Good morning. Kate Mossman has written a long-read on “Vinted Brain”, and how Britain lost its mind to online shopping. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have two months for £2 here.
“The “gamification” of online shopping platforms refers to the integration of rewards and other psychological triggers pioneered by video game designers. It was first perfected by the e-commerce giant Shein, whose hyper-personalised experience is designed to create a feeling of emotional connection in the buyer. Through data matching, brand affinity and size and weight analysis, Shein made you feel warm and fuzzy inside: wow, everything on here will look good on me!
In the last 12 months, in France and the UK, Vinted has surpassed Shein in customer base and revenue – and its own parasocial setting is much more sophisticated, not least because you are interacting with real people selling their own things. Alongside a social media-inspired cocktail of likes and infinite scrolling, Vinted’s homepage uses an advanced algorithm to display stuff truly unique to your taste – an infinite, personal, constantly updating jumble sale of the mind. Each time you look at this jumble sale, it will present better versions of the thing you’ve just bought, encouraging you to buy them too and sell the inferior version, thus keeping you on the app. The money from your sale is stored in a pot rather than going directly to your bank account: this “free money” then sits there, to be used for future purchases, and is often spent accidentally before it can be withdrawn. Vinted shows you how much money you’ve made on the app, but not how much you’ve spent. And though many users, myself included, fantasise about deleting their account, there is always something left to sell, because of all the mistakes and poor purchases brought about by the addiction in the first place. I have never had a compulsive relationship with alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, and I have no social media accounts – yet Vinted dominates my life.”
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The part I find commercially fascinating is that the mistake isn’t really outside the Vinted business model. It can become part of the loop. you buy something, the algorithm shows you a better version and you sell the first one. The proceeds stay sitting inside the platform and psychologically stop feeling quite like money you earned. Then you buy again.
So Vinted doesn’t just benefit when you make a good purchase. It can benefit when you make a bad one too. that is a very powerful growth system: the customer’s attempt to undo the last transaction helps create the next transaction
There’s something slightly extraordinary about a marketplace that can turn buyer’s remorse into retention.
Unfortunately, most of us self-medicate in some form or another (besides caffeine), albeit it’s more or less ‘under control’. And there are various forms of self-medicating, from the relatively mild to the dangerously extreme, that include non-intoxicant-consumption habits, like gambling, social media overuse/abuse, chronic shopping/buying, over-eating ...
(Just to be clear, I'm not at all excusing the corporate-officer sleaze who will do anything for a buck.)
If such self-medicating forms are anything like drug intoxication or addiction, it should follow that: the greater the induced euphoria or escape one attains from it, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their non-self-medicating reality, the more pleasurable that escape will likely be perceived. In other words: the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while not self-medicating, the greater the need for escape from one's reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
With food, the vast majority of obese people who considerably over-eat likely do so to mask mental pain or even PTSD symptoms. I utilized that method myself during much of my pre-teen years, and even later in life after ceasing my (ab)use of THC or alcohol. Though I don’t take it lightly, it’s possible that someday I could instead return to over-eating.