Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

The boards regularly see clothing sellers concerned by lack of sales on ebay. Is it becuase there are so many ebay people selling the same thing or has the used clothing market evolved with buyers migrating to specialist sites ?

 

The reason I ask is I,ve been totally blown away this week. My 16 YO daughter started a clothes shop on a site based on a phone app. I had never heard of it and wont mention the name in line with board policy.  She had a few of her own things, a couple of her brothers and a handful of items she purchased from an op shop for $1 each last weekend. SHES SOLD ALMOST THE LOT and at prices that make your eyes water. And this is for a new store that has only been open a week.

 

The site she is on is targetted at trendy young woman and is basically a straight copy of ebay. It charges 10% commision on sales, but no listing fees and has a feedback system etc.

 

My question is, have many of ebays customers for specific style, more expensive clothing migrated to smaller, trendy, more community based sites and what can ebay do to draw them back ?

Message 1 of 9
Latest reply
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

That's actually quite intereseting, as I developed a theoy a while ago that in order for a site like eBay to be able to compete with ebay, it needs to offer something collectively that can't be obtained anywhere else, and I felt like it had to be something other than the range of products (as in, more experience based, rather than product / price based). 

 

It sounds like there's a sense of discovery, and maybe exclusivity, with the app, sort of like transposing the traditional op shop experience where you can browse and covet, and offerings are limited, creating that sense of excitement that's so difficult to get on eBay now.  

 

I hope she has a lot of success with the endeavour. 🙂 

View solution in original post

Message 5 of 9
Latest reply
8 REPLIES 8

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

Can't really comment about things like phone apps for trendy young people as I am much older and not up with all of that sort of thing.

 

But I have a married daughter who regularly buys things for her kids via local facebook buy & sell sites and she sold a lot of her maternity clothes there too.

 

Just thinking of my own clothes buying, I can recall about a decade or so ago, I would occasionally buy reasonably good brand clothes off ebay but I don't even look nowadays, except occasionally I have bought children's clothes bundles-not for a while though. 

I'm not talking top of the range, exclusive brands, mind you-but not Target either.

 

It's not that I don't shop online any more. This morning I have been looking at several clothing sites (for new clothes) for about an hour.

I can think of 3 reasonable brands that all have online sites as well as real stores & they all send through special offers to my email. One sent through a $20 voucher for Easter, another has a further 30% off the already reduced price on clearance items. It means snapping up some tops that were once $72.99 for about $7.

Now on ebay there always used to be a good range of one of those brands but nowadays there are what i would call a few tired looking second hand items, not always well displayed & at inflated prices.

 

For me, what has happened is the rest of the world has caught up to ebay. Where once it was about the only place to buy a lot of things online, now there are dozens of other options.

For my daughter as a seller, she likes to list on the local buy/swap/sell, get someone to come pick up sometimes the same day, no comebacks, no fees etc

 

 

Message 2 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

I'm not wholly qualified to answer, as I stopped selling clothes years ago and that may make my observations / opinions out of date, but I think springy is right in that it's not so much that the market is changing, but more that it is forever expanding, though I would also add that there is still value in novelty, where it can be found, and that generally carries a time-limit one way or another. 

 

I think the challenge that clothing sellers on eBay face (or, what I started to notice and became one of the reasons I stopped selling clothes) is that it never really cultivated a boutique image - years ago, for sure it was where you could find curated vintage collections, unusual clothes, or bargains, and individual shops may have been able to hit a more niche category (vintage, designer, or subversive culture fashion - steampunk, goth, etc), but it was also where people sold clothing that was misdescribed, faulty, damaged / stained, then as the site attracted larger sellers of new stuff, from certain countries, severely lower quality than expected, or sizing expectations were way off, so over time I think this kind of inconsistency resulted in a lot of "never buying clothes on eBay again" - I suspect those sorts of things have been said by people who bought secondhand clothes elsewhere and were disappointed by one thing or another, but it takes a few years of people getting to that point before the pool of buyers willing to risk it starts to noticiably dwindle. (Obviously this won't happen if the site vets their clothing sellers, but FB certainly won't / can't, I don't know the app you're referring to, so can't really comment on that, either). 

