Many brands offer platforms for buying and selling used gear—Patagonia’s Worn Wear is one of the most well-known. In 2021 Peak Design launched our own, and in doing so, aimed to innovate. At the time, most brand-own used gear sites relied on buy-back programs: the customer sells their product back to the brand, who refurbishes it and resells it to another customer. The PD Marketplace was one of the first programs to operate on a peer-to-peer model: customers sold/shipped used gear directly to other customers, and Peak Design facilitated and supported the transaction.
The advantages of a peer-to-peer model are many: less energy spent on shipping and warehousing, less logistical costs, and ultimately more sale margin going to the end customers. Plus, the p2p model just fits our vibe. It’s lightweight, scrappy, and community oriented.
In practice however, these advantages were eventually outweighed by drawbacks. Peak Design did not control the end-to-end sale experience. It was up to sellers to accurately represent their items and ship stuff in a timely manner. They overwhelmingly did! But when things didn’t go right, it often became a difficult scenario to triage and a really crummy end customer experience.
On the back end, things were also more difficult than expected. Supporting p2p sales required us to put the PD Marketplace on a parallel Shopify store to prevent it from mucking up our primary website’s sales and inventory data. It was a whole other website to manage, troubleshoot, and optimize. Expanding the Marketplace beyond the US also proved more technically challenging than expected—a tough thing to grapple with when half of our customers are international.
The other big challenge of the p2p model was supply. With used PD gear, there are far more buyers than sellers. In fact 75% of the products that have sold through the PD Marketplace are open-box and refurbished items sold by Peak Design. Peer-to-peer listings only account for 25% of the Marketplace’s lifetime inventory, and if you look at the past couple of years, that percentage is even smaller.
Adding all these factors together, we concluded that our p2p program wasn’t providing a Peak-Design-caliber user experience. There are numerous p2p marketplaces out there like eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and Mercari who are in the business of making p2p sales easy, and for now, we think our customers are better off using those services.
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