The Marketplace in Your Pocket

Phone apps turned closets into storefronts, and the biggest of those marketplaces now belong to tech giants, foreign conglomerates and investment funds.

By Richthrax · Oct. 25, 2026

Selling a used jacket once meant a garage sale, a consignment shop or a classified ad. Smartphone apps cut that to a photo, a price and a tap.

Nearly two decades after Apple opened its App Store, the marketplaces built for phones are being bought, merged and bankrolled by tech companies and investors around the world.

Before the phone

The first big online secondhand markets were built for the desktop. Pierre Omidyar founded eBay as AuctionWeb on Sept. 3, 1995, according to Wikipedia. Craig Newmark started Craigslist the same year as an email list; it was incorporated as a for-profit company in 1999.

The door opens

Apple opened the App Store on July 10, 2008, with 552 apps, and users downloaded more than 10 million in the first weekend, Macworld reported.

A wave of phone-first marketplaces followed. Poshmark was founded in May 2011 in Manish Chandra's garage, according to Wikipedia. Depop was founded the same year at H-Farm, an Italian startup incubator, by Simon Beckerman, who had the idea while working on PIG, a fashion magazine he co-founded.

OfferUp was founded in April 2011 in Bellevue, Washington, by Nick Huzar and Arean Van Veelen, Wikipedia says. Japan's Mercari launched in the United States on Sept. 12, 2014, according to a company announcement. Letgo, another classifieds app, was founded in 2015, according to PitchBook.

Vinted, founded in Lithuania in 2008, is the subject of this week's companion story.

Facebook announced Marketplace on Oct. 3, 2016, available at first only in its phone app, SiliconANGLE reported. The company said more than 450 million people were already buying and selling in Facebook groups.

What the phone changed

The apps put the listing, the payment and the shipping label in one place.

Depop's interface was modeled after Instagram's, with listings appearing in users' feeds, according to Wikipedia. Payments stay inside the app, which lets Depop handle disputes and refunds.

Mercari gives sellers prepaid shipping labels, according to Value Added Resource, an industry news site. Vinted's prepaid labels and shipping costs are covered in the companion story.

In May 2018, Chandra told Reuters that Poshmark sellers had earned $1 billion since launch, spread across 4 million sellers, with Poshmark keeping 20 percent of each sale.

The field

Sources: Wikipedia, PitchBook, company announcements and news reports listed below.

Craigslist and OfferUp

Craigslist is privately held and does not formally disclose ownership or financial information, according to Wikipedia. Newmark is believed to hold the largest stake. EBay bought a 25 percent stake in 2004 and agreed in 2015 to sell it back to Craigslist and settle litigation between the two.

OfferUp is privately held and venture-backed, according to PitchBook, which shows no change in control. Investors have included Andreessen Horowitz, Warburg Pincus, GGV Capital and Tiger Global Management, according to Wikipedia.

Roll-ups

Poshmark went public on Jan. 14, 2021, at $42 a share, valued at more than $3 billion, Yahoo Finance and Wikipedia reported. In October 2022, South Korea's Naver agreed to buy it for $17.90 a share, about $1.2 billion in cash. The deal closed in January 2023.

Etsy bought Depop for about $1.6 billion in June 2021, according to Wikipedia. In February, Etsy agreed to sell Depop to eBay for $1.2 billion in cash. The deal closed July 30. With adjustments, eBay paid about $1.4 billion, according to eBay's Aug. 5 earnings release. Depop keeps its brand and app, and CEO Peter Semple stays on, FashionUnited reported.

EBay itself is a takeover target. GameStop proposed buying it in May for about $55.5 billion in cash and stock, and eBay's board called the offer "neither credible nor attractive," Yahoo Finance reported. GameStop then raised its stake to nearly 10 percent. On Oct. 21, eBay confirmed it would cut about 1,000 jobs, its second round of layoffs this year, BusinessToday reported.

OfferUp bought Letgo in 2020 in a deal tied to a $120 million fundraise led by OLX Group, Letgo's majority investor, TechCrunch reported. The two apps combined on Aug. 31, 2020. Letgo listings did not carry over.

Mercari moved its fees from sellers to buyers in 2024, drawing complaints about checkout costs, Value Added Resource reported. Its U.S. arm was profitable for a second straight year in the fiscal year that ended in June, the site reported.

The newest money

Investors are also backing live video. Whatnot, where sellers auction goods on livestreams, raised $545 million in August at a $20 billion valuation, up from $11.5 billion the previous October, Ecommerce Germany reported. Its sales topped $8 billion in 2025.

TikTok Shop launched in the United States on Sept. 12, 2023, according to TikTok. Its U.S. sales reached $11.8 billion in the first half of 2026, up 103 percent from a year earlier, according to a Momentum Works and Tabcut report cited by Net Influencer.

Where the money goes

The fees from a sale go to the company that runs the app: eBay in San Jose, California; Naver in South Korea; Mercari in Tokyo; Meta; TikTok; or Vinted and its investors.

TikTok's U.S. ownership changed under a deal signed in December 2025. Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX each hold 15 percent of a U.S. joint venture and ByteDance keeps 19.9 percent, the Associated Press reported. That venture handles U.S. data, the algorithm and content moderation, while ByteDance's global TikTok entities manage e-commerce, advertising and marketing, according to CEO Shou Chew's memo to staff as reported by Marketech APAC.

Many of the boxes from these sales still go out by mail. This week's companion story looks at Vinted's shipping push and the Postal Service.