 

At the same time people were starting to focus less on the thrill of the hunt, department stores were starting to stock basics at prices often lower than postage costs (if I can get a decent pair of new demin jeans that last a few years for $20, I'm not really likely to pay that for second hand ones that I won't always know if they fit, or how long they'll last, ditto for t shirts and the like, or anything where function is more important than fashion). Op shops also started wising up to the trend of re-sellers shopping there, and started pricing higher, so even if sales remained consistent, often profit margins became smaller - it's ok if you can find a few bargain gems here and there, but for anything more than the occasional hobby, it was a lot of work to scour shops for decent quality, saleable goods at a price where profit was at least likely. One of the Red Cross stores near me has is now an upmarket kind of place, often receiving donations from designers so there's lots of new stuff, but it's priced high, and even a non-branded fashion necklace will have something like $20 on it Smiley Surprised (they accept donations from the general public, but you have to prove the items were drycleaned first). 

 

ebay's switch to focussing on 'new' items was another contributing factor to my decision to stop selling clothes. More and more bigger retailers jumped on - most took a while to figure out how to use eBay effectively, and got a lot of neg feedback in the early stages, but after a while they started to dominate search results. At first I tried to buy new clothes and added accessories into the mix, and would shop at stores during the end stages of sales so that I could try and get a range of new items at deep enough discounts (preferably a few of the same thing in different sizes and / or colours, so that variation listings could be created and give me a boost in best match ranking after a couple of sales), and also tried to source some wholesale items, but really only found clearance outlets accessible... The problem with that for me was, it meant a lot of my stock was stuff people already passed over, plus, I liked to focus on sizes 14+ (for women), and by the time I would consider something worth the cash, often there was only sizes 6-10 left. 

 

I guess the TL;DR of all that is - quality, niche, secondhand items are harder to source, and the number of trusting buyers dwindled, and competing with recognised brands offering their range was extremely difficult. 

Message 3 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

Your point about too many boring common clothes, mis - discribed or faulty probably has a lot to do with it. The phone app site the daughter is on seems like the ebay of years ago, where there is a sense of community, unspoken rules of etiqete and where a lot of the clothes are retro / vintage or high quality brand labels.

 

Some of the things that work well on ebay, dont work at all on this site. I went stock shopping with the daughter this morning at our favorite CHEAP op shop. It is a large warehouse / shed in an industrial estate run by volunteers and most clothes are $1.00. We found around 20 fantastic items including one very high end brand jacket and plenty of genuine retro. When we got home I suggested the daughter list them all. But no, that would be in poor taste apparently.

 

On this site you dont just dump large numbers of listings. You trickle them on over a week or two. Sales rely on people finding your garments and then passing on the link to others that they might suit, rather than the buyer themselves finding the item.. A real personal and community thing with lots of small sellers of trendy individual items, rather than big sellers with lots of listings of just stuff. Apparently the photos need to be " authentic " too with the owner wearing the clothes ( face & legs cropped etc ) rather than on manequins or draped over a bed.

 

Basically a bit of an " in " club thing where sellers value credability among their peers etc.

 

 

Anyway it seems to be working. The daughter would have sold around 80% of her listings in the past week.

Message 4 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

That's actually quite intereseting, as I developed a theoy a while ago that in order for a site like eBay to be able to compete with ebay, it needs to offer something collectively that can't be obtained anywhere else, and I felt like it had to be something other than the range of products (as in, more experience based, rather than product / price based). 

 

It sounds like there's a sense of discovery, and maybe exclusivity, with the app, sort of like transposing the traditional op shop experience where you can browse and covet, and offerings are limited, creating that sense of excitement that's so difficult to get on eBay now.  

 

I hope she has a lot of success with the endeavour. 🙂 

Message 5 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

Can you please give a hint as to what this app is called (or message me)?

 

I don't sell clothing, but I am really curious!

Message 6 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?

I think another reason ebay might be lagging in the clothes selling stakes is because of something I found happened a week or so ago when i was looking. It is that ebay is too broad & it's hard to target what you're after.

Just say you are after a top-maybe a summer top. You might even have a colour in mind. But if you just use ebay to look for eg a blue top or red top etc, you end up with thousands of listings, a lot of them chinese stuff or totally unsuitable styles for your age group etc

It's the opposite to a specialised site.

 

You can type in particular brands & maybe that will shorten the odds. I just tried it. Some of the tops showing on ebay will be second hand and not asking much at all, in fact they may even be listed at 99c. But the postage might be $9 or more.

If you're after a run of the mill top you can often get brand new tops on sale online or in stores from about $15, so that could explain why ebay clothes sales might be lagging.

And if you do happen to know a few brands you like, their own sites are easier & quicker to navigate to scroll through their options.

 

If you're after a really good brand name, that could be a different story if it is competitively priced on ebay & you might be willing to pay quite a bit more for something that is a bit harder to come by & in that context, the postage will only be a minor consideration.

