This week Vinted sellers have forced the marketplace to abandon an update to shipping options which would have offered more choice to consumers. Usually, sellers are able to offer a range of shipping options when listing and deselect those which they don’t wish to use, but this option was removed by Vinted.
We can see Vinted’s thinking – surely it’s a better buyer experience to be able to select a shipping option that’s convenient for them? Why wouldn’t they want sellers to offer the largest range of services possible?
Unfortunately, Vinted forgot that their sellers are largely consumers sellers and some shipping options present challenges that they just can’t cope with.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of Vinted’s 16 million UK sellers don’t own or have easy access to a printer. That means if the courier doesn’t bring a label, or if they can’t go to a parcel shop where the label is printed for them, they can’t ship a parcel.
Another issue is distance to the drop off point – while some areas of the country are well served by particular parcel shops or drop off points, in other areas sellers would have to travel ten, twenty or even thirty miles to their nearest drop off.
But the biggest issue for Vinted sellers which should have been foreseen, is that these are consumer sellers and many of them will have full time jobs. Sellers want to drop all their parcels in one go, in one location, at one time. They don’t want to be scurrying around the countryside to multiple drop off points or waiting at home for couriers that could turn up at any point during the day.
It’s a lesson that many business retailers should learn from – not that we haven’t had the importance of offering multiple shipping options drummed into our heads for years. Consumers need the convenience of organising shipping – for both despatching and receiving parcels – that fit around their life styles and it will never be a one size fits all.
Vinted have rolled back the shipping update and you can once again deselect shipping options that don’t suit you as a seller.
One Response
Good grief.
That sounds like the sort of policy that would be entertained by the idiots at Amazon!