How TWICE’s New Platform Powers the Next Generation of Rental Marketplaces and Aggregators

Powering the future of recommerce: how Twice enables aggregators and marketplaces

The next phase of recommerce and rental innovation won’t come from peer-to-peer apps — it will come from aggregating professionalized supply.

But that requires software infrastructure that can connect thousands of independent operators into shared digital marketplaces.

1. The recurring challenge for rental marketplaces

Many marketplace startups start with a simple goal: connect supply and demand. But they quickly realize that most professional rental businesses don’t have compatible software to integrate inventory in real time.

As a result, founders end up building software for their suppliers — effectively becoming platform providers instead of marketplace operators.

Tuomo notes that he’s heard this story “at least ten times” in recent years: teams begin as marketplaces, then pivot into software companies when they realize how complex managing item-level supply really is.

2. The Twice approach

Twice Commerce solves this problem by professionalizing the supply side through its platform.

Rental and resale companies using Twice can manage every individual item — its attributes, condition, availability, and connected listings — from one central system.

This architecture allows external marketplaces to connect directly to a merchant’s inventory without requiring custom development.

3. Separating catalog and inventory

A key design principle in the new Twice platform is the separation of catalog and inventory:

  • Inventory tracks each unique physical item — its ID, condition, and lifecycle.
  • Catalog represents how those items are marketed or listed across different channels.

This means a single inventory can power multiple types of listings:

  • Granular ones (e.g., exact ski brand, size, model)
  • Generic ones (e.g., “standard skis” category)

Each marketplace can present inventory in its own way, while the Twice system keeps availability synchronized and consistent.

4. Enabling aggregation at scale

By making inventory data structured and accessible, Twice enables aggregators, marketplaces, and even AI-driven commerce agents to plug directly into verified professional supply.

This is how the recommerce market becomes discoverable — not by building hundreds of isolated systems, but by connecting a shared ecosystem of inventory-ready operators through standardized APIs.

Tuomo: What we hope to enable in the market is that as we professionalize the software that rental companies use — or any recommerce company for resales — that supply becomes more accessible for aggregators and marketplaces.

Tuomo: When a marketplace needs professional supply from established businesses, they shouldn’t have to build custom software for them. Over the past few years, I’ve heard at least ten times from rental marketplace founders that they started as a marketplace, but quickly realized they needed to build software for their suppliers.

Tuomo: That’s when they discover how complex it really is. I think our new platform finally solves this. It’s something we should have built earlier — but it’s here now.

Karri: So maybe you can open up a bit how TWICE, and especially the new platform, supports these kinds of connections and integrations — how it enables someone to build marketplaces or aggregator services using Twice as the foundation.

Tuomo: Sure. It all starts with a few core concepts. The first is separating your catalog from your inventory. A listing doesn’t equal an SKU code.

Tuomo: That means you can create listings for your own online store, your admin interface, or external marketplaces that connect to your inventory dynamically. Each marketplace might want a different level of granularity — one might just list “standard skis,” while another requires “Atomic, model X, 180 cm.”

Tuomo: To make that possible, you have to separate catalog and inventory. Twice makes that super simple — you can track every item individually in your inventory and then create listings that point to those items in flexible, dynamic ways.

Tuomo: This frees you from rigid structures and allows your business to serve multiple channels — your own store, external marketplaces, and even future AI commerce agents — all from the same core inventory.