Crosslist from Depop to Kleinanzeigen — and the 10% Germany still pays

On this page

• The 10% most guides will not tell you about
• Depop belongs to eBay now
• What Kleinanzeigen costs
• The 65 characters that carry the entire ad
• Language, and why it is a search problem
• What each platform gives you to work with
• Sicher bezahlen, and the pickup habit
• Ads expire, and expired ads do not come back
• The gewerblich switch, and what it turns on
• What syncs between the two
• What it costs
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

The 10% most guides will not tell you about

Start here, because it changes the arithmetic of everything below and because the English-language advice on it is close to uniformly wrong.

Depop removed its 10% selling fee, and the change was widely reported as a platform-wide abolition. It was not. Depop’s own fee table restricts it: the selling fee “applies to sellers outside of the UK, US, or AUS and selling in a currency other than GBP, USD, or AUD.” A seller located in Germany, pricing in euros, is outside all three lists and pays 10% on every sale.

The rest of the arrangement differs too. Depop Payments exists in the UK, US and Australia; a German seller is routed to PayPal and pays PayPal’s fees, which Depop does not publish. And on the other side of the transaction, Depop’s Marketplace fee — the buyer-paid charge that funds the fee removal elsewhere — applies only to buyers in the UK or US paying in pounds or dollars. A German buyer pays nothing.

So Germany is still on Depop’s old model in full: the seller pays, the buyer does not. That single fact reframes this route. Kleinanzeigen charges a private seller no commission at all, so on a €60 jacket you are comparing roughly €6 plus PayPal’s cut against zero. The reason to keep both is reach, not cost — and you should know which one is paying for the reach.

Depop belongs to eBay now

Worth a paragraph because it dates almost everything written about Depop before this summer. Etsy bought Depop in 2021; eBay agreed to buy it in February 2026 and completed the acquisition on 30 July 2026 at around $1.4 billion. Depop keeps its name, brand and platform.

Nothing about this route changes today as a result. It is worth knowing for two reasons: any guide describing Depop as “Etsy-owned” predates July 2026 and its fee information may be equally stale, and Depop’s fee structure is now set by a company with its own well-developed views on seller fees.

Some current numbers while we are here, from Depop and from eBay’s acquisition announcement: roughly 56.3 million registered users, more than 68 million items listed, up to 600,000 new listings a day, about $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2025, and 7 million active buyers against more than 3 million active sellers at the end of 2025. Depop’s audience skews young — eBay’s release puts “nearly 90%” under the age of 34. Note that figure, because the widely quoted “90% under 26” is an Etsy-era number and is no longer what Depop’s owner says.

What Kleinanzeigen costs

For a private seller, effectively nothing. Kleinanzeigen gives 100 free ads per rolling 30 days in goods, with further ads at €1.99 including VAT. Ads run 30 days when paid for, renewals are free and unlimited, and there is no commission on a sale at any point. For a reseller moving a few dozen pieces a month, the platform is free.

Two corrections to common blog claims. There is no fashion-specific listing fee and no price-threshold fee — the paid tiers sit in vehicles at €9.99 and property at €19.99 to €21.99. And Kleinanzeigen deliberately does not publish the prices of its visibility upgrades — Top-Anzeige, Galerie, Highlight, Hochschieben — stating instead that the price is shown before you book. Any article quoting fixed euro figures for those is guessing.

Commercial sellers are a different story, and it got sharply more expensive on 1 September 2026. A gewerblich account now gets 2 free ads per 30 days in goods, then €3.49 to €4.49 per ad, and commercial ad runtime dropped from 60 days to 30. Kleinanzeigen also restructured its PRO packages in May 2026 into Basic, Power and Premium tiers from €39 a month, with a €15 tier for 10 ads on items up to €25.

That cliff is the reason the legal section further down matters commercially and not just legally.

The 65 characters that carry the entire ad

This is the single most important mechanical fact about Kleinanzeigen, and it has no equivalent on any other channel we support.

