Mepop: A Reporting Tool For Depop Sellers
A TL;DR for those of you who don’t have 5 minutes:
I created a tool to help Depop Sellers track their sales/profits.
- There’s a lot of need for this, as Depop has millions of users, yet offer no out-of-the-box reporting tools to their sellers.
- This wasn’t an easy task (which is probably why it hasn’t been done yet). I built a website that processes the CSV files that Depop allows each seller to download.
- It’s quite neat. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself at: www.mepopreports.com
Depop Overview:
Depop is social shopping app with a reported 11 million users in 2019. People sell all sorts of things on Depop, but you’ll most commonly find clothing. Despite the generally young demographic, lots of sellers have made it big selling on Depop; selling thousands of items to their tens of thousands of followers.
The Background:
I’ve been observing the Depop marketplace for over a year now. Recently, there’s been a noticeable increase in sales growth and follower counts among sellers. As Depop becomes a more significant part of their monthly income, many are feeling the need to track their earnings and profit margins more closely. However, Depop doesn’t offer robust reporting tools to its sellers, making it challenging to monitor everything effectively. It seems likely that this isn’t an isolated issue. With a community of 11 million users and even larger-scale sellers out there, this must be a fairly common problem within the seller community.
The Process:
As a software developer, my mind went to work on this. I wanted to find a way to give sellers their personal sales history, and display it in a aesthetic manner. I explored several avenues before finding the right one.
First off, and most naturally, my mind jumped to the idea of using Depop’s API (Application Programming Interface). That could solve this problem pretty quickly. As it turns out though, Depop doesn’t offer a public API, which is probably why we haven’t seen any tools like this pop up yet.
After a good while of trying to find an API, I admitted defeat on the idea of a Depop reporting tool altogether. I thought it was going to be an impossible feat without the access of an API.
But then I had an idea: I could just web-scrape a users account, read the data in and display it to the user. That didn’t seem like the worst idea; definitely inferior to an API, but not impossible to make work. I started building it out with a good amount of success, until I hit a barrier. After a few dev-hours invested in setting up a web-scraper, I decided to read the terms of service to be safe. I didn’t want to finish the app, only to find that it was illegal. It turns out they forbid any “screen-scraping or data mining” in their terms of service.
Well shucks. Back to square one.
The Solution
Then I found something useful. I figured out that when logged into your Depop account, you can download a CSV file of all your sales. This seemed perfect! I could just ask the user to download their respective CSV and upload it to my software. I’ll parse the CSV, organize the data, and then prettify it for the user.
This is a pretty good option, and the one I ended up using, but it comes with it’s limitations:
- The scope of the data is narrow. The CSV only includes past sales. It doesn’t have any other information such as followers, listings, or even the sellers username. This forced me to only work with what they’ve sold, and I can’t cross-reference it with they’re amount of listings, or average listing prices, etc. The scope of the data is limiting but sufficient for now.
- It’s inconvenient. The user has to go to depop.com, login, download their desired CSV files (which only include, at most, 3 months of sales per file, so you have to download 4 sheets to get a full year etc.), go to mepopreports.com and upload those freshly downloaded files. It’s somewhat of a burden to ask of the user.
- It’s inflexible. From a developers standpoint, it’s a fairly rigid data source. It’s not near as mobile and handy as an API would be.
Amidst the limitations, what I’ve put together seems to be a solid product for what I was given in the CSV. I’ve named it Mepop.
Considering that Depop doesn’t offer any sort of service similar to this, the competition is low. Currently the majority of Depop sellers have three options to choose from: an automated report from PayPal, creating their own report via excel/google sheets, or do no reporting at all, and brush up on their mental math.
PayPal offers very limited reporting on your incoming payments, which is a roundabout way to keep track of your Depop sales. But now that Depop has the option to bypass PayPal and pay directly via your bank, this method has just become a lot less useful.
Importing a CSV into excel or google sheets isn’t a bad option. The potential for data organization/visualization that excel offers is endless. It surpasses the Mepop app without a doubt. This method also plays nicely with the sellers CSV’s. The biggest caveat here is that, while excel is absurdly powerful, it also can be quite daunting and time/labor intensive. This is especially the case if your experience with excel is limited.
I don’t think I need to elaborate on why mental math isn’t the choice here either.
What Mepop brings to the table is something quite easy to use, and also quite informative. It’s goal is to surpass PayPal’s ease of use, while also being much more thorough in regards to reporting. It’s not a big deal to have all the files you need stored on your computer/phone, and ever week/month, visit the Mepop site to visualize all the data.
I feel this is a tool that is desperately needed in the space of online retail. Many companies have done similar things but nobody has created a solution specifically for Depop sellers. With Depop having millions of users, some making six figures in sales every year, this seems to be a tool worth putting my time into.
If you sell on Depop, go ahead and check the app out at www.mepopreports.com! I’m quite confident that you’ll like what you see!
The Future
I have lots of plans for this project, including a Pro version with a whole load of new features for you guys. Let me know what you guys think. I want input and critique, so don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know what works and what doesn’t work for you lovely people.
Thanks for reading y’all.
