Thinking of starting a resale business—or adding resale to your existing retail operations?
In this clip from the ReCommerce Podcast, Tuomo Laine (CEO of TWICE Commerce) explains how both new entrepreneurs and established retailers can begin monetizing secondhand items with low friction and minimal overhead.
Key takeaways:
Karri: How to step into this world if you are, let's say, first that you are a new entrepreneur and you want to start doing this reselling business or maybe as an existing retailer selling new items, like how do you actually jump into this space if you want to start it out?
Tuomo: Yeah, so I think there's probably two ways. If you're a new entrepreneur, any new business, it's always the first thing that you should do is to make sure that there's demand in the market. So set up a website or your corner store or whatever, a Facebook group, or whatever your way of reaching your potential audience for your offering, and then kind of start selling. I think that's the first step, so you should always make sure that you have the demand for it. Then you can establish a website, you can establish one on top of Wix.com in like, I don't know, two minutes at best.
Then if you kind of, once you get your first sales in, then you can start like figuring out like, okay, there are tools like us, like you can install Twice Commerce, for example, in Wix, or then just use it as a standalone, whatever.1 Then you can kind of track the operational side of things. And then you can kind of trust that there should be commerce software like us and others that can help you scale even from your first sale to billions. But yeah, that would be it. I would probably start like as a new entrepreneur figuring out like the demand and then where do I get my supply that if I start selling my dad's old, I don't know, vinyl records from my garage, I will at some point run out of supply. So then maybe at the same time figuring out where might I find more and so on. But I think these entrepreneurs that engage in this kind of, they're usually already kind of somehow engaged in a community where they are doing this.
Karri: Okay, so then if you're an established retailer and you don't do any re-commerce yet.
Tuomo: Probably the easiest friction is to start turning your product returns into resales. So maybe in your stores have a small outlet corner, or if not, if you don't want to assign kind of free real estate for that outlet corner in a physical store, once you get product returns, have an extremely lightweight process of doing that identification and then have in your online store a section for those products. That's again something where a company like us, we can help you do that.
But that would be the kind of ways to get into it. If you are a company that has already capabilities around like, if you're providing repair services, for example, for your customers, it should be even easier because then those people that are doing the repairs are the same, they have the capabilities that are needed in order to identify or even refurbish some of the product returns towards a refurbished sale. So companies that are actually currently operating in like maintenance, fixing parts, might actually be in a really good place to kind of... Well, yeah, you have customers coming in saying that I need this repaired. That's kind of your supply already. You can start offering ideas that, hey, I can buy it out from you and then establishing a source for the replaced sale, whether it's another refurbished model that you have, or maybe even a new sale from a manufacturer. But if you have know-how of how to repair or maintain specific product category, your entering recommerce market is a quite logical step.