 

I'm guessing the reason why this specialised phone app is working is because the links are spread by like minded young people & everything they see is going to be 'their' sort of style-no scrolling through thousands of items & almost everything they see, they like. It's small, it's quick, it's easy.

 

 

 

Message 7 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?


@springyzonewrote:

I think another reason ebay might be lagging in the clothes selling stakes is because of something I found happened a week or so ago when i was looking. It is that ebay is too broad & it's hard to target what you're after.

Just say you are after a top-maybe a summer top. You might even have a colour in mind. But if you just use ebay to look for eg a blue top or red top etc, you end up with thousands of listings, a lot of them chinese stuff or totally unsuitable styles for your age group etc

It's the opposite to a specialised site.

 

You can type in particular brands & maybe that will shorten the odds. I just tried it. Some of the tops showing on ebay will be second hand and not asking much at all, in fact they may even be listed at 99c. But the postage might be $9 or more.

If you're after a run of the mill top you can often get brand new tops on sale online or in stores from about $15, so that could explain why ebay clothes sales might be lagging.

And if you do happen to know a few brands you like, their own sites are easier & quicker to navigate to scroll through their options.

 

If you're after a really good brand name, that could be a different story if it is competitively priced on ebay & you might be willing to pay quite a bit more for something that is a bit harder to come by & in that context, the postage will only be a minor consideration.

 

I'm guessing the reason why this specialised phone app is working is because the links are spread by like minded young people & everything they see is going to be 'their' sort of style-no scrolling through thousands of items & almost everything they see, they like. It's small, it's quick, it's easy.

 

 

 


I think you are probably right. The site is very " niche " and just targeting teenagers or early 20,s. I had a look at clothes in a few of the chain charity shops today ( Salvos, Savers, Save the Children etc. ) WOW, the prices are hot in there for anything decent or retro. There wouldnt be any margin left in buying from the majors and trying to re-sell on ebay. Luckily we have a couple of really cheap op shops locally run by volunteers for more local charities. You can buy quality brand items for a dollar or two, so it leaves some room for margin..

Message 8 of 9
Latest reply

Clothing sellers....Is the market changing ?


wrote:

 


 I had a look at clothes in a few of the chain charity shops today ( Salvos, Savers, Save the Children etc. ) WOW, the prices are hot in there for anything decent or retro. There wouldnt be any margin left in buying from the majors and trying to re-sell on ebay. Luckily we have a couple of really cheap op shops locally run by volunteers for more local charities. You can buy quality brand items for a dollar or two, so it leaves some room for margin..


I used to only go once per week to my locals, because they'd assign colour-coded tags to new stock (at the Salvos, from memory it's white, purple, blue and yellow), and then they cycle them at 50% off, changing the tag colour on Mondays. Basically if something has been there for 4 weeks, it goes half price. 

 

Sometimes I'd pay full price, but usually only if it was new with tags, a highly recognisable and desirable brand, or otherwise too good to wait and see if it was still there in a few weeks. The pricing often befuddled me, though. It often seemed based purely on whether the person pricing it just happened to like it, or some other arbitrary valuing - eg a boutique evening dress, looks new, $8.00, a K Mart brand casual dress, looks well worn, $15 Smiley Frustrated

 

  I had to pass over a lot of stuff that I likely could have done ok with, and of course I also ended up with several things that weren't worth the money (I still have some of them, actually Smiley Embarassed , I should just donate them back, but I'm a lazy so-and-so, and so they're sitting in a bag somewhere), but I generally found enough decent stuff still hanging around.  (The only thing I left behind that I truly regret was a book of fairy tales they had on the counter. I didn't want it to resell, but to keep, as it was this big, thick old thing with yellowed pages, caliigraphy style writing, and instead of printed pictures, the images were separate cards that were affixed to the pages. I don't know if it was just mimicking old books, or was genuinely old, but it was beautiful. I couldn't afford it on the day and it was gone when I went back Smiley Sad

 

When I first started selling clothes regularly (about 8-ish years ago), there was a Scout hall near me that would have kind of a garage sale once a week. Most of the clothes there were pretty trashed, but I did find some gems and everything was priced at 20c - $2, which are the kind of prices I remember my mom paying at the op shops she dragged me to when I was a kid (ah, my hod-podge Wonder Woman quasi-nurse's uniform outfit, hundreds of books about a girl and her horse, and my "I'd rather be rollin'" t-shirt, how I did love thee Smiley LOL ). 

 

 

Message 9 of 9
Latest reply