How To Start An Online Thrift Store (In 5 “Easy” Steps)

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Over the past two years, there has been an explosion of interest in working from home or, at the very least, working online.

Couple that with the swelling interest in reselling items online and the more savvy businessmen and women among us are considering opening a full-blown online thrift store.

I will say that starting an online thrift store is a very different proposition than simply being a reseller.

As someone who flipped thrift store items on eBay for many years, I can tell you this: most resellers have no idea what they’re doing and their “businesses” are held together with snot and chickenwire.

If you’re forward-minded enough to think of your business as a legitimate thrift store that happens to do business online you’ll be miles ahead of the competition.

But how do you go about it?

How do you actually get an online thrift store started and profitable? Well, it turns out that it’s a lot like starting a brick-and-mortar thrift store. It just has a few extra steps.

How To Start An Online Thrift Store

The main advantage to starting a thrift store online is that you can scale it up or down as life and profitability warrant. After all, digital real estate is cheap.

However, let’s assume that you’re going all-in on this endeavor and want to hit the ground running. Doing so will not only give you a better chance of success but will get you your first sales much quicker than treating this as simply a side hustle.

So let’s go through the steps you’ll want to check off:

1. Figure Out Your Selling Platform

Figuring out on which piece of digital real-estate you’ll be hanging your shingle may seem like putting the cart before the horse but, hear me out, it’s the most important step. Where you’ll be selling your stuff informs every other aspect of your business model.

So, what are your options?

Well, in short, you have two options: start your own site or open a store on an existing platform (such as eBay, Mercari, Poshmark, etc.).

Should You Build Your Own Platform/Site?

As someone who has sold on eBay full-time and also started multiple e-commerce site I feel like I’m about as qualified as anyone to answer this question.

And my answer is? Sell on an existing platform.

If you’re starting a thrift store from scratch, selling on an existing platform will let you get your systems in place much quicker and start getting some cash flow.

If you build your own site you’ll be into the project a huge amount of time and money before starting to see any return and, from my experience, you might never have a return. Most sites never get any traffic and slowly die.

There are, however, appealing aspects of running your own store on your own platform. Not paying fees, not being subject to another business’ algorithm or business choices, and not having the possibility of having your store closed without warning are all appealing.

So, if you’re going that route, hear me out. Start on eBay. Selling on eBay doesn’t require any sort of long-term contract or non-compete. Sell on eBay so you have everything in place and already have things moving while building your own site.

Many existing online thrift stores also sell on eBay and include cards in all of their orders directing their customer to their site for their next purchase. Win/win.

2. Develop A Sourcing Model

The reality is that the majority of people who sell used clothes and goods online fail to ever grow a significant business. They plateau at $100,000 per year and can’t ever figure out how to grow past that.

One of the main issues is with their sourcing model.

A typical thrift store has the ability to source tens of thousands of items per day. For most thrift stores, their limiting factor is not inventory but floor space to sell all the things they get.

Most online thrift stores, on the other hand, find one-off items by “sourcing” them individually.

If you want to run an online thrift store you’re going to have to figure out how to source inventory at scale.

If you already have a brick-and-mortar location this is easy, just cherry-pick the items that you want to sell online.

However, if you’re moving straight online y< you’ll find it much more difficult to convince locals to simply donate to the back of your warehouse. They won’t feel like your thrift store is charitable so they’ll take their stuff to Goodwill instead.

There are several good ways to source inventory for an online thrift store at scale. You’ll have to decide which one of these works best for you and then head down that rabbit hole:

The largest eBay stores move thousands of items per day which you can use as a benchmark for your sourcing.

For reference, we typically sell 1-2% of our listing daily. Meaning we get 10-20 daily sales for every 1,000 items we have listed.

3. Optimize Listing Flow

If you are able to source items in bulk, getting them listed so that people can buy them will likely be your main bottleneck.

If you are selling non-replenishable one-off items this is also where the majority of your time will be spent. Regardless of where you sell you’ll have to photograph each individual item and write a description.

Even if your space and procedure is optimized you’ll be hard-pressed to list more than 50 items per day consistently.

