Amazon sells over one billion worth of second-hand goods

Amazon sees great potential in second-hand and shows this with the opening of a temporary physical second-hand store in London, saying shoppers want to save money and shop more sustainably.

Christmas pop-up

Second-hand already represents sales of more than one billion euros for Amazon in Europe. In the United Kingdom alone, the retail giant sold more than four million second-hand products last year. In the first nine months of 2023, Amazon’s sales of second-hand goods in the UK increased by more than 15 % compared to the same period last year.

“Customers are telling us that they’re shopping second hand items to save money in the ongoing cost of living crisis and because they want to shop more sustainably,” said Amazon’s head of UK operations, John Boumphrey. Amazon has therefore opened a “Second Chance Store”, a Christmas pop-up shop selling more than 4,000 returned and refurbished items, that will remain open until 12 December.

Record sales

Amazon also says it has achieved record second-hand sales in recent weeks. According to the company, the period from 17 November to Cyber Monday was the “biggest shopping event ever”, compared to the same 11-day period last year. Amazon did not disclose concrete sales figures, but consumers bought more than a billion items worldwide during the period.

AWS, the retailer’s cloud division, also recently reported the launch of an AI chatbot for developers and IT professionals called Amazon Q, which is designed to help enterprise customers at every stage of development build applications on AWS.