France riots expose retail's new looting front as stolen goods flood Vinted. As French retailers count the cost of widespread looting, suspicious listings appearing on resale platforms have shown how quickly losses from the shopfloor can migrate online. The damage inflicted during a weekend of riots across France did not end when shop shutters came down. Within hours, products resembling those taken from stores began appearing on secondhand marketplaces, turning a wave of physical theft into an urgent ecommerce policing problem. Vinted, which counts France as its largest market, has faced an influx of listings suspected of containing looted goods. Screenshots shared online appeared to show heavily discounted cosmetics, designer products and collectables offered in unusual quantities, fuelling concerns that stolen stock was being rapidly converted into digital inventory. The resale platform said it had taken "immediate action to identify and remove listings linked to the looting" and stepped up monitoring of suspicious activity. It added that accounts which breach its rules can be permanently banned and that it is working with French authorities and law enforcement. From smashed windows to digital storefronts. These looting incidents highlight that civil unrest can now move across channels - both physical and digital. Looted goods can be photographed, priced and offered to buyers before retailers have completed a stock count or filed an insurance claim. Brands are not only faced with protecting staff during this time of unrest and repairing the damage, they must also monitor marketplaces for items that may have come from their own shelves. Vinted prohibits stolen goods and uses reports from retailers and users to flag listings for investigation. Yet, the scale and speed of the suspected uploads show the difficulty facing consumer-to-consumer platforms. Of course there are millions of legitimate sellers on such sites, able to list products with little friction but this does mean proof of ownership is rarely straightforward. Low prices alone do not mean that an item is stolen, while cosmetics, fashion and collectables are commonly sold in multiples. Moderators therefore have to weigh timing, volume, packaging, seller history and reports from affected businesses without sweeping up legitimate listings. The challenge is to move quickly enough to disrupt disposal, while avoiding accusations against innocent sellers. Retailers face a bill far beyond lost stock. Across France, around 1,500 businesses were reported to have been targeted as education and cost-of-living demonstrations descended into violence. Luxury boutiques, supermarkets, beauty stores, electronics retailers and independent shops were damaged or looted in Paris and other major cities. Carrefour chief executive Alexandre Bompard said 50 of the group's stores were targeted, including 19 convenience stores and supermarkets, and put repair costs at more than €10m. The consequences extend to interrupted trading and staffing: employees at franchise partners are expected to be placed on short-time working arrangements while damaged sites remain closed. Sephora closed its French store network from 5pm on Saturday and kept stores shut on Sunday after several branches were ransacked and staff encountered violence. Catherine Spindler, president of Sephora Europe and the Middle East, said no commercial consideration would outweigh the safety of teams and customers. Galeries Lafayette, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior Parfums, Celine, Lacoste, Kenzo, Salomon and Arc'teryx were among the names affected. But trade groups have warned that smaller retailers may be least able to absorb prolonged closures, delayed insurance payments and the cost of rebuilding custom ahead of the key Christmas period. Marketplaces under pressure to close the loop. The suspected Vinted listings make cooperation between retailers and marketplaces more important. Retailers can provide product identifiers, photographs, stolen serial numbers and details of unusual stock combinations; platforms can use those signals to prioritise reviews, link related accounts and preserve evidence for investigators. That exchange is more complicated for categories without unique identifiers. A handbag may carry a serial number, but a lipstick or T-shirt usually does not. Where an item cannot be tied directly to a theft, behavioural indicators become crucial: a newly created account listing large quantities of new goods, abruptly discounted products from a recently targeted retailer, or a cluster of sellers using similar imagery. The response also carries reputational risk. Resale platforms have built their appeal on convenience, value and participation in the circular economy. If shoppers believe stolen goods can be easily traded, trust in that model can erode. However, overly blunt enforcement could alienate ordinary users whose legitimate listings happen to resemble suspicious stock. A test of omnichannel resilience. France's riots are a reminder that loss prevention can no longer stop at the store exit. Crisis plans increasingly need to connect physical security, ecommerce teams, marketplace monitoring, legal advisers and communications staff. A rapid digital response may help recover goods, support insurance claims and prevent stolen stock from competing with legitimate products online. The pressure is also on such peer-to-peer marketplaces to prove that the same low-friction systems that make resale attractive can also detect abuse during a fast-moving crisis. Vinted's stepped-up monitoring and cooperation with authorities is an immediate response, but the wider test will be whether marketplaces can turn exceptional action into repeatable processes for retailers confronting the next surge. The physical clean-up in France may take weeks and the final bill could run to hundreds of millions of euros. The appearance of suspected looted goods online, however, shows that the commercial aftermath began almost immediately. Protecting retail now requires the shopfloor and the digital marketplace to be treated as part of the same crime scene.

