Amazon sells over one billion worth of second-hand goods

Amazon sees great potential in second-hand: the retailer is now illustrating this with the opening of a temporary physical second-hand shop in London. Shoppers want to save money and shop more sustainably.

Christmas pop-up

Second-hand already represents sales of one billion pounds (1.15 billion euros) for Amazon in Europe (including the UK). In the UK 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 John Boumphrey, who heads the retailer’s UK operations, at the opening of Amazon’s first physical second-hand shop in London. That “Second Chance Store” – a Christmas pop-up shop selling more than 4,000 returned and refurbished items – will remain open until 12 December.

Record sales

That shoppers are looking for interesting deals is also evidenced by the record sales Amazon says it has recorded 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.

Just recently, AWS, the retailer’s cloud division, also 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.