What This Actually Cost People

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from thrifting online. You have already put in the work. You scrolled through hundreds of listings. You filtered by size, by price, by condition. You found something that fits your budget — barely, maybe, but it fits. You click through to the item page. The price is right there. You commit. You decide. You add it to your cart.

Then the number changes.

It is not a lot of money. That is the entire point. A dollar fifty-five is not going to ruin anyone’s month. But the feeling of watching a price you trusted suddenly expand at the exact moment when you are least equipped to push back — when you have already invested your time, made your decision, and mentally committed the money — that feeling is not accidental. It is engineered.

Depop is a resale platform. Its user base skews younger, skews budget-conscious, and skews toward people who are specifically trying to avoid paying full retail prices. These are people shopping second-hand because new clothing is too expensive. They are comparing $17 items against $22 items. They are deciding whether to buy three things or two. They are counting. And then the platform quietly moves the decimal on them at the finish line.

The complaint describes what happens to a shopper who discovers the fee at checkout: they must “reevaluate or forgo their purchase plans or to begrudgingly expand their budgets.” That is a polished legal way of saying: the buyer either scraps the mental work they already did and starts over somewhere else, or they pay more than they agreed to. Neither option is fair. Both options benefit Depop.

The law recognizes what Depop counted on: that by the time a shopper sees the real price, they have sunk enough time and attention into the process that they will probably just pay it. The California legislature specifically called this out when passing the Honest Pricing Law, noting that “a shopper may have put so much time into the shopping process that by the time additional fees or charges are disclosed they have already made up their minds to make a purchase.” Depop’s checkout flow was, by the complaint’s account, designed around exactly that psychological trap.

Linsey Dinh was not looking to make history. She was buying a piece of clothing. She relied on the price she was shown. That reliance was reasonable, legal, and correct — and Depop violated it anyway, across tens of thousands of transactions, for months after a specific law existed telling them they could not.

Straight From the Complaint: What Depop’s Own Checkout Process Proves

Every quote below comes verbatim from Case No. 3:26-cv-01173-VC, filed February 6, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. No paraphrasing.

“Defendant adds mandatory fees on items purchased through its Website, charging a ‘Marketplace’ fee (the ‘Fee’) with each transaction. Defendant adds this additional Fee to the advertised prices of the products it sells through the Website.”

• This confirms the fee is mandatory — meaning a buyer cannot complete a purchase without paying it. Under California’s Honest Pricing Law, any mandatory fee (except government taxes and standalone shipping) must be disclosed in the first advertised price. Depop did not do that.
• The fee is described as universal: it applies to every transaction on the platform, not selectively. That matters for class certification, because it means every buyer in the class was treated the same way.

“Defendant waits until consumers have gone through the laborious process of selecting various clothing items before disclosing the Fee, which is revealed only upon initiating the checkout process.”

• The word “laborious” is doing real legal work here. It establishes that Depop’s timing is deliberate: the fee is withheld until the consumer has invested the most time, maximizing the psychological pressure to complete the purchase rather than start over.
• This directly supports the unfair business practice claim under the UCL, which requires showing the harm to consumers outweighs any legitimate business interest. There is no legitimate reason to wait until checkout other than to exploit sunk-cost psychology.

“On or around January 2, 2026, a CLRA notice letter was sent to Defendant that complied in all respects with California Civil Code § 1782(a). The letter was sent via certified mail, return receipt requested… The letter, which was delivered to and received by Defendant on January 6, 2026… Defendant failed to remedy the issues raised in the notice letter.”

• Under California law, a plaintiff must notify a defendant of a CLRA violation and give them 30 days to fix it before suing for damages. This letter satisfies that requirement. Depop received it, read it, and did nothing.
• This failure to remedy transforms what might have been a fixable compliance failure into a deliberate choice to continue unlawful conduct. It eliminates any defense that Depop was unaware of the problem.

“On information and belief, Defendant recently changed its Website in an attempt to comply with the law. However, on information and belief, the ‘i’ icon did not exist next to the advertised price of the clothing when Plaintiff placed her order in January 2025.”

• The complaint cites a Wayback Machine archive from July 20, 2025 showing a prior version of Depop’s product pages without the information icon. This archived screenshot is documentary evidence that the disclosure feature was added after the fact.
• Post-lawsuit website changes do not eliminate liability for past conduct. They can, however, be read as an implicit acknowledgment that the original design was non-compliant.

“Hiding required fees is nothing more than a deceptive way of hiding the true price of a good or service. Transparency and full disclosure in pricing are crucial for fair competition and consumer protection.”

• This quote comes directly from the California legislature’s own bill analysis for the Honest Pricing Law. The complaint includes it to establish that lawmakers specifically anticipated and condemned exactly what Depop was doing.
• It also neutralizes any argument that the law was ambiguous or unclear. The intent was explicit: include all mandatory fees in the first advertised price, no exceptions besides taxes and shipping.

