Stories

Curated weekly. Irish second-hand, things worth knowing about.

14 September 2026

Share your shop link. Earn free bumps.

Every seller on Sellinn already has their own shop page. Most people just aren't putting it anywhere. Worth fixing — it's the easiest free marketing you've got. Drop your shop link in your Instagram bio, post it on your Facebook page, send it to family. Anywhere your people already are. Here's what's new: your referral link now points straight at your shop instead of the homepage, so whoever clicks it sees what you're actually selling first. The reward's the same as always — when someone signs up through your link and makes their first sale, you get a free bump. Stack as many as you like, no cap. Refer 10 people who go on to sell, get 10 bumps. Grab your link here: https://www.sellinn.ie/?gift=1 Bring your friends and family in — the more real sellers here, the better this gets for everyone. 🍀
8 September 2026

Missed a sale? This is probably why.

Someone messages you about your listing. You don't see it for six hours, because you weren't in the app — by then, they've bought the same thing from somebody else. That's not a hypothetical. It's the single most common way a sale on Sellinn quietly disappears, and it has nothing to do with your price, your photos, or your listing. Browser tabs don't get notifications. Installed apps do. Add Sellinn to your home screen — about ten seconds, no app store, no download — and you start getting alerted the moment someone messages you or makes an offer, even with your phone locked. It's the single easiest thing you can do to sell faster here. Here's exactly how: https://www.sellinn.ie/how-it-works.html#install-app
8 September 2026

Why doesn't Etsy feel handmade anymore?

Etsy launched in 2005 with one promise: a place to buy things a real person made. For a long time, that's exactly what it was. Somewhere along the way, that got harder to find. Etsy's own policies now let sellers use approved manufacturing "production partners" rather than making items themselves, and search results increasingly mix genuine one-person workshops with resellers and mass-produced goods wearing a handmade label. It's been written about for years, and plenty of Etsy's own sellers have said the same thing publicly: the platform that made "handmade" mean something is having a harder time keeping that promise. None of that makes the makers disappear. Ireland has no shortage of people making real things — jewellery, ceramics, candles, art, knitwear — and increasingly, nowhere obvious to sell them without a cut taken out of every sale, or a search results page working against them. That's what Sellinn's new Handmade & Crafts category is for. No listing fee, no commission — you keep 100% of what you sell — and every listing on it is a real Irish maker, not a production partner. Daisy in Limerick was first — handmade beaded bracelets, up on Sellinn today. If that's you too, we'd love to have you. PS: separately, we found and fixed a bug today that meant views on your listings weren't always being counted properly — should be accurate from now on.
1 September 2026

A quick one on keeping Sellinn a nice place to browse 🍀

You might've noticed a few listings disappear lately — nothing to worry about, just some housekeeping. We don't allow live animals (selling or rehoming), and we don't allow listings that are really just ads for someone's business or website. If a listing got removed and you're not sure why, that's almost certainly it. To be clear though — if you're offering an actual service, that's always been welcome and still is. Cutting grass, cleaning windows, fixing a leaky tap, whatever it is — real people doing real work for other people is exactly what Sellinn's for. It's specifically the "check out my website/company" stuff we're not able to host. A friendly walkthrough of what's allowed is in our How it works page: https://www.sellinn.ie/how-it-works.html — and the full, official list of what's not allowed is in our Terms: https://www.sellinn.ie/legal.html if you want the complete picture. Thanks for helping keep Sellinn a genuinely nice place to browse. 🍀
21 August 2026

Got banned from Vinted with no real explanation? I did too.

A lot of you have seen the news this week — thousands of Vinted sellers reporting bans with little explanation and no real way to appeal (as reported by the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2kwnrn5zpo). I'm one of them. No clear reason, no real response, just gone. So I built Sellinn instead — free, Irish, and yours to actually use. No algorithm deciding your account doesn't matter. If you're in the same boat, you're welcome here. 🍀
13 August 2026

Right now, nobody can pay to get seen on Sellinn.

