Buying from a private seller

Anyone buying on Vinted, eBay or Facebook Marketplace from someone clearing out an attic is not buying as a consumer. There is no cooling-off period, there is no legal guarantee, and the rules in Your rights when you buy online do not apply. What remains is the ordinary law between two people: the thing has to be what the seller said it was, and a defect they knew about and kept quiet can be held against them. No more. That does not make second-hand dangerous, but it makes the questions you ask more important than they are with a shop.

The first question is whether it is a private seller at all. Since 28 May 2022 every marketplace in the EU has to say, on a listing, whether the seller is a trader or a private person, and in the latter case that consumer rules do not apply. The rule comes from EU Directive 2019/2161 and the sentence is there somewhere, usually small, near the seller's profile. Read it. A "private seller" with hundreds of new, sealed products in a dozen sizes is not a private seller, and against a trader in disguise your consumer rights do apply, whatever the profile says.

The second question is how you pay, and the answer is: inside the platform. Vinted, eBay and Marketplace each have a payment function with some form of buyer protection: the money is held until you have the parcel, and a parcel that does not come or turns out to be something else entirely is refunded. Anyone who suggests settling "outside the app", by bank transfer, by payment request, or in a conversation that moves to WhatsApp, is removing that protection. It is also precisely what scammers suggest, which is why a request to pay outside is on its own a reason to stop.

For expensive things, collecting beats shipping: you see the item, you switch it on, and you pay only once it works. For a phone, ask for the IMEI number and check it is not listed as stolen or blocked; for anything with a manufacturer's warranty, ask for the original receipt, because that warranty usually travels with the product and without the receipt you can prove nothing. A seller who has "lost" the receipt for a three-month-old product may have a reason.

And the manufacturer's warranty is the only thing you have left. Against the shop where the first owner bought, you have no legal guarantee: that exists between that shop and that buyer. What the manufacturer promises often holds for the product whoever owns it, and that is why the receipt makes the difference. What you may expect from refurbished and open-box at a shop, and why that is a different story from second-hand between private people, is in Second-hand, refurbished or open box.