Who Gets Hurt When Platforms Hide Prices

Public Health of Personal Finance

Hidden fees are not just annoying. At scale, across millions of transactions, they systematically distort how working-class and budget-conscious consumers allocate money. Depop’s user base is built on the premise of affordability — second-hand shopping is, for many people, the only way to access clothing they need. Drip pricing exploits that premise.

• The complaint describes a platform with over 43.5 million registered users. Even a $1.55 fee applied broadly across purchases adds up to millions of dollars extracted from buyers who were specifically shopping to save money — money they could not recover without a lawsuit.
• The California legislature found that drip pricing prevents consumers from making “direct, apples-to-apples price comparison” between vendors. When Depop hides its real price until checkout, it makes it structurally impossible for a buyer to know whether they are getting a better or worse deal than on a competing platform. Informed decision-making becomes fiction.
• The complaint notes that individual class members “may lack the resources to undergo the burden and expense of individual prosecution.” This is the core predatory logic: charge small enough amounts that victims cannot afford to fight back individually, then repeat that charge across millions of transactions. The only functional remedy is collective action.
• Budget shoppers specifically — people who count dollars, who chose Depop because new retail is too expensive — are the ones most harmed by having prices misrepresented during the selection process. They calibrate their choices based on the numbers they see. Those numbers were wrong, and Depop knew it.

Economic Inequality

Drip pricing functions as a regressive tax. The people least equipped to absorb surprise costs are the ones targeted most effectively by the psychological mechanism it exploits.

• Depop is a secondhand fashion marketplace. Its premise is affordability and sustainability for buyers who cannot or choose not to pay full retail prices. The platform’s entire value proposition depends on buyers trusting that listed prices are real prices. Hidden fees corrupt that trust while targeting the most financially constrained users.
• The complaint establishes that the “Marketplace” fee is mandatory. There is no opt-out, no fee-free tier for buyers, no transparency during the browsing phase. Every buyer pays it whether they want to or not — and none of them knew exactly how much they were paying until the last possible moment.
• The competitive distortion is concrete: when Depop advertises items at $17.00 and a competitor shows a comparable item at $18.50 with the fee included, the buyer appears to be getting a better deal from Depop. They are not. But they cannot know that until checkout, after they have already decided. This systematically disadvantages honest competitors who comply with the law.
• The class potentially encompasses “at least tens of thousands of consumers throughout California and the United States.” The aggregate amount in controversy is alleged to exceed $5,000,000. Those are real dollars extracted from people who were told they were spending less.

What the Numbers Mean in Human Terms

What You Can Do Right Now

This lawsuit is live. If you bought anything on Depop during the class period, you may be a member of one of the two proposed classes. Here is the concrete situation and your concrete options.

Corporate Leadership on Record

The complaint names Depop, Inc. as the defendant. Depop is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. The company is a subsidiary of Etsy, Inc., which acquired it in 2021. The complaint reserves the right to add officers, directors, employees, and anyone who “knowingly and willfully aided, abetted, and/or conspired in the false and deceptive conduct.”

• Chief Executive Officer of Depop, Inc.: [REDACTED – Not in Source]
• Board Directors of Depop, Inc.: [REDACTED – Not in Source]
• The parent company, Etsy, Inc., is not named as a defendant in this filing, though the relationship exists and may be relevant as discovery proceeds.

Regulatory Watchlist

Multiple agencies have jurisdiction over the conduct described in this lawsuit. All of them have public complaint mechanisms.

• California Department of Justice: The state AG’s office enforces the Honest Pricing Law (SB 478) and has published guidance on hidden fee violations. File a complaint at oag.ca.gov.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): The FTC has a documented track record on drip pricing, including a 2012 economic analysis that is directly cited in this complaint. The FTC accepts consumer reports at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): The CFPB tracks and investigates junk fee practices across consumer markets. Report at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.
• State attorneys general outside California: The Nationwide Class covers all U.S. buyers. If you are outside California, your state AG’s office may have analogous consumer protection authority. Contact them directly.

Grassroots and Mutual Aid Steps

• If you purchased anything on Depop at any point before the fee was disclosed on product pages, document the transaction. Screenshot your purchase history. Save your email receipts. This information may be required to participate in the class settlement or judgment when it comes.
• Share this case with resale and thrift communities online. Most Depop users do not know this lawsuit exists. Awareness is how class action cases build numbers — and numbers are leverage.
• Look at every checkout process you use on every platform: Poshmark, Vinted, eBay, StockX. If a fee appears at cart that was not in the listed price, document it. California’s Honest Pricing Law and federal junk fee rules are expanding. Violations are being caught. Your documentation matters.
• Support organizations that do consumer protection litigation without corporate funding: Public Citizen (citizen.org), the National Consumer Law Center (nclc.org), and your local legal aid society handle cases exactly like this one for people who cannot afford private attorneys.
• Class action notice: When Bursor & Fisher, P.A. distributes class notice, your participation is typically opt-out, not opt-in. Watch your email. Check ClassAction.org for updates on Case No. 3:26-cv-01173-VC.