Not long ago, buying secondhand carried a faint whiff of embarrassment, something you did because you had to, not because you chose to, and something you didn’t necessarily mention. That world is gone. In 2026, buying used is simply how a huge share of people shop, across every income level, with no stigma attached at all. By some measures more than nine in ten people bought something secondhand in the past year, and among younger shoppers, buying used clothing is now completely normal, often preferred. The secondhand market has grown into one of the largest and fastest-expanding parts of retail, running well ahead of the growth of traditional new-goods retail.
This has a clumsy but useful name: recommerce, the structured, deliberate business of buying and selling used, returned, and refurbished goods at scale. It’s no longer a charity-shop afterthought or a niche for enthusiasts. It’s become core retail infrastructure, and brands that once sold only new inventory are building resale into their businesses on purpose. This is a look at why that happened, the ways it’s being done, and how a business can move into it without losing money, because plenty do.
Why secondhand stopped being embarrassing
Several forces converged to move resale from the margins to the mainstream, and understanding them explains why this is durable rather than a passing trend.
The generational shift is the big one. Younger shoppers drove resale into the open, treating buying used not as a compromise but as smart, sustainable, and often more interesting than buying new, with access to items you can’t get otherwise. Once a large cohort normalized it, the stigma simply evaporated for everyone. Alongside that, the platforms got good. Buying secondhand used to mean rummaging through jumble with no guarantees; now it means browsing well-photographed, authenticated, searchable inventory with buyer protection, an experience that feels like modern online shopping rather than a gamble. Professionalization killed the friction that kept people away.
Two more pressures added fuel. Sustainability awareness made buying used feel like a positive choice rather than a lesser one, especially for anyone uneasy about the waste of fast fashion and constant new production. And plain economics matters: when money is tight, buying quality secondhand for less is simply sensible, and value-seeking pushes more people toward resale. Put those together, a generation that normalized it, platforms that made it easy, a sustainability story, and a value story, and you have a shift with deep roots rather than shallow ones.
Why brands stopped fighting it
For a while, many brands viewed resale as a threat, a secondary market they didn’t control, cannibalizing new sales. That thinking has largely flipped, and the reasons are instructive, because they’re about the brand’s own interests, not just goodwill.
Brands realized that resale, done right, solves several of their own problems at once. It’s a new revenue stream from products they’ve already sold once. It’s a powerful driver of customer loyalty and acquisition, a well-run trade-in or buyback program gives customers a reason to keep coming back and hands them credit to spend on new items. It offers a channel for returned and overstock inventory that would otherwise be a pure loss. And it lets a brand control its own secondhand market, managing pricing, presentation, and the customer relationship across a product’s whole life rather than ceding all of that to third-party platforms. Add the growing consumer expectation that responsible brands offer these options, and resale went from threat to strategic priority. The brands moving into it aren’t being virtuous; they’ve worked out it’s good business.
The models, and how to choose
Recommerce isn’t one thing, and the right approach depends on what problem you’re trying to solve. A few models dominate.
Peer-to-peer marketplaces connect buyers and sellers directly, with the platform taking a cut and providing trust and logistics. Managed marketplaces and consignment handle more of the work, taking in goods, authenticating, photographing, pricing, and selling them, in exchange for a larger share. Brand-led and retailer-led programs are where a company runs resale of its own products, through trade-in schemes, buyback offers, or a dedicated resale channel, increasingly powered by specialist “resale-as-a-service” providers that handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes. And trade-in and buyback programs let customers return old items for credit, feeding a refurbished-goods stream while pulling the customer back to buy again.
Choosing among them comes down to what you’re optimizing for. If the goal is loyalty and repeat purchases, a branded trade-in program that hands back store credit is powerful. If it’s dealing with returns and overstock, a resale channel for that inventory turns a loss into revenue. If it’s reaching value-seeking new customers, a resale offering brings them into contact with your brand at a lower entry price. Match the model to the problem, rather than launching resale because everyone else is.
How to do it without losing money
Here’s the honest part that the enthusiasm often skips: recommerce has genuinely difficult economics, and businesses do lose money on it when they underestimate the operational reality. Handling used goods is harder than handling new ones. Every item is unique, which complicates pricing, inventory, and logistics. Goods have to be received, inspected, cleaned, authenticated, photographed, and listed individually, and that labor is real and easy to underestimate. Reverse logistics, the whole machinery of getting used items back in and back out, is where resale programs quietly bleed.
So the practical guidance is to go in clear-eyed. Understand the true, all-in cost of processing each item before you price anything, because a resale program that costs more to run than it brings in is a common and avoidable mistake. Lean on specialist providers and technology rather than building the messy operational back end from scratch, since the firms that do this at scale exist precisely because it’s hard. Invest in the quality control and authentication that keep customers trusting what they buy, because that trust is the entire foundation and one bad experience undermines it. And be realistic about which of your products actually have resale value worth the effort, rather than assuming everything does. Done with discipline, recommerce is a genuine profit center and loyalty engine. Done casually, it’s an expensive way to feel modern.
Which products are actually worth reselling
Not everything has a viable second life, and one of the quickest ways to lose money in recommerce is to build a resale program around goods that don’t hold enough value to justify the cost of handling them. So before launching anything, it’s worth being honest about what in your range actually resells well.
The products that work in resale tend to share a few traits. They hold their value: quality items and recognizable brands that people will pay a meaningful secondhand price for, rather than cheap goods worth almost nothing used. They’re durable enough to have a genuine second life, arriving in resaleable condition rather than worn out. They’re easy enough to assess, clean, and describe that processing them doesn’t eat all the margin. And they’re things people actively want to buy used, categories where secondhand carries no stigma and buyers are plentiful, which increasingly means not just fashion but electronics, furniture, and home goods too.
The products that don’t work are the mirror image: low-value items where the resale price barely clears the cost of handling them, anything that arrives too worn or damaged to resell, hygiene-sensitive or perishable goods, and categories where used demand is thin. For these, a resale program is effort and cost with little return. The discipline is to start resale with the part of your range that genuinely holds value and has eager secondhand buyers, prove the economics there, and expand only into categories that clear the same bar. Trying to resell everything is how a well-meaning program quietly turns into a loss. Reselling the right things is how it becomes a real profit center.
The actual point
Secondhand has completed a remarkable journey from mild embarrassment to mainstream default, driven by a generation that normalized it, platforms that made it effortless, and the twin pulls of sustainability and value. It’s now one of the largest growth areas in all of retail, and it isn’t a fad, because the forces underneath it are structural rather than fashionable.
For brands, resale has turned from a threat to guard against into a strategy to embrace, solving real problems of loyalty, returns, and revenue, provided it’s approached with respect for how genuinely hard the operations are. The winners will be the ones who match the right model to their actual goal and go in understanding the true cost of handling used goods, not the ones who bolt on a resale program because it looks good in a sustainability report. Recommerce is core retail now. The only question left is whether you build it deliberately or watch someone else capture your customers’ secondhand purchases while you sit it out.