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Buying on Vestiaire is two gestures and one answer to your bank — and the charge comes from that answer, never from rega. It is also the marketplace where the price on the card tells you the least: we measured an item displayed at €34 billed €102.12 in the basket. This page follows the whole tunnel, from the emptied basket to the sentence that closes it.
A corridor of matte panels receding into the dark, with a single point of green light at its end

The tunnel: a long corridor of matte panels, one green light at the far end.

The four sentences to remember.
  1. Preparing costs nothing and undoes itself. The basket, the delivery and the payment intent are all free and reversible.
  2. The charge happens at the very last step — the confirmation that leaves on its own once your bank has answered. We led two complete chains up to the bank challenge and stopped: zero euros spent, twice.
  3. A payment cannot be replayed. If it fails, you start the purchase again from the beginning.
  4. The basket is shared by the whole account. One purchase at a time, and anything left lying in it is added to the amount you pay.

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Two gestures, and only one of them costs money

The window that opens from a detection says it before anything else: “Two steps, and neither is automatic: preparing arms this account’s cart on Vestiaire (and empties whatever was in it), paying opens your bank’s validation. The charge comes from your answer, not from rega.”
The sentence above the “PAY” button is worth reading in full, once: “This sends your card’s security code and opens your bank’s confirmation. Nothing is charged until you answer — but this payment cannot be replayed: if it fails, you will have to start the purchase again.”
The reconnaissance rega led on this marketplace cost zero euros — two complete chains taken up to the bank challenge and stopped there — precisely because the charge sits at the last step and nowhere before it. One figure quoted here does not come from it: the 18 seconds of the bank challenge were read from a capture of a purchase that really was charged.

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What “Prepare the purchase” actually does

Seven things, in this order, from a single click. A confirmation stands between you and step 2: “Preparing this purchase from {compte} first removes everything sitting in its Vestiaire basket. No payment is triggered.” The button that goes through is named after what it does — “Empty the basket and prepare” — and on success the screen writes “Purchase prepared from {compte}”.
One purchase at a time per account. Unlike Vinted, the lock is on the account, not on the item, because the basket is shared. Start a second one and you get: “A purchase is already under way on this account. Wait for it to finish: on Vestiaire, two purchases started at the same time from one account cancel each other out.” The gesture expected of you is to wait — not to try again.
A payment family that is asked for and not offered is a refusal, not a fallback. An account set to PayPal is never paid by card behind your back, and the reverse is just as true. And the methods on offer depend on the order — the seller, their country, the item — not only on the account: a method that worked yesterday can be absent today.
rega never sends the amount. It is fixed by the marketplace when the payment opens, and the marketplace reads it from the basket. That is why every figure you see quoted on a Vestiaire purchase is a basket total, never a listing price.

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Where delivery is chosen, and why the map needs a full basket

The list of pick-up points requires a basket that is not empty. Measured on a real account on 17 August, by filling then emptying it, everything else identical: 0 points on an empty basket, 12 points on a full one. The marketplace does not return an error for the empty case — it returns an empty list, which reads exactly like “there is nothing near you”.
So rega borrows the basket to draw the map, and gives it straight back:
1

It takes the account's purchase lock

If the account is already preparing something: “This account is already preparing a purchase. Finish it before opening the pickup-point map — both share the same basket.”
2

It checks your basket is empty

We do not throw away a choice you made: “Your Vestiaire basket already holds an item. Empty it to display pickup points: the map needs the basket, and we will not discard your choice.”
3

It borrows one real item

An item from your own feed when there is one, otherwise one of your recent detections. Never an invented reference: a dead item would draw an empty map you would believe.
4

It reads the list of the order, and whether the order accepts a pick-up point at all

Both are only readable while the basket is full. Once the basket is given back, the order no longer exists.
5

