Amazon executive John Boumphrey says selling pre-owned goods in the UK and Europe is now a $1.3B business and Amazon sold 4M+ used items in 2022 in the UK
James Davey / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon’s used-goods push follows its 2021 response to scrutiny over unsold inventory in the UK, when it introduced programs including resale to reduce waste. The reported scale suggests that the waste-reduction resale program has become a material retail category rather than a narrow disposal channel.
Amazon has also used online sales data to guide its UK physical-retail assortment, as in its first UK non-food store. A larger pre-owned catalog gives the company another source of demand and product-condition data across its retail operation.
First-order effects
- Amazon gains a sizeable UK-and-Europe pre-owned-goods business, with more than 4 million used items sold in the UK in 2022, strengthening its ability to move returned or used inventory through resale.
- UK and European shoppers receive a broader Amazon channel for used goods, while sellers and inventory partners have a more established route for goods that cannot be sold as new.
Second-order effects
- The demonstrated resale volume puts pressure on other large retailers and marketplaces to make returns, open-box stock, and used goods easier to list and discover rather than treating them solely as a clearance or disposal problem.
- A resale channel can improve the economics of excess and returned inventory, potentially changing how merchants value inventory recovery and how Amazon prioritizes condition, listing, and fulfillment workflows.
Third-order effects
- If resale continues to scale inside major retail platforms, recommerce may become a standard inventory-recovery layer within mainstream ecommerce rather than a category served mainly by specialist marketplaces.
- The model could make product-condition data and reverse-logistics execution more important competitive assets, though the corpus does not establish whether Amazon can reproduce the UK and Europe performance elsewhere.
The trend: Major ecommerce platforms are integrating recommerce into core retail operations to recover value from used and excess inventory while broadening lower-priced selection.