List: The e-commerce businesses reported the most in Sweden right now. Unexpected number one. Over 1,000 reports have poured into the Swedish Consumer Agency in just over a week. Ehandel SE has delved into the statistics and mapped which e-commerce businesses have upset Swedish consumers the most during the period. The list of most reported companies during late September and early October includes both well-known pharmacy giants and AI scams. Here are the e-commerce businesses that stand out in the top reports to the Swedish Consumer Agency: That a game developer tops the list by a wide margin may seem surprising, but the company also operates e-commerce. Currently, visitors to their digital store are met with the "Autumn Sale" campaign with up to 90 percent discount. But behind the sale signs, a customer storm is brewing. Almost all 83 reports against the company concern "unfair contractual terms." The large number of reports in such a short time suggests that the company may have recently made major changes to its terms of purchase, subscription models, or user agreements. Ehandel.se recently wrote about how the e-commerce store Saga Stockholm pretends to be a cozy family store on Drottninggatan, but in reality sells Asian dropshipping behind a facade of fake AI images. Now, the reports show that the concept has already been cloned in the form of the sister store Astrid Göteborg. The site attracts with a "Moving Sale" with up to 70 percent discount. Just like its predecessor, Astrid Göteborg uses AI-generated images to build false credibility. Both actors are now attracting a large number of reports for misleading marketing and dropshipping. The online pharmacy Meds has received 10 reports in just a few days. When Ehandel SE look closer at the reasons, it appears that customers are reporting the company for "canceled or unfulfilled" orders, often in combination with "misleading marketing." Other e-commerce businesses with under 10 reports during the period: * Hemnix (5 reports): Reported specifically for "Dropshipping" and "Incorrect or not according to order." * Vinted (5 reports): The second-hand platform has received reports regarding unfair contractual terms, lack of customer support, and incorrect orders. * Ecoawear (4 reports): Focus on "Misleading marketing" and goods that do not match the order. * Vindahls (4 reports): Complaints about lack of customer service and incorrect deliveries. * POWER (4 reports): The electronics chain is reported for, among other things, misleading marketing, ambiguities regarding commitment periods, and problems with invoices. * Hälsoshoppen (3 reports): Has received reports concerning a combination of dropshipping, refund problems, and incorrect orders. * Intersport (3 reports): All reports here concern campaigns and marketing. Customers specifically point to "Sale or clearance" and that the marketing has been misleading. * Switch Nails (3 reports): The beauty brand has been reported for "Environmental claim" (so-called greenwashing) and lack of information. Editorial Staff

In 2008 a woman in Vilnius was moving flat with more clothes than would fit, so a friend built her a website to swap them with people she knew. In 2025 that website moved €10.8 billion of second-hand goods, took €1.1 billion in revenue and runs more than 500,000 parcel points across Europe. A Lithuanian clothing-swap site born from one woman's moving crisis became Europe's largest secondhand marketplace, moving billions in goods and reshaping how millions shop. Milda Mitkutė was changing apartments in Vilnius in 2008 and had more clothes than the new place could hold. Rather than throw them out, she wanted a way to pass them on to people she knew. A friend, the software developer Justas Janauskas, built her a website for it. "We chatted about creating a website where people could trade their pre-loved fashion with each other," Janauskas later told Tech.eu in 2015, recalling that he was doubtful the idea would go anywhere until he asked around and found most of his friends thought it was a good one. The two of them built the earliest version as a side project, under a Lithuanian name that translated roughly to "my clothes," with no marketing budget and no plan beyond friends trading with friends. What tipped it into something larger was almost accidental. A couch-surfing guest from Munich learned about the site, liked it, and helped carry the idea into Germany, where it launched under its own local name, Kleiderkreisel. Other country-specific spin-offs followed the same pattern for a few years, each with its own name and its own small user base, before the company folded them together under a single brand, Vinted, as the parent business decided a fragmented set of local sites made less sense than one platform users could recognise anywhere in Europe. Vilnius stayed its home throughout. How a free listing site turns a profit. The part of Vinted's model that isn't obvious from the outside is that listing and selling on the platform costs a seller nothing. Vinted makes its money almost entirely from the buyer's side of the transaction: a fixed fee of roughly $0.70 plus a variable fee of about 5 percent of the item's price, charged in the buyer's local currency (figures as of late 2025) - according to Vinted's own Buyer Protection fee page. That fee covers payment processing and the cost of the prepaid