A filter is a sieve laid across the whole flow: everything passes through it, only one row comes out lit.
Where the form is. Vestiaire Collective screen → “Filters” tab → “Create the filter”. The guided tour of that screen is here; this page is the trade manual behind it.
The one rule that governs the whole form
Three sentences, and the rest follows from them.- An empty field is not a constraint. It is freedom you are giving the radar, never an oversight.
- A field the listing does not carry never satisfies a constraint you set. It refuses the listing — it never lets it through by default. We would rather lose a detection than manufacture a false one.
- Between two different criteria it is an AND; inside a single criterion it is an OR. Three brands widen; a brand plus a colour narrows.
The seventeen things a filter can carry
The form edits seventeen fields, and this is the complete list. Nothing else exists — anything not in this table is either a behaviour switch (further down) or something the product does not offer yet.Fields 16 and 17 are not criteria of their own: they govern both word lists at once. The form states it rather than hiding it — “Both settings apply to both lists, and words are searched in the title as well as in the description.”
Every criterion is free in time — some are paid for in coverage
On Vinted, a criterion can cost you milliseconds, and the form prices each one. Here, nothing costs time: your criteria never travel to the marketplace on the detection path, so no criterion can slow a detection down. What some of them cost instead is coverage — and that price is not written on any screen, so this is where we write it. The radar reads Vestiaire two ways at once, and the two do not carry the same information about a listing.The item read — the fresh one
One listing at a time. It is the only read that gives freshness: on a measured sample it saw 77 out of 77 listings, and it serves the listing at the very moment it is validated — the shortest delay measured was around 0 seconds.
The batch read — the complete one
Four hundred listings in one go. It saw 54 out of 77, and the 23 it missed were precisely the freshest — created 149 to 229 seconds earlier. It lags 3 to 5 minutes behind, and exists for completeness, never for speed.
The “learned” line deserves a word, because it costs nothing and it works. Every listing read one at a time teaches us how its address maps onto the first two category levels, and the batch read then reuses that lesson for free — verified 6 times out of 6. When two addresses would teach contradictory lessons, we arbitrate nothing: that address stays ambiguous for good. It is the same principle as everywhere else here — losing a detection is cheaper than inventing one.
The radar counts, sweep after sweep, how many listings it had to refuse for a dimension the read did not carry. That count is kept and written down — it is simply not shown on your screen yet. It is listed among the limits at the bottom of this page.
Criterion by criterion
Brands — nothing is listed until you type
Brands — nothing is listed until you type
Field left empty: nothing at all is offered. The list says “Start typing a brand name.”, and the line under the field says “Type two letters to search the whole brand catalogue.”That silence is deliberate. The marketplace only ever hands back one hundred brands for your current scope, out of 17,530 — a list that would look complete while showing 0.6 % of the catalogue, and would make a brand that is merely absent from those hundred look like a brand that does not exist.Field filled in, from two characters: the search covers the whole directory. Brands the marketplace already counts for your scope come first, each with its count; the rest of the catalogue follows, without one. A missing count is not a count of zero — the directory does not count, and we do not invent the number. When the search finds more than it can show, it says so:
{n} shown out of {total} found — narrow the search.A brand is the cheapest criterion in the form: decidable by both reads, and it narrows hard.Category — four levels, and each one is a separate criterion
Category — four levels, and each one is a separate criterion
The universe (Women, Men, Children), then three levels of tree. The screen shows the full path, “Women › Clothing › Dresses”.They combine with AND, not with OR. Ticking “Women” and then “Shoes (Men)” does not give you both: it gives the intersection, which is nothing at all. We do not forbid it — the preview counter says so immediately, in figures, and that is a more honest answer than a rule we would have guessed on your behalf.The third level is one of three criteria the batch read cannot decide — the condition and the material are the other two. On 1,882 out of 1,882 listings read that way, the address stops one level above it, and nothing in the line lets us derive it. Constraining any of the three means asking to be told by the item read alone.The number of values offered moves with what you have already ticked: 14 at the first level, 99 to 112 at the second, up to 229 at the third with nothing else set.
