Business Growth Strategies

8 Business Growth Strategies for Second-Hand Clothing Marketplace in 2022

It has been very common to wear second-hand clothes, especially for sustainability. And people need to find them online. If your online marketplace is for secondhand clothing, where customers can buy and sell clothing, you can follow the suggestions below to grow your business:

Allow comments
Save from unwanted clothes
Offer free shipping
Integrate with Pinterest
Using favourite songs
Use strong visuals
Build a social sharing platform
Buy for friends

1. Allow comments

Allow everyone who has already had a positive transaction on the platform to comment about your marketplace with the clothes they bought. This will allow new users to click on these comments and have a better idea of what to buy and what not to buy. And also, it will give women the power to form a community of like-minded fashionistas.

2. Save from unwanted clothes

Consider how to make Thredup as easy as possible when they are getting rid of their unwanted clothes. By making it easy to get clothes out of a house, and into the marketplace in a box that would be picked up at one point, and that is created with two sides and a top and bottom. This would allow for anyone to fill up boxes in their house (with clothes they want to get rid of) and then either drop them off somewhere or have an option for UPS or someone else to come pick up the boxes. This would also open up some viral marketing possibilities. People could share what they put in their box on social media, which would potentially spread awareness for your marketplace.

3. Offer free shipping

You should offer a free shipping option for items over a certain price point. Customers can still get the secondhand product at low prices, but since there is an added incentive to buy more, they are more likely to do so. This gives you higher sales selling the same existing merchandise with no increase in inventory costs.

4. Integrate with Pinterest

Pinterest is the social network that allows users to save images of things that interest them on virtual pinboards, called pinboards, or "boards". Users can share these pinboards with others via their own pinboard, your follower's pinboards or both. The site has no specific demographic, meaning people from any background can use it and participate. The name 'Pinterest" reflects the possibility of repinning an image as a way to link the image to something else.

5. Using favourite songs

If you have an app and allow customers to use their favourite on the app, it will be more personalized. So whenever they get a notification about you, it is synced up with the song that's playing.

6. Use strong visuals

This will not only help create a highly sharable listing page but also will provide real-life use cases for the product as well.

Your customers are very strong (beyond Facebook and Twitter) about sharing. This could be a visual platform with a Pinterest like/Instagram feed. This would lend itself to the idea of 'social currency' and sharing for great deals.

8. Buy for friends

E.g. a user can enter into her profile what size she is of certain clothes and if her friends like it, they can buy and send the gift directly to her. This can happen without her knowledge! She gets a box of goodies, and you gain a new customer! This is true VC material right here.