What Is Resale as a Customer Acquisition Channel?
Resale as a customer acquisition channel is the practice of treating the secondary market for your products as a top-of-funnel discovery moment. When someone buys your product secondhand and encounters your brand for the first time, that is acquisition. Most brands just aren’t present in it. The global secondhand apparel market is growing seven times faster than traditional apparel. In Australia alone, the secondhand market is projected to grow from around five billion dollars today to nearly eighteen billion by 2031.
How Bernadette Olivier Is Building the Infrastructure for It
The Volte is Australia’s leading peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace, with more than five thousand lenders running real micro-businesses from their wardrobes. CEO Bernadette Olivier spent six years building it before launching Seamlist: infrastructure that lets retailers track their products through the secondary market, earn royalties every time an item is rented or resold, and reach the customers discovering them for the first time.
“I think it has been an error to ignore the power of your product and not to see your product as a marketing channel.”
Bernadette Olivier, CEO, The Volte and Seamlist
Your Secondary Market Is Already Running Without You
The first thing to accept is that you don’t know what happens to most of your products after the first sale. Post-checkout is a black hole. You see a return if it comes back. Everything else is gone.
Those products don’t disappear. They circulate on Depop, Vinted, eBay, and Facebook groups. And somewhere in that secondary market, people are having their first real experience of your brand right now, without you knowing.
Dean Jones noted this when he was building GlamCorner: the brand Spell already had a thriving secondary marketplace running in Facebook groups. The secondary economy for their products was enormous. The brand just wasn’t in it.
Search your brand name on Depop. Those are your customers. You have no relationship with a single one of them.
Secondary Buyers Aren’t Defectors. They’re the Top of Your Funnel.
The most common reason retailers stay out of the secondary market is fear of cannibalism. If your product is available secondhand for half the price, why would anyone buy new?
The data doesn’t support that fear. When Assembly Label launched their re-worn resale program, the finding that settled the internal debate was clear: the majority of secondhand buyers were new to the brand entirely. Not existing customers trading down. New people who found their way in through resale and who are likely to become primary buyers over time.
Bernadette’s pilots with Seamlist show the same pattern from the other direction. When retail partners push resale to their existing customers and reward them with a voucher, the spending unlocked is additive. Dormant wardrobe assets become new transactions.
The Brand Experience of the Secondary Sale Is Yours to Own or Lose
Say someone buys your $700 jacket on Facebook Marketplace. It arrives in a padded bag with no note, no tag, nothing that ties it back to you. They don’t know the story behind it. They don’t end up on your list. That customer bought your product, but you didn’t get the customer.
When Karen Willis Holmes launched their resale platform, giving customers a brand-controlled channel to sell their pieces, 100 listings went live within the first 20 hours. The pent-up secondary market for their products was already enormous. They’d just never given it a front door.
“We’ve had dresses that have been rented 72 times.”
Bernadette Olivier, CEO, The Volte and Seamlist
Each one of those rentals is a customer encounter with that brand. A voucher, a registration, or an email at the point of exchange turns a discovery into a relationship. That’s what building into this looks like.
The Takeaway
Retailers are spending more every year trying to reach new customers through paid channels that are getting noisier and more expensive. Meanwhile there’s a market growing seven times faster than traditional apparel, where your products are already being discovered by people who’d never have found you otherwise, and most brands have no presence in it.
When your product changes hands for the second time, the fifth time, the twentieth time, are you there?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is resale as a customer acquisition channel in ecommerce? Resale as a customer acquisition channel is treating the secondary market for your products as a top-of-funnel discovery moment. When someone buys your product secondhand and encounters your brand for the first time, that is acquisition. Most brands aren’t present in that transaction at all.
Does resale cannibalise primary sales? The data says no. Assembly Label found that the majority of secondhand buyers were new to the brand entirely, not existing customers trading down. Brands running resale programs consistently find that secondary market entry is additive. Secondary buyers are often on their way to becoming primary buyers over time.
How do you capture customers who buy your products secondhand? You capture them by owning the resale transaction rather than letting it happen outside your ecosystem. That means giving customers a brand-controlled channel to sell or trade their used items, with a voucher, registration, or email at the point of purchase. That moment of discovery becomes a managed customer relationship.
What is Seamlist? Seamlist is infrastructure that sits at the intersection of retail and resale. Retailers who integrate it can track their products through the secondary market, earn royalties every time an item is rented or resold, and reach the customers discovering them for the first time.
Based on Episode 621 of the Add To Cart podcast with Bernadette Olivier, CEO of The Volte and Seamlist. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
In this Playbook:
- Your secondary market is already running without you
- Secondary buyers aren’t defectors. They’re the top of your funnel.
- The brand experience of the secondary sale is yours to own or lose
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