For the average shop, relisting stale items on Depop every three to four weeks is acceptable, especially for items with little to no likers. Although there is no verification from Depop, it is common practice to believe that relisting items gives it an edge in search results, so it is good practice to consider relisting a maintenance activity rather than a ranking activity.
How relisting on Depop actually works
Relisting on Depop means removing the old listing and reposting the item, and the only thing that is for sure to be different is the listing date. There is no “relist” button, like on Etsy, that pushes the old listing to the front. You repost the item with the pictures and information as the old listing, remove the old listing, and wait for it to show up in recent listing for buyers. Your followers also may see the item again in their feed.
Depop doesn’t document much. It has statements about listing, editing, and deleting items. It has policies about spam and duplicate listings. Depop hasn’t disclosed how its search function ranks items or if there is a freshness effect. Selling folklore says that to maintain a position at the top of search results you must relist your items every few days. While many relists result in a quick burst of views, that does not prove that relists are what causes items to rank higher.
A workable process for a shop with between 50 and 200 items looks like this:
- Sort your shop by age once a week and pull anything listed more than 3-4 weeks ago.
- Check likes on items that have been listed for awhile and offer the item to the liker(s) to give it an edge.
- Keep in mind that if an offer expires without a sale, it could mean that your photos, title or price needs tweaking before you relist.
- Avoid relisting all 80 items in your shop at the same time. Break the task up and relist in batches of 5-10 items a day.
- After relisting an item, be sure to delete the old, and keep only the new, listing live.
Step three is the most critical part. Items that have not sold after a month (or longer) and are re-listed with the same photos at the same prices will probably not sell. Alternatively, there may be better cover photos and more enticing first lines in the descriptions. A price drop of 10-15% also helps. Relisting is an opportunity to rebuild the post, so why not make some changes?
As a part-time seller, it is reasonable to manually re-list a handful of items once or twice a week. Each individual re-listing takes only a few minutes if photos and descriptions are saved. Automation is then reasonable to consider if the number of stale listings grows faster than time allows to work through them.
What you lose when you delete and relist
With Depop, the biggest cost of re-listing is that likes on the old listing disappear, and those people are often your best customers. A like indicates interest, and if you do not send them a message offering to sell the item before removing the listing, they will not get a notification if they happen to see your new post. So if an item has 12 likes, it should be offered first.
Other mistakes that cost sellers time or a sale:
- Relisting too frequently. If you repetitively post the same item every couple days, Depop believes that to be spam and may result in a ban. To avoid that, make sure to space it out a week or more in between.
- Leaving both versions posted. Having two posted versions of the same item means two possible buyers and only one jacket. Delete the old one as soon as the new one is posted.
- Doing mass postings. Flooding your followers by posting 100 items in an hour to sell old stock gives your shop a clearance bin status.
- Relisting an item with an open conversation. Deleting a listing breaks that conversation and may lose a potential sale.
- Failing to account for other marketplaces. A relist on Depop does not remove that item from eBay, Poshmark, etc. and vice versa.
- Thinking a relist can save a bad listing. Same price, same pics = same result. Change it or leave it alone.
There is also a gray area with older items that are just slow movers. A one-of-a-kind vintage piece may take 3 months to find a buyer. In a case like this, a longer relist interval with an offer to likers is a better use of your time.
Also, it is important to keep records. Keep a notepad to log the date and price of each relist. Tracking this can help you measure whether relisted items actually sell faster in your shop. Your shop data is more credible than any forum rule about timing. Your data helps you determine whether the effort is worth the time invested.
Relist Depop items on a schedule with PrimeLister
Manually relisting works great as long as your stale inventory doesn't outgrow your evenings. Relisting on multiple platforms increases the risk of double selling, which PrimeLister resolves by automatically relisting and offering on Depop and syncing your inventory, so a sale in one marketplace automatically removes your listing in all the others.
- Depop bot: helps you relist, offer to likers and be active in your shop on Depop.
- Crosslisting: helps you post the same items to multiple marketplaces to increase buyers.
- Inventory sync and auto-delist: automatically removes a sold item from your other marketplaces.
- Bulk Actions: enables you to perform operations on many listings at the same time.
- Analytics: shows sell-through rate and time-on-market to evaluate which listings actually need a relist.
- Find Duplicates Tool: identifies duplicate listings so you can capture double copies of an item before the customer does.
The Depop Bot is $15 per shop per month or $12 per month billed yearly with a 7-day free trial and no credit card required.
Frequently asked questions about Depop relisting
Does editing a Depop listing work the same as relisting?
No. Editing keeps the original listing, its likes and its date, while relisting creates a new post with a new date. Depop has not said that edits impact a listing's visibility, so edit if the listing needs to be changed, not to refresh it.
Will relisting get my Depop shop banned?
Relisting stale items every few weeks is normal shop maintenance. The issue comes from spammy behavior, like reposting the same item multiple times per day, which Depop's rules also prohibit. Space out relists and always delete the old listing.
Should I relist items that have likes?
You can try offering a small discount to people who liked your post first. It's a good way to incentivize people to purchase the item without taking a huge loss. You can relist it if the offer is ignored over a few days.