Most marketplaces have a quiet second tier. List for free, sure — but if you actually want eyes on it, pay up. Bump it, boost it, feature it. The listing with the biggest budget wins the top of the page, not the best deal. Right now, Sellinn doesn't work that way. Every listing rotates hourly. Not sorted by who paid, not sorted by who's been on the platform longest — just rotated, so everyone gets their turn near the top. A jacket listed five minutes ago has the same shot as one listed last week. Free means free — for buyers and sellers, on every part of the platform, as things stand today. Why bother saying this out loud? Because it's easy to assume "free marketplace" means free-to-list-but-pay-to-win, since that's how most of them work. We'd rather you knew exactly how it works right now than find out by watching someone else's listing sit above yours for no reason you can see. That's it. List it, it rotates, everyone gets a fair go — today, and for as long as we can keep it that way.
26 July 2026

We listened, we shipped (literally)

A buyer in Finland bought Irish stuff off Sellinn. We did not see that coming. 🇫🇮 Turns out a few of you have already sold across borders, so we've made it official — optional EU shipping is here, three simple price tiers, no faff. Sticking to collection or Ireland-only? Grand, nothing changes for you. Oh, and we tidied up the FAQs too, so the little "wait, how do I—" moments have answers now. One serious note while we're at it: Sellinn will never message you first, on any listing or otherwise, asking you to "verify" or "confirm" anything — if you ever get a message like that, it's not us, don't click it, just report it to us. Bring your friends and family in — the more of you here, the better this gets. 🍀
14 July 2026

We're getting better because of you 🍀

Over the past few days, Sellinn was targeted by a spam bot — the same kind of bad actor that shows up on every marketplace that starts gaining traction. We won't pretend it wasn't annoying. Some of you received messages with suspicious links, and a wave of email notifications went out that shouldn't have. We're sorry for the noise. Here's what actually happened, and what we did about it. The attack was automated — a bot creating accounts and sending phishing messages across listings, trying to redirect sellers to fake "payout verification" sites. Classic marketplace scam, and unfortunately a sign that Sellinn is now worth targeting. We took it as a challenge. Within hours of the attack, we deployed three layers of protection directly into the database: — External links in chat messages are now blocked entirely at the database level. No matter how a message is sent — through the app, through a modified client, directly through the API — if it contains a link to an outside site, it never reaches the DB. It's not filtered. It's rejected. — Rate limits now cap how many messages any single user can send within a given window. Bots that try to flood conversations hit a wall fast. — Additional protections now cover other vectors the bot attempted to exploit. Those gaps are closed. These protections sit below the app layer. They can't be bypassed by a modified browser or a direct API call. We also cleaned up the bot accounts, removed their messages, and are reviewing our sign-up flow. On the email side: some of you received a flood of "your listing is getting attention" emails. That was a separate issue — a background job that sends seller notifications had been misconfigured since April and fired for the first time properly this week. It sent every backlogged notification at once. We've fixed the configuration and it won't repeat. None of this affected any payments, listings, or personal data. Sellinn doesn't store card details — Stripe handles payments, and the attack never touched that layer. A few things we want to say directly: Thank you to everyone who reported suspicious messages. It helps more than you know, and action is taken almost immediately when you do. You can always report a user from their profile or flag a message in chat. Thank you for being on Sellinn. We're still a small platform run lean and built carefully, and we're determined to keep it that way. Every time something like this happens, the platform gets a little harder to abuse and a little safer for the people who use it genuinely. If you enjoy using Sellinn or have made a sale here, we'd love your support. We keep the marketplace free — no seller fees, no buyer charges — and we intend to keep it that way. If you want to help us do that, head back to the homepage — you'll find the Support Sellinn option in the footer. It's entirely optional, and we're grateful either way. We're not going anywhere. Neither are you. 🍀
16 May 2026

