A California shopper has filed a class action lawsuit against Depop, accusing the secondhand fashion marketplace of hiding a mandatory “Marketplace” fee until checkout in violation of California’s Honest Pricing Law. The case, Dinh v. Depop, Inc., was filed on February 6, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and seeks to represent a nationwide class of buyers who were charged the fee without seeing it on the item listing.
What Depop Is Accused of Doing
Plaintiff Linsey Dinh, a Richmond, California resident, bought an item from Depop’s website around January 10, 2025. It was listed at $17.00. At checkout, a $1.55 “Marketplace” fee appeared on her order total. According to the complaint, nothing on the listing warned her about the extra charge before she started the purchase.
Depop introduced the Marketplace fee in July 2024, when it dropped its 10% seller commission for U.S. transactions and shifted the charge to buyers instead. The fee runs up to 5% of the item price plus a fixed amount of up to $1.00 per transaction. Depop’s own help pages confirm the fee is calculated at checkout, not shown on the listing itself.
The complaint calls this “drip pricing”: advertising a low price to draw shoppers in, then adding mandatory charges once they’ve committed time and attention to the purchase.
Who the Class Covers and What It Seeks
Dinh is asking the court to certify a nationwide class of consumers who bought items through Depop and were charged the Marketplace fee without advance disclosure. The suit seeks monetary damages, restitution of fee revenue, a court declaration that the pricing practice is illegal, and an injunction ordering Depop to stop it. No total damages figure has been made public.
The California Law Behind the Case
The lawsuit rests on Senate Bill 478, California’s Honest Pricing Law, which took effect on July 1, 2024. SB 478 amended the Consumers Legal Remedies Act to make it unlawful to advertise a price that doesn’t include every mandatory fee a buyer has to pay. The only carve-outs are government-imposed taxes and reasonable shipping charges.
Because the law sits inside the CLRA, individual consumers can sue directly. Actual damages carry a statutory floor of $1,000 per plaintiff, and punitive damages are available. The complaint also brings claims under California’s Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law, plus a common-law claim for unjust enrichment seeking the return of Marketplace fee revenue.
Before filing, Dinh sent Depop a CLRA notice letter on January 2, 2026, which the company received on January 6. The CLRA requires that step to give businesses a chance to fix violations. According to the complaint, Depop did not remedy the issues.
A Brief Fix, Then a Reversal
One detail in the complaint stands out for anyone tracking whether Depop has changed its pricing. After the complaint was drafted but before it was filed, Depop added a small “i” icon next to item prices. Clicking it showed that the price included the Marketplace fee. The complaint describes this as an “apparent effort to get ahead of this complaint.”
The change didn’t hold. By late March 2026, the icon was gone from Depop’s website, even when browsing from a California address, and the Marketplace fee had gone back to appearing only at checkout. Whether that was a test or a deliberate reversal after the suit was filed is not clear from the record.
Where the Case Stands
The case is assigned to Judge Vince Chhabria under case number 3:26-cv-01173-VC. In late April 2026, the court granted a stipulation ordering Depop to file a notice about a previously filed class action, which Depop did on May 5, 2026. The initial case management conference was pushed back to July 17, 2026, with a joint case management statement due a week earlier. No dispositive motions or substantive rulings had been entered as of mid-2026, so class certification has not yet been decided and there is no settlement or claim form to file.
Does the eBay Sale Change Anything?
Depop has been a subsidiary of Etsy since 2021. In February 2026, Etsy announced an agreement to sell Depop to eBay for approximately $1.2 billion in cash. The closing, originally expected by the end of the second quarter of 2026, has been delayed to the end of the third quarter. Regulators in the United States and Germany have cleared the deal; review is still open in the United Kingdom and Australia. The sale agreement includes standard indemnification and litigation-disclosure provisions, but the schedules listing specific lawsuits have not been made public, and it is not yet clear how the class action will be affected by the change in ownership or whether eBay will take on the claims.