Secondhand stores move online with the rise of apps like Depop, Mercari and Poshmark.
By Makenzie Elliott
May 29, 2021
EUGENE, Ore. — Sitting on her couch with a freshly brewed cup of tea, Rosie Zbaracki prepares for a night of posting clothing on Poshmark. Using previously taken measurements and photos she took in her garage, Zbaracki crafts a description for her item. With one more click, she shares the product with her 48,829 Poshmark followers.
Zbaracki is the co-owner of Visibly Sold, a secondhand store in Eugene, Oregon. Zbaracki opened Visibly Sold as a physical store in 2018, but soon began using online selling platforms to boost sales.
Zbaracki currently sells on Poshmark, Etsy, Depop, Mercari and eBay under the brand of Visibly Sold. According to Zbaracki, about 50% of the store’s income comes from these platforms.
“I started selling online,” she said. “And I realized that you can make a sizable income if you work on it like it is a job, like it is a business.”
These platforms are not just for those wanting to start a business out of reselling, however. For some, these apps are just ways to shop sustainably or pass off items they no longer need.
Quynh-Nhi Tran, a second-year student at Northwestern University, began using secondhand websites in high school. She said she would use them to find business and formal clothing—pieces she wouldn’t wear very often.
When buying secondhand, she said, “I don’t have to pay as much money for something that I’m only going to wear once.” For buyers, apps like Poshmark and Depop can ease the process of hunting through the racks of the local thrift store. According to Tran, simply typing in the item she’s searching for on Depop is much easier than in-person thrift shopping.
“If there’s a specific jacket that I want,” Tran said. “I can just search the jacket name, and a lot of the time it’ll come up.”
Audrie Fox is a junior at Centennial High School in Gresham, Oregon. She began using Depop regularly about a year ago when she began selling jewelry and clothes she no longer wanted.
“I think it’s a good way for selling or buying sustainable stuff because it’s usually secondhand,” she said. “And you’re not contributing to fast fashion.”
“Fast fashion” describes clothing that was rapidly produced at a low cost, often under unethical working conditions. These clothes usually follow fast-evolving trend cycles, meaning pieces are bought and discarded quickly.
Liza Williams began selling on Depop about two years ago and now regularly sells items on the app. For Williams, selling on Depop allows her to give her clothing a second life. Most of her inventory comes from her own closet, she said.
“It’s just really important to me that any piece that I purchase and love gets extended to someone else who’s really going to love and cherish that piece as well,” Williams said. In a world where consumption is easier than ever, Williams urges people to start thinking more about the labor chain attached to each item. “It’s so easy for us, from clothing to anything really, to just consume, consume, consume,” Williams said. “I really encourage people to take a step back and understand where their products are coming from.”
While these online platforms can offer more accessible ways to shop sustainably, they aren’t always so glamorous, Fox said. Things like “dropshipping” and high prices plague the sites.
Dropshipping is when sellers list an item they bought on a cheap retail website, like AliExpress, and attempt to pass it off as vintage or secondhand. This allows them to charge a much higher price and gain a larger profit, Fox said.
Fox also said she’s noticed many sellers who try and sell anything they can for a profit. Children’s clothing is especially becoming a popular item, she said—but the target audience isn’t children.
Many sellers will buy children’s t-shirts or sweater vests from local thrift stores and list them online as crop tops or “baby tees” for adults, she said. Not only is this misleading for buyers but the process takes advantage of thrift store prices, Fox said.
“People will go into thrift stores and just buy stuff, like anything that they see that’s cute or they can make a profit on,” Fox said, which limits inventory for people genuinely needing to shop at thrift stores for financial reasons.
Fox said it can seem ridiculous for sellers to charge $40 for a used top, but Zbaracki said sometimes higher prices are necessary for sellers to turn a profit.
The buyer essentially pays for the labor that goes into finding, ironing, mending, photographing and promoting the item, Zbaracki said. After breaking down the amount of time she spends finding and preparing a piece, Zbaracki said it translates to making around $7 an hour.
“Would you do a job for $6.80 an hour? No, that’s a crappy job,” she said. “A lot of people don’t think of it in those kinds of terms.” While the high prices are sometimes necessary, Zbaracki still said that people abuse these platforms. Along with dropshipping, some sellers buy high-end brands from retail discount stores, like Ross, but cut off the discount tag and list the item as full-price.
For Zbaracki, she hopes to use online platforms ethically. The money she makes from online orders allows her to give back to the community in other ways, she said. For instance, Visibly Sold has a “pay what you want” section in its physical store. Zbaracki explained that community members can self-select prices for pieces in this section.
“It’s important for me to make sure that people can get a top for 50 cents,” she said. “Because sometimes that’s all you have.”