Agentic AI to power resale market
Over my lifetime of bricks and mortar ownership I’ve had three properties, including my present semi in North London. During the purchase phase of each of these three homes I’ve always had in the back of my mind the ease with which I’m likely to be able to sell the place.
I’ve shied away from purchasing anything too esoteric and also something with characteristics that might appeal to my whims but is unattractive to most other people. It’s a conservative approach that I suspect is not particularly unusual because we are talking about the most expensive purchase most people are likely to ever make. Could this approach be filtering down to items of lesser value? It’s undoubtedly the case with that other major purchase, the car, but what about things like clothing.
Evidence from the recent ThredUp report suggests this is the case. This annual publication tracks the resale market for clothing and this year it found that 60% of customers have acknowledged that resale value was a crucial factor when buying clothing. This very much throws the purchase of clothing, and the price, into new territory. It suggests that like a new car shoppers are starting to incorporate expected depreciation into their buying decisions on clothing.
Subscribe to TRBSo if such goods are following the car model – with active new and second-hand markets – then the more cost-conscious shoppers will undoubtedly find the secondary market particularly appealing. This is good news for resale sites like Vinted and Vestiaire Collective that have certainly been seeing a healthy increase in volumes over recent years and for Vinted profitability has been reached.
What about the prices of these second-hand clothing items? Whereas the brands have pretty much total control over pricing in the primary market the polar opposite happens with resale, which is more like a stock market where prices for the same product continuously change on the back of supply and demand dynamics.
What’s interesting is that brands that have scarcity value don’t necessarily command the highest resale values. The more widely available items often have the highest prices because there is liquidity in the market. This gives reassurance to buyers that if they want to sell their goods in the future then they will have no problem finding a buyer. This virtuous circle supports the primary and secondary valuations of certain brands.
So what brands are we talking about? Needless to say it is the large global brands – from the stables of LVMH and Kering etc…- that have the necessary volumes to generate high resale values, which in turn provides the support for high primary market prices. This is evidence of a very healthy feedback loop.
What does all this mean for the resale market? Well, ThredUp certainly forecasts growth and reckons it will be worth almost $290 billion this year, which represents a doubling in value over the past five years. A major future kicker for this market, according to ThredUp, will be the growing use by consumers of AI in the purchasing journey.
Already 69% of shoppers looking for a difficult-to-find item state that they are willing to outsource the job of monitoring resale platforms – through the use of AI bots. In addition, 59% would let AI negotiate pricing on their behalf. If such agentic commerce takes off then it certainly points to a rosy picture for the resale market because it will take a lot of the legwork out of finding the right pieces at the right prices.
Maybe it is a very short step away from AI bots selling my current property and negotiating the price on my behalf with the buyers when I look to sell. And of course they can then also find me a new place while they are at it.