shipping label the seller is given for free. It is close to the inverse of how rivals like Poshmark and Depop have historically operated, charging the seller a cut instead. Vinted also sells optional promotion to sellers who want more visibility: a feature called Closet Spotlight puts five of a seller's listings into other users' feeds for a week for a flat fee, and a per-item "bump" pushes a single listing up in search results, priced dynamically by category and demand. From a hobby site to a logistics network. Underneath the fee structure sits a harder problem: getting a stranger's old jumper from a seller's flat to a buyer's front door, cheaply and reliably, across dozens of countries. That has turned Vinted into as much a logistics company as a marketplace. According to the company's own 2025 financial results, its delivery partner network now gives users access to more than 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points across Europe, and the company runs its own parcel carrier, Vinted Go, directly in five markets: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. In 2025 it also opened operations in Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia, seventeen years after that first Vilnius website, extending its reach into corners of Europe the original Kleiderkreisel-era patchwork of local sites never touched. From a free site to a billion-dollar company. The money that built out Vinted's logistics network came in stages, and the pace of it tracks how quickly investors decided the model was working. In November 2019, the company raised €128 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Accel, Insight Partners, Sprints Capital and Burda Principal Investments also participating, pushing its valuation past $1 billion for the first time and making it, according to the reporting on the round, Lithuania's first unicorn. Lightspeed partner Brad Twohig said at the time the firm looked for "outlier management teams building generational companies," a fairly standard line for a venture press release, but one that in this case was describing two people who had started out solving a problem for their own friends. Two years later, in 2021, a further round led by EQT Growth brought in $303 million and roughly quadrupled the valuation again, to $4.5 billion, with the same core group of earlier investors returning. That was the last outside funding round before the company turned its first profit in 2023, at which point continued growth could increasingly be funded from the business itself rather than from new investors. What the 2025 numbers actually show. Vinted's first profitable year, by its own account, was 2023, when it reported revenue of €596.3 million and a net profit of €17.8 million, a milestone The Next Web covered as the company's first since founding. Two years later, the picture is bigger but less straightforwardly better. Vinted moved €10.8 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, up 47 percent on the year before, and took €1.1 billion of that as revenue, up 38 percent, almost double the 2023 figure. But net profit, which had grown substantially in the years after 2023, fell 19 percent in 2025 to €62 million, and adjusted EBITDA slipped 5 percent to €151 million. CEO Thomas Plantenga framed the trade-off plainly in the release: the company is spending on expansion, including a push into Germany, category diversification beyond clothing, and the launch of a payments wallet called Vinted Pay, rather than banking the growth as profit this year. That is a company choosing to spend faster than it earns while the market is still there to be taken, not a company in trouble. It is worth naming the distinction because the two can look similar on a spreadsheet, and a 19 percent drop in profit reads very differently once it's clear the company was profitable at all only two years earlier, and is still profitable now, just less so by design. A platform built on other people's closets. What the €10.8 billion figure represents is how far secondhand clothing has moved from a hobby into ordinary consumer behaviour across Europe. The company has said it intends to bring the same model to the United States next, according to Dealroom's coverage of the 2025 results. Whether Vinted's European logistics playbook, built over seventeen years and hundreds of thousands of parcel points, transfers to a market with a completely different postal and returns infrastructure is the open question the 2025 numbers don't answer. QUIZ · EDITORS' PICK Most assessments tell you what type you are. This one tells you what you're avoiding. Your Direct Message: a free 8-minute psychological assessment from DMNews. Maps the Tension you've normalized, the Noise you hide behind, and the one truth your therapist is building toward but hasn't said yet. On its radar. Free field brief The empire file. How money, ownership, and power actually move behind the companies you think you know. Built for people who watch its documentaries. Sundays you also get The Undercurrent. Free PDF. Also The Undercurrent. Unsubscribe anytime. A Silicon Canals column Canal Letter. Canal Letter is Silicon Canals' weekly briefing on the global innovation ecosystems 5miles cover, with particular attention to European startup activity. Articles under this column are produced by its editorial team under the direction of the Chief Publisher.