EU Resale Marketplaces Prioritize Personal Touch, Encourage Conscious Consumption

The latest European resale platform to attract investors represents a return to the human touch.

And true to the original spirit of peer-to-peer (P2P) eCommerce, professional sellers appear to have found a home on Wallapop. This Spanish second-hand marketplace app recently bagged 81 million euros in funding (about $88 million).

Browsing the platform is reminiscent of perusing eBay. Still, given that the marketplace is dedicated to listing pre-owned goods, it hasn’t been flooded with merchants from around the globe looking to outprice each other on the same mass-produced new items like on eBay, for example.

Instead, the company is branding itself as a more sustainable alternative to the breakneck consumerism popularized by some of the world’s most well-known eCommerce platforms.

Commenting on the recent fundraise, Wallapop CEO Rob Cassedy said the company’s expansion so far “[has] allowed more and more people to benefit from our fundamental purpose — facilitating a more conscious and human way of consumption that creates economic opportunities for people.”

Marking Out the Resale Space

Due to its fulfillment model and interface design, shopping on Amazon may feel like buying from a single vendor rather than a global network of merchants.

But modern resale platforms appear to be adopting a different approach, which can be seen in how second-hand clothes marketplaces like Vinted and Poshmark display their sellers’ profile images in the corner of each listing.

Rather than try to obscure the fact that the goods on sale have previous owners, these platforms want to highlight that fact. And rather than just listing the millions of items for sale, their promotional materials emphasize the “community” of buyers and sellers they enact.

The proliferation of these websites, which often specialize by region or niche, suggests that their focus on community and human-to-human commerce offers at least some protection from monopolization.

For example, it is unlikely that London-based Depop and French marketplace Vestiaire Collective will ever really compete in the same space even though nominally at least, they offer a similar service.

Both are fashion resale platforms that promise consumers a way to shop for things they might not be able to find elsewhere in a cheaper, more sustainable way than buying everything new.

Yet by concentrating on different styles — one more oriented toward streetwear and the seller-influencer, the other on luxury and curated vintage collections — the two websites have carved out their respective niches with a small enough overlap not to get in each other’s way.

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