Only the title is indexed for search. The description is not. Kleinanzeigen’s title limit is 65 characters. Everything a buyer might type to find your item has to be inside those 65 characters, or the item is invisible to them no matter how good the description is.

Now consider what you are starting from. Depop has no separate title field at all — its own advice is to “start with a title” inside the description, so what functions as your Depop title is simply the first line of your description text. It was written for a feed where hashtags, photographs and browse behaviour do the discovery work, and where nobody is typing a search box in German.

So the first line of a Depop listing is almost never a usable Kleinanzeigen title. Compare:

The pattern for a good German classified title is unglamorous and consistent: Marke, Artikeltyp, Zustand oder Ära, Farbe, Größe. Brand, item type, condition or era, colour, size. No adjectives, no personality, no emoji. It reads like a catalogue entry because that is exactly what it needs to be.

Language, and why it is a search problem

There is no Kleinanzeigen rule requiring German. The reason to translate is mechanical rather than cultural, and it follows directly from the section above: if only the title is searched, and German buyers search in German, then an English title is simply not findable. It is not a matter of politeness or presentation — the ad is invisible.

There is a second, less obvious consequence we have measured in our own integration. Kleinanzeigen’s category suggestion works from the German words in your title, and it returns nothing at all for long, specific, English titles. A raw English Depop first line therefore lands in the wrong category or in none — which compounds the invisibility, because browse traffic is the other half of how Kleinanzeigen ads get seen.

The attribute values need translating too, not just the title. Kleinanzeigen’s fashion categories expect German values for condition, size and colour, so a Depop listing whose condition reads “good” and whose size reads “M” needs mapping rather than copying.

The description is the one place you can relax. Since it is not searched, its job is purely to inform the buyer who has already arrived. English there is a minor discourtesy rather than a functional problem — though German will serve you better with a German buyer.

What each platform gives you to work with

The trade is legible once it is laid out. Depop gives you better structured data and a browse-driven feed; Kleinanzeigen gives you five times the photographs and an unbounded description, against a 65-character search surface and a brand taxonomy that barely exists.

The photograph difference is the most immediately useful thing here and the most commonly wasted. If you have been shooting for Depop, you have been shooting for a small set. Kleinanzeigen will take twenty, and a German classifieds buyer — who often cannot inspect the item and is deciding whether to travel to collect it — genuinely uses them. Labels, seams, soles, flaws, measurements against a tape. Photographs do the job the unsearched description cannot.

Sicher bezahlen, and the pickup habit

Kleinanzeigen began as a classifieds board and still behaves like one by default: the buyer messages you, you agree a time, they collect, they pay cash. Abholung is the norm rather than the exception, and it involves no fee, no platform and no protection.

Bolted onto that is Sicher bezahlen, an escrow checkout with buyer protection. Funds are held and released on the buyer’s confirmation, or automatically after 14 days. The fee is €0.50 plus 4.5%, paid entirely by the buyer — the seller pays nothing. Its protection covers shipment within Germany only.

For a Depop seller this is unfamiliar in a specific way. On Depop every sale is a shipped, platform-mediated transaction. On Kleinanzeigen a meaningful share of your sales will be someone standing at your door with cash, entirely outside any system. That is faster and cheaper, and it means no order record exists for anything to detect.

One warning worth repeating because it is the classic German classifieds scam: PayPal Friends and Family provides no buyer protection and no seller protection. A buyer proposing it is either naive or working you. Sicher bezahlen or cash on collection are the two sound answers.

Ads expire, and expired ads do not come back

A free private Kleinanzeigen ad runs 60 days. You can extend it by another 60 within an eight-day window before it expires. Miss that window and the ad is gone — an expired ad cannot be restored, and you list the item again from scratch. Paid and commercial ads run 30 days.

Depop has trained you out of thinking about this. A Depop listing sits there until it sells or you remove it, so a slow-moving piece simply waits. On Kleinanzeigen a slow-moving piece silently disappears after two months, and if you are not watching, half your catalogue quietly goes offline over a summer.

