How recommerce went from a novelty to a mainstay

As the last century was winding down, the notion of buying and selling used items on the internet was just beginning to take hold, with the introduction of both eBay and Craigslist in 1995.

By today’s standards, however, recommerce was a byzantine process. To list an item, sellers had to take photos on digital cameras, then transfer the photos to their computers via SD cards or USB; to buy something, purchasers would have to both park themselves at a computer and be somewhere with Wi-Fi, perhaps at one of those Internet cafés that started popping up in the mid-’90s.

With a new century, however, came swift and dramatic improvements to mobile and e-commerce technology that would transform the resale market.

The “unbundling” of eBay

“Online resale is happening for a while before other companies start to take pieces of eBay and pieces of Craigslist,” Jake Disraeli, co-founder and CEO of Treet, which works with retail brands to launch resale programs, told Retail Brew. “It’s like the unbundling of eBay.”

Disraeli noted that it wasn’t just resale that in the early aughts started to break off pieces of what had worked for eBay and Craigslist. Having seen categories that had performed well on Craigslist, he noted, StubHub launched in 2000 and Airbnb in 2007.

When it comes to resale, it was apparel and accessories marketplaces that were the first to get their footing.

Clothing marketplace ThredUp entered the picture in 2009, and in 2011, it introduced the Clean Out Kit, which simplified getting more used clothing into the resale market by making it as simple as consumers shoving clothing into a bag and bringing it to a shipper or scheduling a pickup.

ThredUp CEO James Reinhart told Retail Brew that “the real sea change” for both e-commerce and recommerce came with the introduction of smartphones, especially the iPhone, which was released in 2007.

Carrying these small computers and digital cameras in our pockets spurred “fundamental changes in consumer applications and behavior that start to unleash a different way of consumption,” said Reinhart. “That’s sort of the beginning of this journey.”

Also helping ThredUp and its resale peers, Reinhart suggested, was the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 that reflected the “zeitgeist around sustainability,” as evidenced by the then-nascent electric car market (Tesla’s first model rolled off lots in 2008) and a growing interest in renewable energy, including solar power.

Increasing curation

ThredUp marks the beginning of resale companies demonstrating “it was possible to buy secondhand stuff online in a much more curated way” than shopping on eBay, with its myriad categories and subcategories, Emily Gittins, co-founder and CEO of Archive, which partners with brands to launch resale programs, told Retail Brew.

Poshmark and Depop—both of which introduced social media elements in resale marketplaces—launched in 2011, as did TheRealReal, with its focus on luxury goods. Also introduced that year was OfferUp, establishing local marketplaces, which were the ticket for bulkier items like furniture that were too expensive and burdensome for sellers to ship to buyers. (Facebook Marketplace, a similar proposition, launched in 2016.)

Sneakerheads were the primary focus of two more marketplaces, Goat, which launched in 2015, and StockX, in 2016.

Articles abounded of power sellers cleaning up on the platforms, which themselves, with their easy-to-use apps, became not just simpler but—thanks to what Gittins calls the “gamification and social media-ization of resale”—kind of addictive.

“You have people scrolling through ThredUp and spending a lot of time on an app like that, as if it’s part of their social media usage,” Gittins said. “And you saw the dwelling time on these resale sites go up as it became much more about capturing the consumer’s attention versus just for a transaction like it would have been on something like eBay.”

Notably absent from the resale landscape for much of the first two decades of this century, except for a few notable exceptions, were brands. They may have noticed how briskly their products were selling on resale marketplaces, but they stayed on the sidelines.

Soon enough, though, they got into the game, too.

Branded resale takes hold

The first brand to launch its own resale program, Eileen Fisher, was way ahead of the pack, introducing Eileen Fisher Renew in 2009. It would be eight years before outdoor brands, fittingly enough, put their stakes in the ground: Patagonia and REI launched their resale programs in 2017, The North Face in 2018, and Arc’teryx in 2019. 

“Brands are like, ‘Well, shit, if this is going to be part of what my customers are going to do for the rest of their lives, we should probably pay attention to this,’” Reinhart said.

By the end of 2022, the number of brands with resale programs had swelled to 121 and today numbers 148, according to ThredUp, which tracks branded resale participants and listings volume monthly on its online The Recommerce 100.

Vendors that set up and often administer brands resale programs, known as resale as a service (RaaS) have been helping fuel this growth. Trove, a self-described “branded recommerce solution” company, launched in 2016 and in turn helped launch the aforementioned recommerce sites of Patagonia, REI, and Arc’teryx.

ThredUp got its B2B sea legs and launched its RaaS program in 2019. Other RaaS foundings include Recurate in 2020 (sold to Trove in 2024), and both Archive Resale and Treet in 2021.

Reinhart said that many of the factors that spawned recommerce, like advances in mobile technology and e-commerce and the dedication of value-seeking consumers, also fed other phenoms that turned out not to have legs, like the flash sale format led by Groupon, Gilt and Ru La La.

“These things were more faddish,” said Reinhart of the flash sale sites. “I think resale has shown that it has real successive-generation staying power.”