Sizes — the most expensive constraint in the form
Sizes — the most expensive constraint in the form
Pick a category first. With no category ticked, this field offers nothing at all and says only that: “Pick a category first: the sizes offered depend on it.” The marketplace does hand back eighteen scales when nothing is ticked — eighteen intervals of bare numbers, several of them starting on the same value, which is precisely why we no longer put them in front of you.Once a category is set, sizes are offered scale by scale, and which scales appear depends on that category: under “Women › Clothing › Dresses”, exactly one comes back. The consequence is then written above the control, before you pick any size: “Constraining size rules out bags, jewellery and watches: the field is missing from 43 % of listings.”A saved filter that already carries sizes always shows them, whatever its category — a constraint you cannot see is a constraint you cannot remove.Scales have no name. They are shown by their two extremes,
Scale {de} – {a}. The marketplace gives them no name, and inventing one (“Shoes EU”) would be writing down a piece of data we do not have.And a size is kept as the marketplace’s own value, never as its label — because one and the same size stands for “12 UK / 40 FR / 44 IT / 8 US / L International” all at once. A filter written on the label lost 40 % of the matching items in the most favourable case measured: 49 out of 81.Colour — it already carries its parents
Colour — it already carries its parents
24 values, 22 of them with a swatch in the product.A “Blue” filter catches an item described as “Navy”, and a “Beige” filter catches a “Camel”. That is not a tolerance we added: the marketplace indexes it that way, and we read what it indexes.One value behaves differently, and it is worth knowing: “Other” weighs 17,362 listings, and it comes with no parent colour at all — on 60 listings out of 60 probed. Judging colour on the parents alone would have thrown away at least ten thousand listings, so we do not.
Material — it rolls up to the parent, never down
Material — it rolls up to the parent, never down
56 top-level values and 19 finer ones, and the two sets are independent of each other.The direction matters, and it was measured across 8 crossings with a control: ticking “Exotic leather” keeps an item described as “Python”; ticking “Python” does not keep an item described as “Exotic leather”. Tick the wider of the two when you hesitate.Material is decidable on the item read only: constraining it rules out the batch read.
Condition — five values, and one read only
Condition — five values, and one read only
5 values. Like the material, the condition is carried by the item read and not by the batch read, so constraining it costs you the catch-up and nothing else.The condition label stored on a detection is the one from the sweep, which runs in French for everybody. What travels beside it is the identifier, and that is what your screen translates — so an English interface shows you an English condition even though the sweep read it in French.
Origin — and why “From Europe” is not Europe
Origin — and why “From Europe” is not Europe
Three modes: “Any origin” (“The seller’s country is not constrained.”), “From Europe”, and “Chosen countries” (“Only listings sold from these countries will be kept.”). The marketplace offers 71 countries.“From Europe” is exactly 29 countries, and it is the marketplace’s own definition, not ours: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the Isle of Man.Denmark and the Netherlands are not in it — and the Netherlands alone weighs 8,154 listings. Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Isle of Man are. Three independent readings of the marketplace gave the same list, so we serve it as it stands rather than quietly correcting it into something you could not check.One honesty point: the form calls this criterion “Seller’s country”, and what is actually compared is the country the listing is in. On six items read through both doors, the two disagreed twice. Where you need the seller specifically, read the seller’s country on the detection line.
Models — shown, removable, not choosable
Models — shown, removable, not choosable
The marketplace publishes no list of models, and the field is missing from 79 % of listings. So there is nothing to pick from, and the form says exactly that: “The marketplace publishes no list of models: these are kept as they are, and can be removed.”A filter that already carries models keeps them, shows how many —
{n} models carried by this filter — and lets you take them off. That is the whole of it.Price: which number is being compared
Two fields, “Minimum price (€)” and “Maximum price (€)”, both in euros, both empty to begin with. Empty means no bound at all: with the ceiling left empty, no price is ever too high for the filter. What matters is which price is compared, and it is not the one you will pay.There is one Vestiaire to read, and the country is a criterion applied to the listing — not a shop to choose. Nothing here resembles the Vinted rule where the origin you pick decides which shop is watched and a mismatched filter goes structurally blind. The interface language is a setting, and it changes nothing about what the radar sees: the sweep is shared by every client and runs once, in French, and your screen translates what it shows you.
Keywords: the criterion nobody else applies for us
Every word narrows the neck a little further — and one single ruled-out word closes it.