It empties the basket, whatever happened

Including on failure. And the whole borrowing runs by itself, the moment the map has nothing to draw: once each time the panel is opened, never in a loop, and never while the account is preparing a purchase. What makes that safe is the two refusals above, not caution at the last step.
With nothing to borrow, the refusal names the gesture rather than showing an empty map: “The pickup-point map needs an item in the basket — Vestiaire shows none without an order. Start the Vestiaire radar, or open the map from an item in the feed: REGA borrows it just long enough to read, then empties the basket.”
“No point near here” and “this order does not accept pick-up points” are two different things, and they do not call for the same move. Measured on five items in a row: 6 points, 0, 5 points, 0, 0 — three items out of five did not ship to a pick-up point at all, and the marketplace said so by returning an empty list, not an error. On one of them, a foreign seller, home delivery was the only option and both postage figures were the same: €45.00.
If no delivery is set, the marketplace decides alone, and silently. It attaches the nearest pick-up point — so the parcel does not go home, it goes to a shop nobody chose. Nothing in the marketplace’s answers shows it: the delivery block came back empty on 34 answers out of 34. rega says it out loud instead, even when everything went well: “No delivery method is saved for this account: Vestiaire will pick a nearby pick-up point on its own.”
A delivery refusal stops the purchase before the payment is opened. Nothing is engaged at that point, so there is nothing to undo. If your saved pick-up point is not offered for that order, the purchase stops and the screen explains why: “The pick-up point saved for this account ({nom}) is not offered by Vestiaire for this order. The purchase was stopped before any payment: without that choice, the parcel would have gone to a shop nobody picked. Choose a pick-up point from those Vestiaire offers, or switch to home delivery.”
When one mode is refused, rega tries the other and tells you the new price. “The saved pick-up point was not possible for this order: delivery switches to the account’s HOME address, for {port}. REGA preferred that to losing the item — nothing has been paid yet.” The same sentence exists the other way round, towards a pick-up point. It is only tried on a refusal — never when nobody has chosen anything.

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What the item really costs

The displayed price is not the price paid, and the gap is neither constant nor proportional. That is why every Vestiaire purchase in rega reads the basket total, and never the listing price. Here is the whole of a real order, measured on 17 August on an item displayed at €34:
Buyer service fees are not a line on top — they are a slice of the price already shown. On that same order they came to €8.16. The item displayed at €34 is paid €34 for the item: €8.16 of it goes to the marketplace and €25.84 to the seller. What is added above the displayed price is postage and duties — here €45.00 and €23.12.
Five real orders, side by side. The gap is never the same twice:

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Postage can more than double

Measured on the same order: €4.90 to a pick-up point against €10.90 to a home address. On another listing, a price of €263.00 breaks down into €250.00 for the seller and €13.00 of buyer fees, with postage on top — €14.90 home, €9.90 to a pick-up point. And on the out-of-EU order above, both modes cost the same €45.00: choosing a pick-up point does not always save anything.
A price constraint in a filter compares the listing price, never what you will pay. A Vestiaire filter capped at €50 will happily hand you the €34 item that costs €102.12 at the basket. The constraint is not broken — it simply does not measure the same thing. See Writing a Vestiaire filter.
Every amount you read is written by rega, from the figure the marketplace sends, in the conventions of the language you are reading it in. What rega never does is convert a currency: it does not hold the rate, so a price in pounds stays in pounds. An amount the marketplace does not send is shown as unknown, never as “0”: a credible false figure is worse than an admitted gap. And there is no price cap anywhere on this path, by an explicit and repeated decision: what replaces the constraint is visibility.

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Paying: the bank confirmation, which is always asked for

A narrow vertical slit of green light in a matte dark wall

The gate the money passes through: a very narrow vertical slit of green light in a matte wall.

Measured 4 times out of 4 — twice through a browser, twice through rega — the device fingerprint sent before the payment did not exempt anything: the bank asked for its challenge every time. That is a policy of the card issuer, not a limit of the marketplace, and another card may well be exempt. On the one capture we followed all the way, the challenge itself took 18 seconds and three form submissions, and the bank’s push notification did arrive on the phone.

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What you have to do, in order

1

Save a card in rega for that account

Without it the payment does not even open: “No usable card is saved in rega for this account: the payment was not opened.” The panel explains where cards come from: “A card is saved with Vestiaire at the first purchase: rega presents it at payment, then Vestiaire keeps it and shows it here.”
2

Choose between the security code alone and the full card

The security code alone is enough. “rega keeps this card’s security code, and nothing else: the number stays with Vestiaire. That is all it takes to pay.” The longer explanation is worth reading: “Vestiaire already keeps the card; it only asks for its security code at every purchase. Entrust it to rega and this account prepares the purchase on its own — basket, delivery, card — and all that is left for you is to confirm it with your bank. rega never needs the number.”
3

Prepare, then press “PAY”

The screen then shows “Your bank is asking you to confirm this payment. Nothing is charged until you answer.”
4

Open “ANSWER MY BANK” and answer inside the frame

The page says what it is doing: “Answer your bank in the frame below. This page is waiting: do not close it.” It also shows the “Purchase amount”, so you check the total before answering.
5

Let go — the confirmation leaves on its own

“Answer received — finishing the purchase…”, then “Your bank answered and the payment has been requested. You can close this tab.”

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Why there is a page of ours in the middle

On Vinted, your bank serves a page and the browser opens it. On Vestiaire there is no page to open: the bank expects data to be sent to it, not a visit. So rega serves its own page, under its own address, which posts to your bank inside a frame and listens for the answer.
Your gesture does not change: it is still a link that opens in a tab. Everything that differs sits behind it.
That page is deliberately powerless, and it is worth knowing why:

It cannot charge you

It holds neither the payment provider’s data nor the authorisation token, and neither of them can be obtained from it. At worst, a page that was tampered with could cancel a purchase in progress. It cannot pay for one.

