#co-shopping

#co-shopping

The convenience of sourcing online is fraught with more pitfalls than most of us want to admit. Try finding adequate photos of a vintage piece's condition-close-ups of the fabric, video of damaged areas, any images of a piece's rear or underside!

A quick ask around my Whatsapp groups tells me why it's appealing to the millennial female. "It's the source of all knowledge and free of influencers," says one friend. "I use it because it's real people, and ChatGPT is soulless and makes me sad," says another. "I like how old school the platform is - it feels quite separate from adverts, image saturation, influencing," says a third.

Videos of people proudly holding up potential purchases in stores, roaming the aisles looking for the best shoes and housewares, or running through every item in their "thrift hauls" - recaps of everything they found while thrifting - have hundreds of thousands of views and likes. Beyond that, some have turned their thrift finds into dollars, reselling the items online to other secondhand material lovers.

If you're looking for an easy way to make extra money in this economy, declutter your home with some timely spring cleaning or even start a simple side hustle, Facebook Marketplace is one of the best platforms to use. The site lets you list items for free without fees, sell locally or nationwide, and tap into millions of buyers that the internet considers friends.

For eBay, acquiring Depop makes a good measure of intuitive sense. Generally, resale is trending upward: Based on ThredUp's 2025 Resale Report, the secondhand apparel market is expected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7 times faster than the overall global apparel market. Millennials, Gen-Z, and Gen-Alpha shoppers are some of the strongest drivers of that trend, with 39% of younger generation shoppers having made a secondhand apparel purchase on a social commerce platform in the 12 months before the study was published.