The preview counter, and what it is really telling you
At the top of the form sits “On Vestiaire right now”, followed by the number of listings that would match at this instant. It re-reads on its own while you tick.The marketplace applies your criteria in exactly one place: this counter. Detections are decided entirely at our end, on a different path.The consequence is worth knowing, because it makes the two easy to believe in agreement when they are not: a fault in the counter shows on the counter and not on your detections — and the other way round. The counter is an excellent way to catch a contradiction before saving. It is not proof that the filter will detect.
The number next to a value says what you would GAIN, not what you have. Each count is computed by relaxing that one value’s own constraint and applying all the others. With Gucci ticked, type “max” in the brand field: Max Mara comes back with a count, and that count is what you would get if you ticked Max Mara as well.
When two criteria contradict each other
That last row is not a gap we are hiding — it is the one contradiction case nobody has measured, and we would rather write it here than let you conclude something false from a zero.
The four switches that are not criteria
Beyond the seventeen fields, a filter carries four decisions. They change what the filter does, not what it keeps.Autobuy never spends. It reserves an account, empties and fills that account’s basket, sets the delivery and takes the purchase up to the payment — and hands back. Nothing that runs without you can reach the step that actually charges a card: it is not a setting we could get wrong, it is a road that does not exist. What autobuy costs you is your basket, not your money: see Buying on Vestiaire.
last {quand} or “never”, Rename (an empty name is refused), and Delete, which asks first — “Delete “{nom}”? The radar will stop looking for these listings; detections already found stay available.”
What a filter that is too wide gives you
Listings are born on Vestiaire at about 24 per minute during the day — measured over 7.8 continuous hours, between 13.5 and 46 per minute — and 7.2 per minute at night, between 22:30 and 00:30 UTC. That is a ratio of 3.3, and, in cadence, about two hundred times slower than Vinted. So a filter that keeps most of that flow does not break anything. It simply gives you more than you can read. Three things happen to a wide filter, and none of them is an error message:- The list caps its display. Past a certain number of visible lines a banner appears:
{n} detections kept — the {plafond} most recent are shown.Nothing is lost; drawing hundreds of thumbnails every few seconds would make the screen unusable. - “Alert me” becomes unbearable long before the list does. Leave it off until the hit counter tells you the filter is calibrated.
- Detections are wiped after 48 hours, on their own, with no warning beforehand. Whatever you want to keep, favourite it or open it the same day.
The first sweep after arming notifies nothing. It is an inventory: without that rule, arming would pour the couple of thousand listings already online onto you as if they had just been born. And a listing already filed is never filed again — the radar re-sees it on every sweep for as long as it stays in the window, and says nothing.
A Vinted filter, a Vestiaire filter
What transposes, and what simply does not exist here. Read it as pairs.Our advice
1 · Start with a brand, or one word
Both are decidable by both reads, both narrow hard, and neither costs you any coverage. Everything else is refinement.
2 · Read the counter before you save
“On Vestiaire right now” is the only thing that catches a contradiction before it costs you a day of silence. At zero, loosen — most often it is two category levels.
3 · Never constrain a size on bags, jewellery or watches
The field is missing from 43 % of listings, and an absent field never satisfies a constraint. A “Gucci bags” filter with a size ticked finds next to nothing, and says nothing.
4 · Think twice before constraining the country
It rules out the fresh read: your listings can then only arrive through the batch read, which lags 3 to 5 minutes. On this marketplace, that is most of your advantage.
5 · Tick the wider material
“Exotic leather” keeps “Python”; “Python” does not keep “Exotic leather”. When you hesitate between a family and its member, take the family.
6 · One inclusion word, several exclusions
Every inclusion word must be present, and we read the description too. Three words is how a silent filter is written.
7 · Come back an hour later and read the hits
0 hits · last never after an hour means the criteria are too strict together. No amount of re-reading the form will tell you that.8 · Leave “Alert me” off until the filter is calibrated
An alert per kept listing, on a flow of ~24 births a minute. Turn it on once you know the hit counter, never before.
9 · To stop a filter, untick “Active filter”
It is the gesture that holds — the one that survives a restart. Deleting keeps the detections but their line will read “deleted filter”.
10 · Take out what you want to keep the same day
Detections are wiped after 48 hours, silently. Favourite the find, or open it in a tab.
