Resale
Operations Briefing

The global secondhand apparel market hit $257 billion in 2025 - up 13% year-on-year, nearly four times faster than the broader retail clothing market. The RealReal surpassed $2 billion in GMV and delivered positive Adjusted EBITDA in every quarter of 2025 for the first time. eBay's pre-owned fashion grew 19% in 2024. By every financial measure, the platforms are thriving.

Sellers don't see it that way.

Scroll Reddit or TikTok for any major resale platform and you'll find the same pattern: lost inventory complaints, low payouts, fees that didn't used to exist. ThredUp, once known for its free clean-out service, now charges a $15 processing fee deducted from seller earnings. CEO James Reinhart's explanation was direct: "We've always had more supply than we needed," which "made it easy to add the fees."

That sentence does a lot of work. It describes not just ThredUp's decision but the structural shift that's happened across the sector since the pandemic.

Pre-2020, platforms competed hard for quality supply. Sellers had options, and platforms knew it. The pandemic clean-out wave changed that permanently. Supply flooded in. Leverage shifted. And once leverage shifts in a two-sided marketplace, it tends to stay shifted - because the party with supply options is now the party without them.

The platforms didn't do anything unusual. They repriced access to their buyer base when they could. What's worth paying attention to is what that repricing reveals about the underlying supply relationship - and how thin it actually is when terms change.

Vinted read this differently from the start. Free listings, no seller fees, buyer-funded protection. In 2025 they reported €10.8 billion in GMV (up 47%), €1.1 billion in revenue, and €62 million in net profit - with profits intentionally compressed because they chose to invest in reducing costs for members further, including building out Vinted Go's shipping infrastructure and Vinted Pay's wallet. Growth and profitability, in service of making participation cheaper, not more expensive.

Two approaches to the same supply problem. One extracted margin from it. One compounded through it.

For operators distributing through platforms, the practical question is less about which platforms are doing this and more about what your supply relationship actually looks like independent of them. Consignors, brand partners, community sellers - relationships built outside platform terms don't reprice when the market shifts. They're slower to build. They also don't come with a $15 processing fee attached to someone else's decision.

Platform access remains essential. The question is whether you're building alongside it or dependent on it.