Get Your Thrift Store in the Game, Sell Online
Expand your customer base across the world
A million dollar a year thrift store might average 200 visitors a day with a $15 average sale. (your results may vary) A customer looking specifically for a size 13 Nike pair of shoes, or a WW2 British Helmut or a ten-pound box of leggo blocks may or may not be in that mix. Online people looking for all of those every day.
The internet is awash in people looking for something specific every day.
According to Google Analytics:
Etsy has over 323 million visitors each month
eBay gets over 162 million visitors each month
Shopify is accessed over 4.6 million times a month
Thredup sees over 4.5 million visitors each month
Abebooks generates over 2.9 million visitors each month
Shopgoodwill connects with over 1.5 million visitors per month
Goodwillbluebox (a relatively new entrant) has over 16,000 visitors each month.
All of those sites primarily sell second hand, vintage or unique products.
Non-profits in particular are responsible for getting good value from donated items. It takes a lot of $5 board game sales to make up for selling one vintage board game for over $600.
One of my early experiences with selling thrift donate goods online was a pre world war two Monopoly game. It didn’t look like much, we didn’t know it was so old, the box was beat up, and it was missing some parts. The ecommerce manager almost didn’t list it. But he did, with a $5 opening bid. It set off a bidding war, selling for over $600.
That’s a perfect example of the upside of selling online. If we had put that on the shelf in a store it would have likely sold for $5 if it had sold at all. I have seen this time and time again. The value multiplier for selling many items online can be a game-changer. It takes a lot of thrifted tee shirt sales to match that one sale.
It’s easy to worry that all the “good stuff” would be stripped from the stores, hurting store sales. We did not find that to be true. We did find that we could sell many things for several times more than we could sell them in a store. I think that is part of the mindset of the thrift shoppers.
Thrift store staff will never have the depth of knowledge that a niche reseller has. Simply put, pricers pushing 100+ items an hour will never catch everything.
Some low hanging fruit in eCommerce is musical instruments, Legos, and those really unusual items that have a narrow but deep market.
Jewelry takes a little more work as someone has to untangle all those globs of tangled jewelry. If you have someone knowledgeable about jewelry and give them some tools you will find thousands, yes thousands of dollars of value that would otherwise be missed. As of this writing Shop Goodwill has 25,500 jewelry and gemstone items listed for sale.
In Conclusion
If you have a traditional retail thrift store, give it a try. Start with some easy categories and get your feet wet. Do it right and you will make more money and satisfy customers you would not have otherwise connected with. Your price per item will be a lot higher, your e-commerce labor cost to sales will be lower, you won’t be as affected by retail store shutdowns.
about me
I am a thrift and e-commerce business expert located near Chicago helping individuals and entrepreneurs grow and succeed. You can benefit from my twenty plus years of retail, and seven-plus years of thrift and eCommerce experience. I provide consultation services from exploration discussions to full-on operations.
Check out my web site, thethrifter.com for lots of thrift oriented resources. You will find plenty of free tips for retailers, resellers, eCommerce operators, and shoppers. I’m always happy to connect on LinkedIn.
You might also be interested in my Thrift Merchandising ebook on Amazon. It’s about merchandising thrift stores more like traditional stores. It’s free with a Kindle Unlimited membership.
Tim Gebauer — The Thrifter