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Low Prices Drive Gen Z Shoppers To Resale

Gen Z shoppers are more than twice as likely to buy secondhand items than Gen X shoppers.

A new survey of 1,100 U.S. consumers from return platform Seel found that 57% of Gen Z consumers purchased a resale item either in store or online in the past 12 months, compared with 53% of millennials and 26% of Gen X shoppers.

Of all the consumers who shopped for secondhand items, the top reasons where:

  • Lower price (58%)
  • Better value for premium brands (40%)
  • Positive past experience (38%)
  • Environment or sustainability (28%)

Online Retailers Confirm Price is Key for Secondhand Goods Conversion

Back Market, an online retailer of refurbished tech products like smartphones and laptops, finds similar motivation for its customers, Amanda Michel, U.S. Director of Marketing, told Chief Marketer in a previous interview. Although the retailer’s mission is to reduce technology waste, its U.S. customers are most likely to buy because the devices are cheaper and a good value for the brand, Michel said.

Similarly, Matthew Kaness, former CEO of GoodwillFinds.com, also found that consumers were fine buying used goods online, especially if it was from a brand they knew and liked.

“They’re into vintage and trends,” he said in a previous interview with Chief Marketer. “They care about shopping for brands because brands give them a trust about the size and the quality.”

GoodwillFinds.com was the online counterpart of the well-known nonprofit thrift store Goodwill that operated for 2.5 years and shuttered in March 2025.

The Secondhand Market

With demand for secondhand goods, especially from younger shoppers, a number of online resellers have popped up including: The RealReal, which sells used luxury brands, ThreadUp, which sells everyday apparel, and StockX, which sells sneakers. Plus, peer-to-peer marketplaces, such as Poshmark, have made online resale popular.

According to the Seel survey, consumers who said they did not purchase secondhand items said the top barriers were concerns about product quality or condition, high shipping costs, fear of scams and a preference for new items.

Consumers said strong reviews and product protection were the top ways to build confidence to make a secondhand purchase, according to the Seel survey.

Discovering Products on Social Media

Where a consumer learns about a product, brand or shopping platform, may also matter to build confidence, according to the survey results. Gen Z ranks TikTok as their most-trusted product discovery social platform (53%), followed by Instagram, YouTube and then Facebook. For millennials and Gen X shoppers, the inverse is true as both groups rank Facebook as their top-trusted product discovery platform and TikTok ranking much lower.

Gen X is also much more likely to say they do not trust social media platforms for product discovery at all at 26%, compared with 10% for millennials.

For all shoppers, 44% say they often or very often purchase a product after discovering it on social media and 33% sometimes do. Only 23% of shoppers say they rarely or never do. This propensity to buy social media-discovered products surges higher for Gen Z shoppers, who say they buy products after discovering them on social media:

  • Very often – 20%
  • Often – 29%
  • Sometimes – 35%
  • Rarely – 14%
  • Never – 3%

The survey also found:

  • 87% of shoppers expect retailers to resolve an order issue within two to three days.
  • 61% of Gen Z consumers say they have decided not to buy something online because of the return policy, higher than both millennial (58%) and Gen X (52%) shoppers.
  • 57% of Gen Z consumers say they have stopped shopping with a brand because of a poor return or refund experience, higher than millennial (54%) and Gen X (42%) shoppers.

Figures are rounded.