Walk into a thrift store today, and you’ll see shoppers with one eye on the racks and the other on their phones, checking resale sites or Google Lens.
Online reselling has become an increasingly visible part of the secondhand retail landscape. Data from Capital One Shopping shows that resale now represents 55.7% of the secondhand market. For thrift retailers, that shift creates both an opportunity and a challenge. Resellers bring consistent traffic and can help move inventory quickly. At the same time, they have access to the same information that consumers and retailers do. They can identify a valuable brand, vintage piece, or in-demand item in seconds and determine what it could sell for online.
That raises an important question for thrift stores: Are you capturing the full value of the donations your organization receives?
How Resellers Are Changing Thrift Store Pricing
Resellers aren’t necessarily the problem. In many ways, they’re evidence that thrift inventory has value. The challenge is what happens when a store doesn’t have the tools or processes to identify that value.
Consider a vintage jacket donated to support a nonprofit’s mission. If it’s priced at $8 because the brand isn’t recognized or its condition isn’t properly evaluated, a reseller may recognize the opportunity immediately and purchase it for a fraction of its potential resale value. The store makes a sale, but it may leave significant revenue on the table.
Historically, one response has been to raise prices across the board. But that can create a different problem. Thrift stores serve shoppers who value affordability, and consistently increasing prices can make it harder to serve that audience.
The better approach isn’t necessarily to price everything higher. It’s to make better-informed pricing decisions based on the item, its condition, its brand, and its potential market.
That’s where technology can make a meaningful difference. Instead of relying entirely on individual experience at the sorting table, thrift organizations can build pricing standards and useful data directly into their production workflow.
At Retail Control Systems, we’ve spent more than three decades helping retailers improve the way they manage their operations. We brought that experience to the secondhand industry through Brijjworks, an all-in-one retail platform designed around the unique challenges of thrift.
That means taking the same approach to technology that makes sense for any modern retailer and applying it to the realities of thrift: high-volume donations, constantly changing inventory, production teams with varying levels of experience, multiple sales channels, and the need to turn donated goods into revenue efficiently.
Using Thrift Technology to Improve Pricing and Production
One of the most important places to apply that approach is the production floor.
Pricing shouldn’t depend entirely on who happens to be working at the sorting table that day. Brijjworks Thrift Production Manager gives production teams standardized pricing guidelines, automated brand lookups, and quality grading tools as part of the workflow.
These tools help staff make more consistent decisions while they’re processing donations and make it easier to recognize items that may warrant additional research or a different sales channel. The goal isn’t to put a higher price tag on everything. It’s to give employees better information so they can make the right decision for each item.
Why Data-Driven Pricing Matters in Thrift Retail
Large retailers are already investing in technology to make pricing and production more consistent.
A recent example came when Savers Value Village launched a new AI tool to price items. Called “ThriftIQ,” the platform uses years of proprietary data to help automate apparel pricing and improve consistency and sell-through. The company says the technology has already been used to price more than 25 million items across pilot stores.
The significance goes beyond one company’s technology. It demonstrates where the industry is heading: away from pricing based primarily on individual judgment and toward processes supported by data, technology, and consistent standards.
That doesn’t mean every thrift organization needs to build its own AI platform. Regional thrift organizations, nonprofit retailers, and independent secondhand stores can take a similar approach by using technology that brings more information and consistency into the processes they already have.
And pricing is only one part of the opportunity.
How Thrift Stores Can Use Online Sales to Capture More Value
A reseller doesn’t stop at identifying an item with potential. They take it to the marketplace where they believe they can get the best return.
Thrift organizations can do the same.
Some donations have significantly more potential online than they do on a traditional sales floor. The challenge is making online selling practical at scale. If employees have to photograph an item, research it, enter product information, create a listing, and then manage that inventory through a completely separate process, online sales can quickly become too labor-intensive.
That’s why eCommerce works best when it is connected to the rest of the thrift production process. When an employee identifies an item with online potential during production, the next step should fit naturally into the workflow rather than require a completely separate process.
With Brijjworks Lister, thrift organizations can move selected inventory into online sales channels without requiring staff to manually recreate every item listing from scratch. A valuable item identified during production can move into an online sales workflow rather than simply being priced and placed on the sales floor.
In other words, the same process that helps your team identify an item’s value can also help your organization capture more of that value.
How Thrift Store Technology Improves Visibility Across Locations
As thrift organizations grow, another challenge becomes increasingly important: visibility.
When production, point-of-sale, reporting, and online sales operate in disconnected systems, it can be difficult to understand what’s happening across the organization. Leaders may have access to plenty of information without having an easy way to connect it.
That connected view is another important part of a modern thrift technology strategy. Brijjworks Reporting and Brijjworks Point-of-Sale help bring key parts of the retail operation together, giving teams better visibility into inventory, sales, and store performance.
That can mean understanding which products are selling, how inventory is moving, how individual stores are performing, or where changes to production and pricing could make an impact. Instead of looking at each part of the operation in isolation, leaders can use connected data to make decisions across the business.
The value of a donation isn’t realized when it arrives at the dock. It’s realized when your organization turns that donation into revenue that supports its mission. Connected systems make it easier to see that process from donation to sale.
Building a More Modern Thrift Retail Operation
The rise of resellers is one sign of a broader change in secondhand retail. Consumers have more information than ever about what products are worth, where they can be sold, and what other buyers are willing to pay.
Thrift organizations can respond by becoming more informed, too.
That doesn’t mean trying to eliminate resellers or turning every thrift store into an online marketplace. It means giving your team the tools to recognize valuable inventory, make consistent pricing decisions, determine which items make sense to sell online, and understand what’s happening across the business.
The right technology can help make those processes part of the everyday workflow rather than adding another layer of work for already-busy teams. For RCS, that’s the purpose behind Brijjworks: bringing decades of retail technology experience into a platform built specifically for the way thrift organizations operate.
The reseller market isn’t going away—and it doesn’t have to. The opportunity for thrift organizations is to make sure they have the systems, data, and workflows to compete in a market where everyone has access to more information.
Contact Retail Control Systems to learn more about how Brijjworks can help your organization build a more efficient, data-driven thrift operation.
