In 2022, we are quite familiar with the concept and convenience of marketplaces. Marketplaces help us to discover a wide range of products from multiple merchants. We read reviews, look at merchant ratings, compare prices, plan when and how to receive the shipments, and make payments through different modes. The sellers are businesses and buyers are both individuals and businesses. Typically, sellers absorb the cost of running the marketplaces. This is the pattern, which is common across all the marketplaces, whether it is B2B or B2C.

There is another important aspect of marketplaces. Marketplaces are not primarily concerned about inventory, sellers are. Marketplaces facilitate the trade, and then focus on fulfilment and reconciliations. For example, Amazon’s warehouses encourage short-term storage for fast fulfilments, and dissuade sellers from bulk or long-term storage. In a way, sellers concern with the product and inventory, and marketplaces solve order and fulfilment problems, in addition to product discovery.

With this context, let us look at the trade of used goods. eBay comes to our mind first, then there is Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace. Even though we consider these as marketplaces, for most part such sites have grown out of classifieds model. Payments are often the feature available in addition to discovery. Now, this is changing!

eBay has been trying out fulfilment in a few markets, dealing with the tougher part of used-goods marketplace - logistics. We also see newer business models for used goods - connecting customers to buyers through real-time auctioning. Often the problem solved by these models are logistics. The new breed of marketplaces will facilitate C2B business models, and of course P2P models too. The services from these marketplaces would be discovery (listing), valuation (pricing), transactions (& auctions), payments (& escrow services), and goods movement.

Inventory is not the key challenge in marketplace models, fulfilment and logistics are. As the new models in used goods increase the reverse marketplaces are set to become more prevalent and established. Yes! it is good for the economy and environment. And most importantly, such capabilities will spawn and support further business models such as rentals, leasing, and buy-backs.