Kleinanzeigen is one of the channels where FLUF’s relisting works, which is the practical answer to this. It is included from Seller (£29/month) upwards rather than on every plan — and on this particular channel, given ads expire on a fixed clock, it is closer to a necessity than a convenience.

The gewerblich switch, and what it turns on

This is the part that catches resellers, and it is worth reading properly even though it is dull. Nothing here is legal advice — it is a description of where the line sits and why it matters commercially.

German law distinguishes the Verbraucher from the Unternehmer. Under §14 BGB an Unternehmer is someone acting “in Ausübung ihrer gewerblichen oder selbständigen beruflichen Tätigkeit”. There is no statutory number — no sales-per-month threshold that flips you over. Courts weigh repetition, volume, organisation and, above all, the intention to resell.

That last point is the one that matters for a Depop reseller. If you buy stock in order to sell it on, the volume question is never really reached: buying to resell is the definition of trading. Selling your own wardrobe is a different activity, however many pieces are in it.

Once you are gewerblich, several obligations arrive together:

• A Gewerbeanmeldung under §14 GewO. Failure to notify is an Ordnungswidrigkeit carrying a fine of up to €1,000 under §146 GewO.
• An Impressum under §5 DDG — note DDG, not TMG. The Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz replaced the Telemediengesetz in May 2024, and an Impressum still citing “§5 TMG” is itself a target. Kleinanzeigen provides a dedicated field for it on commercial ads. Defects carry a fine of up to €50,000 under §33 DDG, though the realistic risk is a competitor’s Abmahnung rather than the fine.
• A 14-day Widerrufsrecht under §312g and §355 BGB. Used goods are fully covered — there is no second-hand exception. If you fail to inform the buyer of the right, the period does not start, and §356(4) BGB extends it to twelve months and fourteen days. Return postage falls on the consumer only if you told them so; otherwise it falls on you.
• Packaging registration. The Verpackungsgesetz was repealed on 12 August 2026 and replaced by the Verpackungsrecht-Durchführungsgesetz implementing the EU packaging regulation. Registration in the LUCID register is still required and is free, there is no small-seller exemption, and e-commerce shipping packaging is explicitly covered. If you post parcels commercially in Germany, this applies to you.
• The Kleinanzeigen commercial fee schedule described above — 2 free ads per 30 days instead of 100, and per-ad charges after that.

Separately, and often confused with all of the above: DAC7 reporting. Under §4 PStTG a seller is exempt from reporting only if they made fewer than 30 sales on that platform in the year and received less than €2,000. Both limbs must hold — 31 sales totalling €300 is reportable, as is 12 sales totalling €2,100. Platforms report by 31 January, and Kleinanzeigen confirms that it does.

Being reported is not the same as owing tax, and the confusion causes real anxiety. It is a data transfer to the tax office, nothing more. What actually taxes a private sale is §23 EStG, which has a one-year holding period and a €1,000 Freigrenze — and which excludes Gegenstände des täglichen Gebrauchs entirely, meaning your own worn clothing is outside the charge whatever it sold for. A trader, meanwhile, is taxable from the first euro and well below 30 sales.

What syncs between the two

Kleinanzeigen supports mark-as-sold, order sync and relisting through FLUF. Depop supports the broadest feature set of any channel we drive — relisting, offer management, messaging, order sync and mark-as-sold. So this pairing is better served than most: a sale on either side can clear the other.

The real gap is not technical. It is that a cash-on-collection Kleinanzeigen sale produces no order anywhere for anything to read. When someone hands you twenty euros at your front door, no system knows. Mark it sold, and everything else clears.

Kleinanzeigen is a Germany-only channel. If you are not selling into the German market, this route is not available — but the Depop side of your catalogue has plenty of other destinations.

What it costs

7 days for £1, then from £9/month. There is no free plan and no free tier.

Crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations are on every plan. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing are included from Seller (£29/month) upwards; Starter does not include them. Paying annually saves 40%.

