This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 14th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

It was supposed to become easier to buy and sell second-hand. Instead, users rose up against the new Blocket. Now an SvD review shows how expensive the failure may have become – and why it risks threatening the giant’s dominance in the Swedish second-hand market.

“Now we’re making it even easier to buy and sell second-hand,” wrote Blocket last November. Its owner Vend, which runs a host of similar sites across the Nordics, was moving the service to a new technology platform and decided to redesign it at the same time. “New Blocket” was launched.

Normally this would have gone unnoticed. Colors and shapes change on online services every day without anyone noticing. This time, though, it set off a minor revolt among users.

And now the crisis is showing up in the numbers.

“New Blocket” meant an entirely new interface. Listings were displayed differently, search returned different kinds of results, and saved searches worked differently.

Based on user feedback, it can be summed up more simply: everything got worse.

On Trustpilot, Blocket now has a rating of 1 out of 5 – “very poor.” One user writes, for example: “introduce zero or negative ratings for apps like the new Blocket.” Similar comments are posted almost daily, even though it will soon be a year since the change was made.

For anyone who regularly buys and sells on these services, Blocket’s problems are obvious. Notifications have stopped working for some users, the interface is unclear, and because fewer people post private listings, the selection seems to have worsened too.

Blocket has, in a somewhat cryptic way, admitted to having had problems. In the February quarterly report from its owner Vend, you can read that Blocket has entered a “stabilization phase to optimize performance and address user feedback.”

That is corporate-speak for something having gone seriously wrong. All of this because the company wanted to save on technology costs by letting several businesses reuse what already existed.

In theory, it’s logical. In practice, it has turned into something else.

The discontent can also be seen in the figures. The debacle may have become very expensive for Blocket.

In the first half of 2026, the marketplace’s revenue fell 7 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. That amounts to almost SEK 37 million. And Vend itself links the decline to the redesign, according to the quarterly report.

Vehicle listings, Blocket’s most important revenue category, were hit hardest. To try to turn the trend around, Vend put around SEK 18 million into extra marketing in the category, and according to the company a large share of that went to Sweden.

Compare that with neighboring Norway, where the equivalent services grew by almost 18 percent over the same period. If we assume Blocket had grown the same way in Sweden, that growth would have been worth around SEK 95 million. Norway also switched technology platforms – but kept the service’s look and functionality, and according to Vend it happened without disruption for Norwegian users.

The analysis shows that the overhaul may have cost Blocket around SEK 150 million in lost revenue and extra costs – in the first half of 2026 alone. An enormous sum in a very short time.

Winning back the traffic will be hard. Right after the overhaul, Blocket lost 30 percent of visits, and by the first quarter of this year it had managed to win back only half of them, according to Vend’s own quarterly presentation.

Marketplaces rest on a delicate balance between buyers and sellers. If there are no items for sale, there is no point in visiting the service. If there are no buyers, nobody wants to list things for sale. Launching new services of this kind is therefore both expensive and time-consuming. That favors the market leader.

Blocket is precisely such a leader. But the question is for how much longer.

Competition has intensified, with Tradera doing better than ever, Facebook Marketplace still big, and a long line of upstarts in selected categories – like Sellpy or Vinted in fashion.

When sellers realize that selling through other services works just as well (or better), the incentive to return to Blocket is small. So far it has strong coverage in many categories, but the discontent creates openings for competitors to step in and take position.

One of the biggest problem areas appears to be the lucrative car listings. The industry site Carup has been in touch with both private sellers and car dealers, some of whom report the same thing. “Today Blocket is a dead market,” one of them writes.

The outcome is surprising, because Vend knows how to run marketplaces. A couple of years ago, a series of international marketplaces (spun out into a separate company) was sold to Permira and Blackstone for around $13 billion. Proof of an incredible company-building feat – a deal like that only happens if the businesses are well run.

By comparison, moving the Swedish Blocket to a new technology platform and carrying on as before sounds trivial. Yet they have badly missed the mark here. Some concessions have been made, in an attempt to recreate how Blocket worked before.

The question going forward is how stubborn its owner Vend will be. We are nearly a year into this debacle, and what was meant to be a cost saving now looks set to become an expensive extra cost for Blocket in particular.

If this continues, the site risks losing its position as Sweden’s market leader. And when it comes to marketplaces, there is nothing more expensive than that.

Footnote: The calculation of the economic impact was made by comparing the decline in revenue and extra marketing costs, and by applying the same growth rate as the equivalent service in Norway. All figures are taken from Vend’s public quarterly reports.

Svenska Dagbladet is owned by the media group Schibsted, which in turn is owned by the Norwegian foundation Tinius. The foundation is also the largest owner of Vend, which is Blocket’s parent company.