The online listings started appearing just hours after the looting in France. For sale were a variety of items — handbags, skin care products, lip glosses — suspected of being stolen by people who had smashed windows and emptied stores in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities over the weekend.
Protests in France, which started over conditions in schools and broadened into demonstrations against the rising cost of living, descended into unrest on Saturday and Sunday. Several government buildings were damaged and more than 3,000 shops were looted, leading to the arrest of more than 2,500 people, officials said.
In Paris, many of the shops across Les Halles were looted and vandalized, while the Place de la Bastille and Place de la Concorde became center points for standoffs between the police and protesters. Stores that were broken into included Louis Vuitton, Céline, Hermès and the North Face, as well as video game shops, pharmacies and electronics stores. A preliminary estimate showed the damage would cost several hundred million euros.
Resale sites like Vinted said this week that they were cracking down on items suspected to have been looted. Vinted said it was working with the French authorities to detect malicious behavior.
“Since this weekend, our teams have taken immediate action to identify and remove listings linked to the looting, and we have stepped up monitoring of suspicious listings,” Vinted said in a statement. “When our rules are breached, we act against the accounts involved, up to permanent bans.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France warned on Sunday that “those who looted will have to pay back, and those who sought to bring down the republic will be held accountable.”
But many more people participated in the looting than the police will be able to arrest, and it will be virtually impossible for resale sites to take down all stolen items because of the scale of the theft, said Charlotte de Montpellier, an economist at ING Bank.
“I don’t expect that those companies will be able to track everything,” she said. The test for the broader French economy, she added, will be how long the protests last, and whether the unrest continues. “More could come, and that will of course have a significant impact on the final bill,” she said.
France was calm on Wednesday, but Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, said a significant security operation was planned ahead of more protests expected on Saturday.
Serge Papin, the trade minister, and Anne Le Hénanff, the digital affairs minister, met on Monday with resale platforms to discuss strengthening their cooperation with the French authorities to identify and report stolen goods. Alliance Française des Places de Marché, which represents platforms like eBay, Vinted and Etsy, said in a statement after the meeting that its members had agreed to increase monitoring to detect goods that might have been obtained through looting and inform consumers of the penalties associated with buying stolen goods.
The damage to companies goes beyond replacing looted products. On Tuesday, Carrefour, the largest food retailer in France, lowered its full-year financial targets because of indirect costs of the riots: increased spending on security and logistics, fewer customers, precautionary closures and reduced hours because of curfews.
“Our group is facing an unprecedented situation in France,” Alexandre Bompard, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “There is a high degree of uncertainty regarding consumer spending trends and the conditions under which our stores will be able to open.” He said about 50 stores had been affected by vandals, costing the company at least tens of millions of euros.
The French government said businesses that had been forced to reduce or suspend their activity after the damage could get financial assistance like interest-free loans. Employees who are unable to work would receive compensation equal to 60 percent of their salaries, and those earning minimum wage would receive their full paychecks. Businesses could also apply for emergency grants of up to €1,500, or about $1,700, and the government is establishing a support fund for businesses with fewer than 50 employees, which will be able to receive a lump-sum payment.
If riots continue, the concern is that tourists will cancel trips to Paris and that business owners may feel reluctant to start new businesses or reopen shops, Ms. de Montpellier said. For these reasons, “we think that it may have a slightly bigger impact” on the economy than the major protests in France in 2018, she said.
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