If you’re interested in running a full-scale online thrift store you’ll need to move to high-ticket items which are worth your time to list of hire help to get your items online en masse.

The best tips I can give you for speeding up this process are:

  • Have a dedicated space. If you have to set up lights and backgrounds every time your take pictures it will become a major hurdle to getting your items online.
  • Batch “like” items. If you have a bunch of shoes, do them all at once. The same goes for any other type of item. Once you have everything set up for a specific type of item, stick with that item until you’re out.
  • Batch “like” actions. Some people take each item from start to finish (photographing, listing, inventorying) which wastes a ton of time while they switch tasks. Instead, take all of the day’s pictures before moving on to the next part.

The faster you can get items online, the faster they can sell. Tons of online thrift store owners seem to think that they make or break their business in the “sourcing” and build up a massive backlog of unlisted inventory which they dub a “death pile”.

If it’s not listed, it’s a waste of money.

4. Master Fulfillment

The most obvious difference between owning a physical thrift store and an online one is that you’re going to have to ship every single order to the customer.

This adds expense, time, and a level of complexity to a business which also reduces your average purchase size (compared to brick-and-motor thrift stores).

I will also add that shipping is the main expense in our business. Sure you charge for shipping if you’re smart but it still, on average, costs us more to ship an item than to source it.

It follows that the more efficient you can get the process, the more profitable your business will be.

Here are my best tips for running an efficient shipping station for your store:

5. Scale

Scaling an eBay store (or an online thrift store on a different platform) really isn’t as difficult as people make it out to be.

Because you’re tethered to physical products which are time intensive to source and fulfill you’ll just be scaling linearly rather than exponentially.

The most obvious way this is done is by hiring additional help.

Every employee will be able to list or ship an additional X number of items per day giving you the date the easily calculate your growth.

Scaling up your operations is what will truly allow you to build a brand and become an online thrift store rather than simply fitting in with the thousands of resellers who are building mud pies on the bottom-most rung.

Why Would Anyone Want An Online Thrift Store?

There are a ton of advantages to taking a business online. For most businesses, the upsides far outweigh the downsides.

Is this true for thrift stores? I’m honestly not sure. Running an online thrift store is so far removed from a brick-and-mortar situation that they’re not likely to even appeal to the same people.

Running an online thrift store gives up several perks that a traditional store has but doesn’t really have any of the perks that most businesses get by moving online.

So what’s the ideal solution?

In my mind, the best setup would be to run a thrift store or pawn shop that also runs an online shop (probably on eBay).

This gives you a couple of advantages:

  • You’ll have a competitive advantage over other local thrift stores. Local thrift stores and pawn shops typically have to sell rare or valuable items for much less they’re worth. Mostly because they simply don’t have the audience size to do otherwise. Selling a few of your best items online gives you access to a much wider audience that just might be looking for exactly what you have.
  • You’ll have a competitive advantage over online sellers. First and foremost you’ll be able to receive donations far more efficiently which will greatly reduce your sourcing expenses. Additionally, you’ll be able to sell all the low-cost items in your store where you can avoid shipping and people are more likely to buy multiple low-cost items.

The Best Example Of An Online Thrift Store

While many pawn shops list their items (particularly gold and jewelry) on eBay, most thrift stores are so focused on moving inventory that they never make the jump.

Goodwill is the exception.

You may have heard that Goodwill picks out the best items for their online store…and it’s true.

There is a main online thrift store run by Goodwill (ShopGoodwill) but many regional stores also sell on eBay.

You can check out several of Goodwill’s eBay stores to get an idea of the types of things you could also be looking to sell on eBay.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, choosing to run an online thrift store is an excellent opportunity if you’re the right kind of person to run it and make it work.

For the rest of us, maintaining a day job while learning how to sell on eBay on the side is a much better option.

It allows you to make some money on the side while scaling it up and down as much as you want.

Listing daily on eBay (even if it’s just one item) will give you something to fall back on if things ever go south. So, whether you’re into starting a full-blown thrift store or not, find yourself some inventory and start selling!

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