No title field. So your first line is one.

The highest-leverage sentence on the platform, written like a text message.

"Got this ages ago and never really wore it tbh." That is a genuinely normal opening line on Depop and it is also the single most expensive mistake available, because it is what appears where a title would appear, and it says nothing a buyer is searching for: not the item, not the era, not the fit, not the size.

The fix is not to make it sound corporate. Depop's whole register is conversational and a listing that reads like a department store is out of place in a different way. It is to put the scannable facts in the first line — era, item, fit, size — and then carry on sounding like yourself in the second.

The other half of a Depop listing is the five hashtags, and they are a taste filter rather than a reach lever. #fyp and #trending on a denim jacket describe nothing, match nobody's browsing, and unrelated tag stuffing is treated by Depop's community guidelines as a suspension risk rather than a wasted opportunity. Five genuine style, era and material tags do more work and carry none of that.

Worth saying plainly: Depop does not publish its ranking algorithm or an official description character limit. Where this job talks about how discovery behaves, it is repeating what sellers consistently report, and the report labels it that way rather than dressing community understanding up as platform policy.

The two that are not about writing at all.

The first is the category. A jacket filed under Tops is a jacket that does not appear when somebody filters to jackets, and filtered browsing is how a large share of Depop buying happens — the search box is not the only route in. No amount of rewriting the description reaches a buyer who has already narrowed to a category your item is not in. It is a dropdown, it takes four seconds, and it is checked before anything else because it can cost you every impression.

The second is what the platform will not let you sell. Depop's buyer base is streetwear-heavy, which makes replica trainers and counterfeit branded pieces a live enforcement category rather than a theoretical one — and in the UK, selling counterfeit goods at commercial scale is a criminal matter, not a platform ticking-off. Where the material describes an item in terms that suggest a replica, the report says so and stops. It does not write the listing better.

Both of those sit above the copy in the ranked fixes for the same reason: a perfect description of an item nobody can find, or an item that gets the account closed, is not a thing worth £7.

A real listing, before and after.

From the Depop rubric behind the job.

The second sentence still sounds like a person. "Great layered over a hoodie or thrown on with baggy jeans" is not marketing copy; it is how the seller would actually describe wearing it, and it is doing useful work because it tells a Depop buyer what look this fits into.

The interesting change is "size M I think?". That is real uncertainty, and it did not get resolved by guessing. It became three measurement requests, because the seller has a tape measure and the model does not. Vintage sizing maps badly onto modern UK sizes and a confident "M" would have been worse than the honest question mark.

How the job runs.

• Paste the description and the hashtags. All five hashtags, even the lazy ones — especially the lazy ones. Say what category you filed it under too, since the wrong category quietly removes an item from the filtered browsing most Depop buyers actually use.
• £7 once, no subscription. Seven thousand points; a ceiling of 3,500 on this job and only what the report costs is spent. If you are listing a wardrobe, the leftover balance is the point — one payment usually stretches to a second listing. Three revisions included.
• You get back a first line, a body, five hashtags and a shot list. Plus the score, the ranked problems, and the measurements to take before you post it.

Nothing is spent on a generation that fails.

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