Where 63,000 tonnes of Irish clothes end up — and what to do instead

A quarter of Irish households bought second-hand clothing in 2024. That's a real number, from the Environmental Protection Agency's research. It's a lot. It also means three quarters didn't. Here's the other number nobody really wants to look at: 63,000 tonnes of textiles end up in Irish landfills every single year. Clothes, towels, bedding. Most of it still wearable. Some of it brand new, tags on, never worn. And here's the bit that surprised us most when we started digging into where Ireland actually sends its old clothes: most of what you donate doesn't end up where you think it does. THE CHARITY SHOP STORY WE TELL OURSELVES You clean out the wardrobe. You bag up the things you don't wear. You drop them at Oxfam, or SVP, or the textile bank in the car park outside Aldi. You feel like you did something good. You probably did do something good. But here's what the Irish environmental charity VOICE Ireland found when they put GPS trackers inside items of clothing and "released" them into Ireland's donation system: around 80% of clothing collected for donation in Ireland is exported abroad. Some of it gets resold in markets in Eastern Europe and Africa. Some of it gets recycled into rags and insulation. And a meaningful chunk of it ends up in landfills or burnt in countries that can't handle Ireland's textile waste any better than Ireland can. This isn't a story about charity shops being bad. Oxfam Ireland sells what they can. SVP sells what they can. They do the best they can with 1.2 million bags of donations a year and limited shelf space. But the system behind them is largely invisible, and it doesn't always end where the optimistic version says it does. THE SIMPLER ANSWER IS THE ONE WE FORGOT If your jeans still fit someone, the highest-leverage thing you can do is sell them to that someone. Not donate them, hoping they get sorted, exported, sold in a market in Kenya, and worn. Just sell them directly to someone in Cork or Dublin or Mayo who actually wants them, gets them in two days, wears them next week. That's not a sustainability slogan. That's just how the maths works. Selling direct is one transport leg — your jeans, posted or collected within Ireland. Donating is anywhere from two to six transport legs: bag → charity shop → sorting facility → textile operator → export container → overseas market → (often) overseas landfill. The carbon math doesn't always favour donation, even when the intent is good. And the financial math — you keep €15, €30, €80 for items you'd otherwise pay nothing for — is obviously in your favour. BUT I DON'T HAVE TIME Fair. So here's the honest version: listing on Sellinn takes about 60 seconds per item. One photo on your phone, a title, a price, a county. No shop, no shipping label until someone buys, no fees ever. If you have ten items, that's ten minutes of your evening. If half of them sell at €20, that's €100. The blocker isn't the time. It's the activation energy of starting. So we'll make it concrete: open Sellinn, list one item from your wardrobe tonight, and see what happens. One item. Not ten. Just one to break the seal. WHAT TO DO WITH STUFF THAT SHOULDN'T BE SOLD We're not pretending Sellinn is the answer to every disposal question. The honest split: Sell on Sellinn — anything in good condition with resale value. Jeans, dresses, jackets, kids' clothes, shoes that aren't beaten up, designer pieces, vintage finds, unworn gifts. Donate to charity — everyday adult clothing in good condition but low individual resale value. Oxfam Ireland, SVP, or your local charity shop will take care. Textile recycling (last resort) — stained, torn, genuinely worn out. Use mywaste.ie to find your nearest of 1,500+ collection points across Ireland. General waste (truly last resort) — badly soiled, mouldy, contaminated. Even charities can't use these. START SMALL. TONIGHT. If 63,000 tonnes feels like a number too big to do anything about, that's the right reaction. It is too big for any one person to solve. But it's also made up of millions of individual bags of clothes, including yours and ours. The Sellinn version of the answer is the unglamorous one: open your wardrobe, pick one thing you haven't worn in a year, list it on Sellinn in 60 seconds, and see what happens. It's not the planet-saving heroic gesture. It's the small action that compounds when 22 of us do it, then 220, then 2,200. The circular economy isn't a campaign. It's a million small swaps between Irish people who'd rather not throw working things away. Sellinn is free to join, free to list, free forever. We don't take a cut of your sale. We don't charge buyers. We're just here so the swap between you and the person who wants your jeans is easy. — Sources: Environmental Protection Agency (Ireland); VOICE Ireland "Threads of Transparency" report; Oxfam Ireland sustainability reporting; mywaste.ie circular economy resources.
6 May 2026

Tom's Collection — Nintendo nostalgia, collectibles & too many unopened boxes

Tom has been collecting for years — the kind of collector who tells himself "just one more" and somehow ends up with shelves full of unopened boxes. A huge Nintendo fan since childhood, he started with a few Amiibo figures and slowly fell down the rabbit hole into Pokémon collectibles, vintage gaming peripherals, retro toys, sealed boxes, and limited editions of all kinds. Most of it was bought for display, not for play. Some pieces were opened and proudly displayed; others stayed sealed in their boxes from the day they arrived — "too nice to open" became a recurring problem. The collection slowly took over shelves, wardrobes, and corners of rooms that were supposed to stay tidy. Now Tom has decided it's finally time to clear out part of the collection and let some of it go to people who'll actually enjoy it instead of leaving it sitting in boxes. If you're into gaming nostalgia, Nintendo, Pokémon, or collectibles in general, have a look through the listings — and don't be shy about making an offer.