It cannot claim your bank said yes

It hands back only the sealed answer your bank produced. The verdict is read by our servers, never announced by the page.

It never replays

There is no “try again” button, and a lock prevents a second send in the same breath. That case is exactly how double charges happen.

It has no timer

Deliberate: a challenge measured at 18 seconds and three submissions would be turned into a fake abandonment by any deadline. There is no “this is taking a while” message either, for the same reason.

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PayPal takes another road, and we lose sight of it

If the account is set to PayPal, the tunnel branches before the bank challenge: what comes back is an address to open, not a challenge. The amount sent to PayPal is read from the basket, never from the listing.
rega will never know whether a PayPal payment went through. No route gives the outcome back, so the product says so instead of guessing. The notification says it too, title and body: “PayPal payment to complete” — “The payment link is ready. Nothing has been charged until you follow it, and REGA will not know the outcome: check on Vestiaire before starting over.”

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After the last word, the silence

The marketplace’s last word is “requested”, not “paid” — and there is no word after it. No route rereads the state of a payment, and the site’s own confirmation page rereads nothing either. The only indirect signal is the basket going empty, and it proves nothing: a basket emptied by hand looks exactly the same.
A payment can end in five ways, and the product names them all: The last one is the only place in the whole product where we refuse to state that nothing was charged: “The confirmation was sent but Vestiaire did not answer. Check your order on Vestiaire before starting another purchase: we cannot tell whether the payment went through.”
Nothing is ever replayed on a timeout. When an answer does not come back, the outcome is unknown, and replaying risks charging you twice. On this marketplace there is no signal that would prove non-execution, so there is no exception to that rule.
On a clean ending, the sentence you get is deliberately modest: “The payment has been requested. Your bank has the last word; you will find the order in your Vestiaire account.”

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If you stop halfway

A challenge that is opened and never answered used to lock the account for good — one waiting line, a basket still holding a €97 dress for €116.52, and no way out of it. Since 17 August there is a way out, and it is one button: “Cancel payment”. Cancelling does two things: it closes the line and it empties the basket — the second being the useful half. And the product tells you whether the emptying worked, because a basket you believe to be empty is the worst of the three possible states:
Cancelling releases the item. The hold falls, and somebody else can buy it. That is not recoverable, and the button’s tooltip says so before you press it: “Closes this payment and empties the Vestiaire basket, so the account can buy again. The item will no longer be reserved for you.”

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Closing the challenge tab is not cancelling

The relay page’s “Close without answering” button does not tell our servers anything: the line stays open, and therefore resumable. That is deliberate — your bank may be authenticating the very same payment in its app, on another device, and closing it from here would kill a payment that was about to succeed. What you read on leaving is “You left without answering your bank. Nothing was charged.”
A payment left open finds its way back to you. A banner sits on the dashboard and on the Vestiaire screen, titled “Your bank is waiting for your confirmation” or “A Vestiaire payment is under way”, with the amount and two buttons — “Resume” and “Cancel payment”. It explains why it matters: “While this payment waits, no other Vestiaire purchase can go out: the basket is shared across the account.” It refreshes every 20 seconds, and that refresh only reaches Vestiaire for an account that has a payment under way: when nothing is waiting, it costs the marketplace nothing.Before that banner existed, the link lived in the browser’s memory: one reload, one tab change, one switch to a phone, and you had to know a 32-character identifier to get back to your own money.
Nothing is ever cancelled automatically, and that is a decision. A challenge may be sitting open in your banking app on another device; cancelling it on a timer would kill a payment that was going to complete. Only the states where a human gesture unblocks something are surfaced in the banner.

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Buying that starts without you, and stops before the money

There is automatic buying on this marketplace, and it is semi-automatic on purpose: rega drives, you confirm. Nothing on that path can reach the confirmation — not directly, not through anything it calls.
Arming is per filter, one tick box at a time. A new filter never starts filling baskets on its own — it is disarmed by default. Arming filters in bulk is refused: it would fill as many baskets as there are filters, in one gesture, without ever announcing the number.
Why not open the payment at detection time, rather than at your click? Because opening it early would burn the payment reference, and the bank challenge would already be dead for someone who looks at their phone twenty minutes later. It is opened fresh, at the moment you click.

