That is why girls flea market currently has massive problems

The platform for second-hand fashion has apparently not been paying some of its sellers for weeks. They are frustrated and angry. Now Startbase has learned the reason for the complications.

The start-up Mädchenflohmarkt was a pure success story for a long time. Over the past ten years, the platform for second-hand fashion has benefited from the trend toward greater sustainability. The portal now has around two million users - and they now sell and buy so many used clothes via Mädchenflohmarkt that the company was even able to announce that it was profitable in September 2021- a milestone all of its own among startups. On top of that, there was financing, with Momox founder Christian Wegner joining as a new investor. In short, things could hardly have gone better.

But the start of the new year marked the beginning of problems at Mädchenflohmarkt that continue to this day. The start-up is not paying them off, users complain to Startbase and also on rating platforms. There is a threat of damage to the company's image. Mädchenflohmarkt denies the accusations on request, sees itself as a victim of fraudsters and has called in the police. So what's going on at the Stuttgart-based start-up?

According to its website, Mädchenflohmarkt actually wants to pay out the sellers as soon as the customers have received their product and confirmed that everything is in order with it. Mädchenflohmarkt acts as a kind of trustee so that buyer and seller can conduct the trade as securely as possible and collects a commission of ten percent for this.

The users evaluate girl flea market in the Internet badly

But while the buyers received their products, the sellers waited not a few days but weeks for their payments - in some cases until today. This led to many bad comments on rating platforms such as Trustpilot. Of the approximately 3300 reviews there, 28 percent are marked as "insufficient," and there is only one star out of five. If you then scroll through the comments, you will find a lot of concern, anger and frustration among users who have previously enjoyed using Mädchenflohmarkt and, according to their own statements, are waiting for hundreds or thousands of euros.

For example, one user writes: "I am also totally angry. Have sold for the first time what over girl flea market. If I had known that I would have to wait so long for my money, I would not have done it." Another writes that her payout is already three weeks in coming and thus still formulated one of the rather more harmless comments. The rest of the column reads more like this: "What a mess!!customer service answers with excuses of some kind!I'm going to file a complaint and get a lawyer involved!", writes one user. Another comments on Trustpilot: "NO MORE !!!! FINGER AWAY ! MONEY DOES NOT COME !"

Several reviews at once call for class action lawsuits, legal action and speculate wildly about financial problems. Maria Spilka, who founded the start-up with Peter Ambrozy and Thorsten Lückemeier in 2012, is surprised by such a level of accusations, which she immediately denies to Startbase. When asked, she explains the actual reasons for the delay. For example, she says the platform has noticed increased attempts at fraud in payment processing since the beginning of the year. "These are systematic and carried out by a group," the founder writes, adding, "We have already reported this to the police."

Mädchenflohmarkt plans to settle the outstanding payments soon

As a result of the fact that they now filter out the fraud attempts at Mädchenflohmarkt, they have to manually check a "considerable proportion of the payouts." This, of course, takes longer than if the transactions were simply run through a fully automated system. However, according to Spilka, the delays should be resolved in the next one to two weeks.

Users have therefore recently been receiving an email in which the platform apologizes and also outlines the reason for the problems: "Since the beginning of the year, we have noticed increased attempts at fraud when processing payments on Mädchenflohmarkt. Through our payment system, your payout is safe. Nevertheless, we need to ensure that the right people get their money," it says. Outstanding payments will be settled soon, it says. From the start-up's point of view, we can only hope that users will understand this - and that the ratings on Trustpilot will soon go up again.