Wallapop: a chat running two weeks late is killing sales

Wallapop's chat arrives two weeks late and sinks sales

Wallapop isn't working properly. That's the conclusion hard to escape for people who have used the app for years to buy and sell second-hand items, and who now watch a freshly published listing go from a hundred views in two hours to a mere ten. The most common diagnosis points to a change of model: the app has allegedly stopped prioritising organic visibility to push sellers towards paid listings. If you don't pay to stand out, you simply don't exist.

The most frequently cited symptom isn't the lack of views, but the chat. Messages that never get delivered, notifications that don't pop up, conversations that reorder themselves and, in the most extreme cases, replies that arrive two weeks late or even months afterwards. A delay like that isn't a minor annoyance: it's a lost sale. Some users recount closing a deal only to watch the buyer disappear because the confirmation message never reached its destination.

Why Wallapop's chat delivers messages late

The app is dragging along programming bugs that show up intermittently. Those affected describe a pattern: most of the time there's no alert for a new message, and unless you manually open the messages section, the conversation stays invisible. Other times messages get lost outright, and in the most baffling cases the system shuffles the lines of an entire dialogue, leaving a conversation of twenty or thirty messages turned into a meaningless puzzle.

Some point out that the problem depends on the device: certain Android models would perform worse than the iOS version, which supposedly works "infinitely better". Others dismiss that explanation and argue the app goes through phases, with weeks of intense activity trinc by three or four without a single message. The web version appears as the only refuge when the mobile app decides not to cooperate.

The wall of paid listings

The most widespread hypothesis is short-termism: cashing in on the app's momentum by monetising boosted listings while the user experience degrades with nobody stopping it. The result is a vicious circle. Less organic visibility forces you to pay. Paying raises the bar for those who can't or won't. And whoever leaves takes their catalogue elsewhere.

Not everyone shares this diagnosis. Some sellers claim they've noticed nothing: an item freshly listed and thirty people writing in from all over Spain, without paying for a boost. Their take is different: if nobody sees you, you're asking too much or the product isn't interesting. The disagreement is real and can't be settled with a survey.

The underlying problem: prices and junk

Beyond the technical glitches, the recurring complaint is the quality of the marketplace. Used items priced like new ones, absurd haggling over twenty-euro products, buyers demanding forty-kilometre trips to close a tiny deal. The "non-negotiable price" option exists, but it's systematically ignored. And second-hand clothing, that category nobody asked for, is seen as dead weight cluttering the shop window.

The alternatives aren't convincing. Milanuncios is championed as more direct —just call and done— but the ecosystem still lacks a clear rival. Meanwhile, the user who relied on Wallapop to shift their used tech is left with an app that fails, a chat that doesn't deliver, and the feeling that the business is no longer about connecting two people, but about charging for them to see each other.

It remains to be seen whether the company corrects course or whether the decline becomes entrenched. With this level of failures, an American app would have been dead long ago. This one, for now, is still alive. We'll see for how long.