For this pairing specifically, the automation tier earns its keep: Kleinanzeigen ads expire on a 60-day clock and cannot be restored once gone, and Depop supports offer management. Both of those live above Starter.

Sources and verification

Every fee, rule and date was checked against a primary source on 7 September 2026.

• Depop’s seller fees and charges page — the verbatim restriction that the selling fee “applies to sellers outside of the UK, US, or AUS and selling in a currency other than GBP, USD, or AUD”, the 10% rate, and the Depop Payments processing rates for the three fee-free markets.
• Depop on the Marketplace fee — that it applies only to buyers in the UK or US paying in pounds or dollars, and is refundable.
• Etsy’s announcement of eBay’s agreement to acquire Depop and the SEC filing on completion — the 30 July 2026 close at approximately $1.4 billion, the 2025 gross merchandise sales of about $1 billion, the 7 million active buyers and more than 3 million active sellers at 31 December 2025, and the “nearly 90%” under 34 figure.
• Depop’s own facts and figures — the 56.3 million registered users, 68 million items and up to 600,000 new listings a day.
• Kleinanzeigen’s fee page and its commercial-user fee page — the 100 free private ads per 30 days and €1.99 thereafter, the vehicle and property tiers, and the commercial schedule effective 1 September 2026 with 2 free ads and €3.49–€4.49 per ad.
• Kleinanzeigen on Sicher bezahlen — the €0.50 plus 4.5% buyer-paid fee, the escrow release on confirmation or automatically after 14 days, and the restriction to shipment within Germany.
• Kleinanzeigen’s own guidance on good and bad ads — the 65-character title limit, and its image rules for 20 photographs per ad at up to 12 MB each.
• Kleinanzeigen on ad runtime — the 60-day free private ad, the eight-day extension window, and that expired ads cannot be restored.
• Kleinanzeigen’s about page — more than 32 million monthly users, more than 58 million live ads and more than 449,000 commercial users.
• §14 BGB, §14 GewO, §5 DDG, §312g BGB, §356 BGB, §4 PStTG and §23 EStG — the Unternehmer definition, the trade-notification duty, the Impressum requirements, the 14-day withdrawal right and its twelve-month-and-fourteen-day backstop, the conjunctive 30-sales-and-€2,000 reporting exemption, and the one-year holding period, €1,000 Freigrenze and everyday-goods exclusion.
• The Verpackungsrecht-Durchführungsgesetz and the packaging register on shipping and online retail — the replacement of the Verpackungsgesetz on 12 August 2026, the continuing LUCID registration duty, the absence of a small-seller exemption, and the express inclusion of e-commerce shipping packaging.

What we could not verify, and therefore left out. Any figure for Depop’s German user base or market share — none exists that we could source, so the case above rests on Depop’s own infrastructure (no German locale, no Depop Payments, no Marketplace fee in Germany) rather than on a percentage we invented. Depop’s exact description character limit and photograph count: Depop publishes neither reliably, its help page says four photographs while our own integration has posted more, so we describe both loosely rather than stating a hard number. Kleinanzeigen’s description character limit, which no official page states — the commonly blogged figure is unverified. The euro prices of Kleinanzeigen’s visibility upgrades, which Kleinanzeigen deliberately does not publish. Whether the 60-day private ad runtime is still current, since its help article is undated and sits awkwardly beside the new 30-day commercial figure. The case-law indicators for privat versus gewerblich — the statutory test is solid but the widely quoted numeric thresholds could not be traced to a judgment, so none appears here. And PayPal’s fee rates for a German Depop seller, which Depop does not publish and which vary by account.

Related guides

• Sell on Depop — the complete seller guide
• Sell on Kleinanzeigen — the German classifieds guide
• Sell online in Germany — every marketplace you can reach
• Crosslist from Kleinanzeigen to eBay
• Crosslist from Depop to Vinted
• All marketplace guides
• All crosslisting routes