Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) recommerce market can be divided into corporate recommerce and aggregator brands. The main difference is how and where they acquire their supply.
Corporate recommerce operators (brands and retailers) already own the items: product returns, overstock, or goods designed for multi-cycle use (e.g., rental-ready skis). Aggregator brands acquire supply from the market at scale through trade-ins, cashback/buyback programs, or purchasing from other aggregators (for example, used smartphones aggregated and resold).
Whether you’re a retailer adding refurbished/secondhand programs or an aggregator scaling buyback operations, the operating model, channel strategy, and trust dynamics all trace back to the same root question: how do you secure and standardize reliable supply?
Tuomo: If we first look at the B2C and B2B segments, we could kind of split them into two operators. There's what we call corporate re-commerce where it's a brand or retailer who owns the items already and are kind of selling them out as used or refurbished or renting them out. And the other side of that might be what we call aggregator brands. They're independent companies that have purchased items from the market. So they might have offered trading or cashback offerings or buyback offerings for the consumers or they might have bought them from other aggregators. An example of this might be, for example, SwapB who aggregates used iPhones from the market and then sells them forward. That's the kind of, if we now first focus on the B2C and B2B, those are the two things that I would kind of look there. Companies selling to other companies and companies selling to consumers.
Karri: So the main difference between these models is actually where they get their supply from.
Tuomo: Yeah, I think in re-commerce in general, if you want to understand a player in the market, it's best to look at their supply source. Supply is always the hard thing in re-commerce. And also it's the most telling of, let's say, market potential and the potential bottlenecks and all of that of a player. So corporate re-commerce tends to get their supply from their own product returns. They might actually manufacture some of the items themselves. So brands might actually be using their own manufactured inventory. And then whereas an aggregator kind of taps into a market to buy stuff out of it. So used phones or used clothes and that's why they're called aggregators.
Karri: So are the corporate re-commerce companies mainly doing re-commerce on the side, if they're relying on the product returns? Or are they also ordering or manufacturing some items that are designed to withstand the re-commerce and the multiple cycles?
Tuomo: Yeah, I think it's a question what defines on the side. So if we look at ski industry, we have brands like Atomic and Fisher, who specifically manufacture product types, for example, skis that are designed for rentals. It is a relevant segment for them. So it's maybe more than a side hustle. So they have specific design and manufacturing processes. And they take into account the life cycle of a rental good by having unique ideas and all of these things into it. But of course, there are then players that have maybe entered re-commerce by having a history of not necessarily manufacturing with the purpose of selling items more than once, but are now adjusting to it slowly. So maybe optimizing their product designs a bit for re-commerce. IKEA might be a good example that has invested quite a lot in the ability to turn product returns to a second sale or to even facilitate a peer-to-peer transaction of IKEA goods as a marketplace.
Tuomo: So yeah, but corporate re-commerce on a big picture, you could say that for them, it's probably still like a side revenue stream compared to the linear models that they have.
Karri: And then the aggregator brand sounds like that's their main business. And that's what they are actually focusing fully on is the re-commerce.
Tuomo: Yeah, they've kind of entered the market with the idea that, hey, well, there is this untapped potential in the market. For example, in the US, there's $600 billion worth of unused goods that have value sitting in the households of Americans. So these aggregator brands are kind of acknowledging that there's $600 billion worth of goods that we could buy back from the consumers and sell with the profit. So it's a reusable value that is sitting idle with the potential of revenue. So they kind of tap into that market as their supply.
Karri: How large is the B2B and B2C market and how is the size split between corporate re-commerce and aggregator brands?
Tuomo: It's kind of the one thing this is safe. Once we start to go to the market numbers, is that re-commerce is historically extremely hard to quantify because it's not that well recorded. Like the consensus, like there's no statistics that have been recorded for 50 years for re-commerce and re-repair. But there's some estimates there. So if for re-commerce, it's estimated to be something between 20 to 40 billion in US and Europe together. And then the aggregator brands, that's maybe 20 to 35 billion. Kind of there, you could say even sized. If you compare that to the overall sales of all of the commerce, it is we're talking about single percentages.
Karri: Sounds like they are actually quite large markets already and probably some markets that are actually growing year by year.
Tuomo: Yeah, there's various estimates on the growth rates, but usually it's double digits in a year. So we're talking about anything from like 10 to 20 percent year on year growth rates on the market. So it is a significantly growing market because there's tailwinds like regulation, consumer preferences and maybe even purchasing power being a bit lower. So consumers tapping into lower price point goods and all of that. So there are significant tailwinds for this market.
Karri: How are these items then sold to the consumers? So what is the main channel?
Tuomo: Yeah, so when we talk about B2C and B2B operations, the one thing that kind of defines that is that these corporate retailers or aggregators are kind of retail brands. They're usually selling those under their own channels. So white label channels, it might be their online store that they've built with twice or Shopify or Wix or it might be their own retail space. So it's usually, of course, everyone can tap into kind of marketplaces and so on, but by principle they kind of sell it under their own channels that they already have.
Tuomo: Which usually has a few things that—or kind of it affects a few things. So if you sell under your own channel and you are a trusted brand, you might need less kind of trust facilitation between the consumer and you. So if you're returning your phone to Best Buy to get a cashback or similar, you likely kind of trust that Best Buy is not going to screw you on the deal. Like you might even be willing to do that via shipping. Now that's not necessarily true if you don't have a trusted brand or if you're doing peer to peer sales. So in peer to peer sales you might need some facilitation of trust and shipping and payments in between. Whereas with a corporate re-commerce, the corporates can tap into the brand and trust that they build over time. And then the same applies to the aggregator brands. That's why something like Swapby at the end of the day for someone looking to buy a good as new iPhone, they are a retailer or kind of a source of iPhones among others. So the quality is the same or at least should be and the price points might be lower. But from a buyer's perspective Swapby for example in the Nordics have already grown to be a trusted brand. So that adds a few benefits for the business that they can tap into.
Karri: Sounds like the brands that are already have been in business and when they're expanding into re-commerce they are in a good position because they already have that brand trust. Then these new companies like Swapby they probably have to do quite a lot of work to actually earn their trust.
Tuomo: Yeah it is like launching—going from zero to one in anything. It's like you have to invest in the brand, you have to start kind of accumulating reviews and all of the things that apply to any business. Like if you launch a corner store you probably have some launch campaigns where you kind of invite the neighborhood, visit the store and so on. So all of that still applies. I think in re-commerce you might often see that before you've had the chance to build an audience for yourself you might start to do your sales over eBay or Grexlist and kind of that way launch to a marketplace. The cost of that is of course that you give X amount of the sales to the marketplace so it can be anything from like 10 to 20–30 percent that a marketplace takes as the cost of facilitating the sale and trust and facilitating shipping and facilitating payments. So it might be that at the end of the day these kind of launching sales leave really thin margins for you or in some cases zero margin but it helps you launch your brand. You kind of get yourself out and then you can over time start directing the traffic directly to you as a brand for the second purchases, third purchases and so on.