Condition is the single largest price variable we can measure, and it is bigger than almost anyone assumes. Grading consistently is not perfectionism — it is how you avoid paying good-condition prices for stock you will have to describe honestly later.
We took sold listings on Vinted Spain and grouped them by the condition the seller selected. The gap between the top and bottom grade is not a rounding error — across the categories we checked, the best grade sold for roughly three and a half to seven times the worst.
Nike sneakers are the clearest example. Median sold price ran about €70 new with tags, €50 new without tags, €30 very good, €15 good, and €10 satisfactory. Adidas sneakers showed nearly the same shape, from about €55 down to €8. Levi's jeans compressed into a narrower band — roughly €40 down to €10 — and Zara jackets narrower still.
Two things fall out of that. First, the drop from "very good" to "good" is brutal: on Nike sneakers it halved the median. One grade of honesty costs a lot, which is exactly why sellers over-grade and why you must not pay their grade's price without checking. Second, deadstock with tags carries a real premium — it is often the only condition where a premium buy price is justified.
Check condition before money changes hands, in daylight, with a consistent routine: underarms and collar for staining, seams and crotch for splitting, cuffs and hems for wear, zips and buttons for function, and the whole garment held up to light for holes. It takes forty seconds once it is habit.
Write the grade down at the point of purchase. Grading from memory a week later, with the item already bought and the money already spent, reliably produces a more generous assessment than the item deserves — and an over-graded listing is how you get returns, disputes and a damaged rating.
The economics are simpler than they look. Anything a wash and a de-bobbler can fix is not really a defect, and buying lightly-pilled stock cheaply is a genuine edge. Anything requiring a repair — a replacement zip, a re-stitched seam — almost never pays, because the labour cost is fixed while the value added is proportional to a garment that is, by definition, already damaged.
Smell is the exception that deserves its own rule. Smoke and damp survive washing more often than people expect, buyers detect it instantly on arrival, and it converts directly into returns and bad reviews. There is no price low enough to make it worthwhile.
You do not need to be an expert on every brand. You need to know which brands in your range are heavily faked, and to apply extra scrutiny only to those. Concentrate on the parts counterfeiters get wrong most consistently: interior labels and their stitching, hardware weight and finish, font and spacing on any printed branding, and the quality of the stitch line where two panels meet.
The commercial rule matters more than the technical one. If you are not confident, do not buy — and if you have already bought and are not confident, do not sell it as genuine. Listing something you cannot stand behind risks your account, and an account is worth considerably more than any single item.
Always, with a photo of the flaw. The disclosure costs you a small amount of price and eliminates the return, the dispute and the rating hit. Buyers are markedly more forgiving of a flaw they were shown than of one they discovered.
Respond through the platform, provide your sourcing detail and the photos you took before dispatch, and follow the platform's dispute process rather than arguing directly. This is the strongest argument for photographing labels and condition on every item before it ships — the evidence has to already exist when the claim arrives.
Resale IQ turns a Vinted listing into one answer: BUY, WATCH, or SKIP — with buy-below price and best sizes.
Try Resale IQ →