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The fifteen minutes, and what they are not

You get 15 minutes to confirm. The panel counts them down — “You have {minutes} min left to confirm.”, then “You have less than a minute left to confirm.” — and says what happens if you do nothing: “After that, nothing is charged: the purchase is simply dropped and the account becomes available again.”
That number is a judgement call, not a measurement, and we would rather write it than let you assume otherwise. What has been measured is that an accepted offer is valid for 24 hours and reserves nothing. What has not been measured is how long a Vestiaire basket keeps its contents. The 15 minutes sit between two real costs: too short and you miss the notification, too long and the account is blocked for every other detection. It is neither a spending guardrail nor a cap.
The notification carries the basket total, delivery included — never the listing price: “A purchase is waiting for you — {montant} {devise}” / “The basket is ready and nothing has been charged. Your bank will ask you to confirm: you have {minutes} min. Without your confirmation, the purchase simply will not happen.” It never claims the item is reserved for you: how long a Vestiaire basket keeps what it holds has never been measured, so nothing here promises the item will still be there. The waiting panel shows the amount under “Basket total, delivery included”, names the filter that found it with Found by “{filtre}”, and carries two buttons: “Confirm with my bank” and “Do not buy”. When there is nothing left to confirm it says so in full: “No purchase is waiting for your confirmation. Any that were waiting have been confirmed, cancelled, or ran out of time — in every case, nothing was charged.”

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Why a detection may not arm a purchase

None of these is a spending guardrail: nothing here judges a price, an opportunity or a pace. They all say the same thing — we do not ask you to confirm a payment we could not describe correctly.
Pending validations do not survive a restart of the service. Nothing is charged — none of them had reached the confirmation — and the next preparation empties the basket. If the purchase can no longer be opened when you click, you are told why: “This purchase could not be opened. The item may have been sold in the meantime — nothing was charged.”

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What can refuse a purchase, and what it means

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The card and the bank

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The account, the basket and delivery

A refusal from Vestiaire never signs you out of rega. It is the marketplace refusing something, not us: the message is red, the screen stays where it was, nothing else moves.

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What surprises people

On Vinted you can run two purchases side by side on one account. Here you cannot: one basket, one account, one purchase at a time. Everything else on this page follows from that single fact — the emptying, the lock, the banner, and the pick-up map needing a borrowed item.
And it is written in the confirmation before it happens. If you keep a shortlist in your Vestiaire basket, move it to your favourites first: the preparation does not sort, it clears.
Three items out of five, measured in a row, simply do not ship to a pick-up point. The marketplace expresses that with an empty list and a perfectly ordinary answer — which is why we distinguish “no point near here” from “this order does not accept them”.
The marketplace sends the home price and the pick-up price together, every time. So the amount you see for the mode you did not choose is real — it is not an error.
The negotiated price goes down to the basket on its own, with no extra step. Then postage is added on top: an accepted offer of €3,400 was billed €3,890. See Making an offer.
We never write “paid” on a Vestiaire purchase, because the marketplace never says it. Anything more definite would be us inventing an outcome we cannot read.
The second one lands on the same state and says so: “This payment was already closed — the account is free.”
Yours may have one; ours does not. Adding a timer would have turned a challenge measured at 18 seconds and three submissions into a fake abandonment.

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What buying on Vestiaire does not do yet

We would rather write it here than let you find out halfway through.

No purchase history for this marketplace

The Orders screen knows nothing about Vestiaire. Once a payment has been requested, the order lives in your Vestiaire account and nowhere else in rega.

No tracking after the confirmation

Nothing rereads the state of a payment, because nothing can. The last thing rega knows is that the confirmation went out.

A PayPal outcome is invisible to us

The link is served, the amount is right, and there our knowledge stops. Check the order at Vestiaire before starting over.

No pick-up map without an item

There is no way to draw that map on an empty basket. Borrowing an item is the only route, and it needs one of your own.

Addresses are located in France only

Elsewhere the map admits it does not know where the address is, rather than placing a pin that would be wrong.

Pending confirmations do not survive a restart

Deliberate: an obligation kept on disk would be a lock under another name. Nothing is charged, and the next preparation clears the basket.

Duties are in the total, never on a line of their own

The marketplace announces them — €23.12 on the order measured above — but rega shows you the total that contains them, not the breakdown.

No offer is ever made automatically

Offers stay a manual gesture, by decision. Nothing in semi-automatic buying negotiates a price.
We do not publish a duration for a Vestiaire purchase. Vinted has one, measured end to end; this marketplace does not, and a plausible figure would be a promise the product never made. What is measured here is the bank challenge — 18 seconds, three form submissions — and that part is neither ours nor shortenable.

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Where to go next

Your Vestiaire accounts

Connecting an account, the card panel, and the five health points a purchase needs.

Making an offer

The floor, the irreversible rise, and why an accepted offer reserves nothing.

The marketplace, and how it differs

Manual validation, the pace of the radar, and what a shared watch means.

Writing a Vestiaire filter

Every criterion, what it costs — and why a price cap does not measure the total.

The Vestiaire screen

Where the detections, the filters and the accounts live.

Money

The same question on Vinted: caps, the total debited, and what spends without you.