What surprises people
A criterion can refuse a listing it agrees with
A criterion can refuse a listing it agrees with
Not a contradiction: a refusal for want of information. If the read that met the listing does not carry the dimension you constrained, the listing is refused rather than let through. The alternative — letting it through — would fabricate detections that do not match.
Keywords are searched in the description as well
Keywords are searched in the description as well
This is the difference that surprises people most in practice. A word buried in a long description brings in a listing you were not expecting — and, symmetrically, an exclusion word buried in a description throws out a listing you did want.
“Ignore accents” is on and “Whole word” is off
“Ignore accents” is on and “Whole word” is off
Both defaults lean the same way: towards the widest reading, because the widest one cannot make you miss anything. And both apply to the list that includes as well as to the list that rules out.
Two category levels can cancel each other out to exactly zero
Two category levels can cancel each other out to exactly zero
Ticking “Women” and “Shoes (Men)” is an intersection, not a union. The preview counter answers immediately, in figures — which is why the sentence it shows at zero names this case first.
“From Europe” leaves out Denmark and the Netherlands
“From Europe” leaves out Denmark and the Netherlands
And it includes Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Isle of Man. It is the marketplace’s own grouping, verified three independent ways. We serve it as it stands rather than correct it into something you could not check against the site.
“10,000+” is not ten thousand
“10,000+” is not ten thousand
Past that, the marketplace stops counting. We show the
+ rather than a bare figure, because writing “10,000” would pass a limit off as a measurement.The count beside a value is what you would gain
The count beside a value is what you would gain
It is computed by relaxing that value’s own constraint while applying all the others. So the list keeps showing you brands you have not ticked, with the number of listings ticking them would add.
A filter created without a name keeps the language of that moment
A filter created without a name keeps the language of that moment
The fallback name is saved as though you had typed it: created in English, it stays “Unnamed filter” even after you switch the interface to French — and one created in French stays “Filtre sans nom” in an English interface. Renaming it is the only way out.
Creating an active filter arms the radar by itself
Creating an active filter arms the radar by itself
You never have to click “Arm the radar” after creating your first filter. The reverse is the surprising half: as long as one active filter remains, disarming by hand does not survive a restart.
What filters do not do yet
We would rather write it here than let you find out halfway through.Models cannot be picked
The marketplace publishes no list of models, and the field is missing from 79 % of listings. A filter that already carries models shows them and lets you remove them — that is all.
0.7 % of listings are out of reach
They are old items put back on sale, far below the window we sweep. No filter can reach them, whatever it is written with. The rest — 99.3 % — is covered.
Marketplace dimensions with no field here
Direct shipping and the countries it covers, the seller’s badge, discounts, the marketplace’s own editorial picks, stock, region, the movement of a watch, whether the shop is official, whether an item is already sold, and local delivery countries. That is not a closed list — the marketplace publishes more dimensions than the form carries, and we would rather name the ones we have seen than a count we cannot keep true. None of them can be filtered on here yet.
The refusal counters are not on screen
The radar counts how many listings each dimension made undecidable, and publishes it. Your screen does not show it yet — so “this criterion is costing me a read” is something this page tells you, and the product does not.
No groups in the Vestiaire form
A filter is filed from the list, not from the form, and drag-and-drop remains a Vinted feature.
Export and import stay Vinted
The file format saves and restores Vinted filters only. Vestiaire filters are not carried by it.
Bulk edit carries neither name nor autobuy
Deliberately: renaming twenty filters at once would make them indistinguishable, and arming twenty at once would fill twenty baskets.
Detections last 48 hours
The purge runs on its own and warns you of nothing. It is the deadline that governs how you work on this screen.
Two things we have not measured, and will not guess at: how many listings a typical filter really detects per day in production, and how the marketplace combines a top-level material with a finer one. Where a figure does not exist, this guide leaves the space empty rather than fill it.
Where to go next
The marketplace, and how it differs
Why there is no birth to watch for here, and what one shared sweep means.
The Vestiaire screen
Every control, every badge, every refusal — the guided tour.
Your Vestiaire accounts
What a filter needs before it can offer or prepare anything.
Making an offer
The floor, where it comes from, and why it never goes back down.
Buying on Vestiaire
What an item really costs once every fee is added.
Writing a good filter
The same trade, on Vinted — where criteria are paid for in milliseconds.