Vinted
A read on an emerging commerce behaviour, and why a familiar format means opposite things once it crosses into a new context.
METHODS
Moderated interviews, journey mapping, prototype usability testing; 12 participants (6 buyers, 6 sellers)
DELIVERABLES
Separate buyer and seller journey maps
A tiered delight and pain-point prioritisation, split by buyer versus seller
Prototype usability findings (flow, clarity, friction points)
Product-strategy implications and the two-sided design tensions
Prioritised follow-up research recommendations
THE SHIFT
Started with a live-commerce bet Vinted wasn't ready to commit to: a young market, a small reachable audience, a half-built prototype. Landed with the bet de-risked before a line of it was built, redirected away from copying social live and toward what a two-sided resale marketplace actually needs.
MARKETS
UNITED KINGDOM
THE SIGNAL
Live shopping is an emerging social-commerce behaviour, learned on social platforms and carried into new spaces wholesale. But the same ritual doesn't mean the same thing to everyone in it: what looks like one shared want is really two, pulling in opposite directions, and the trust and sense of participation that make live work on a feed don't transfer intact to a marketplace. When a familiar cultural format crosses into a new context, its mechanics have to be rebuilt, not copied.
→ Fieldwork
Twelve UK participants, six buyers and six sellers, all Vinted users with prior live exposure, using moderated interviews, journey mapping, and usability testing against the mobile prototype.
→ Two lenses
A Vinted-specific lens and a "beyond Vinted" lens, with a delight and pain-point prioritisation run separately for buyers and sellers.
The Stakes.
Live shopping was reshaping EU e-commerce and resale, and Vinted was weighing whether to build a native live-selling capability of its own. The pull was strategic: deeper engagement, support for higher-value fashion, and reach into younger members, where live already had traction. The difficulty was committing with confidence. The market was young, the reachable audience small, and the prototype only partly built. Before investing further, the business needed a clear read on whether the concept resonated, what users expected, and where it would break.
The Tension.
Live selling has an obvious template, and it's the wrong one. Most users learn the format on social platforms and dedicated live apps, so they arrive at a marketplace live carrying strong, often subconscious expectations set by polished, high-production shows. My question going in was whether that inherited model is what Vinted should build against.
A marketplace live is a different animal from a social feed. It's a two-sided transaction rather than a broadcast, so the people it has to satisfy, buyers and sellers, want different and sometimes opposing things from it. It sits inside a resale platform with a specific trust model and a sustainability identity, and it's judged against expectations formed somewhere else entirely.
That was the tension the study had to hold: meet the baseline users inherited from social, while the format itself diverges from social on almost every mechanic that matters.
The Approach.
I designed the study to do two jobs at once, and to keep the two sides of the market legible rather than averaging them into a single "user."
The Phases.
→ Two evaluations at once.
Every session ran on an evaluative layer (does the prototype match users' mental models, and hold up on clarity, navigation, and engagement) and a generative layer (the underlying motivations, and the expectations that only surface when you ask what people want beyond the prototype).
The Turn.
A marketplace live is not a social feed, and the two sides of the market want opposite things from it. Buyers and sellers pull apart on the very use case that matters most, which makes "meet in the middle" a non-strategy. The lesson that travels: importing a familiar format wholesale is the real risk, it has to diverge deliberately to fit the platform it lives on.
The wider signal, and why it matters beyond Vinted: as ways of gathering and buying migrate out of social platforms into new spaces, the format travels but its meaning doesn't. Trust, participation, and what people actually want from being there get rebuilt in each new context, and reading that divergence early is what separates a format that belongs from one that's only borrowed.