Seel Lets Shoppers Sell What Stores Won’t Take Back

Watch more: Digital Shift With Seel’s Zack Peng

The final-sale dress that looks different at home, the jacket that misses its return deadline and the beach purchase that gets plenty of use before summer ends present versions of the same problem: The shopper owns merchandise that has value but no longer has an easy way to turn it back into money.

A return’s one way to handle some of those purchases. Resale can handle others. Yet the two processes usually have little connection.

A return starts with a transaction the retailer already knows. The product, price and customer are well-documented, and the merchant has a process for taking the merchandise back. Once the return period expires, a consumer who wants to sell the same item generally has to begin another process on a secondhand marketplace.

That means identifying a reasonable price, creating a listing, finding buyers, answering questions and arranging shipment. A seller who wants to reach buyers on several marketplaces has to repeat some of that work and keep track of where the item remains available.

Seel’s new one-click resale service, launched Aug. 19, connects those two stages for eligible purchases by using information from the original order to start the resale process after the return period has ended.

Seel Founder and CEO Zack Peng told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, “We find that a lot of times, people don’t want return the product within 30 days because they actually enjoy the product.” After using it for perhaps 90 days, he added, they may want to recover some of what they spent.

Putting resale alongside returns gives those purchases another route. It also moves resale closer to the original transaction instead of requiring the customer to reconstruct the information needed to sell the product elsewhere.

The customer Peng described isn’t primarily the regular secondhand seller. Consumers who sell frequently may already have marketplace accounts and established ways of photographing, pricing and shipping merchandise. He said Seel is seeking to bring consumers who haven’t previously sold secondhand products into resale.

The Work Behind a Resale

Setting the price is a universal hurdle in resale.

A shopper knows the original purchase price, but that provides limited guidance about the secondhand price months later. A $1,000 purchase that might now command $800 or $200. Consumers can search comparable listings, but they still have to determine which products are comparable and what buyers are paying.

Listing on more marketplaces expands the potential buyer pool while adding more work. Each listing has to be monitored, and a sale on one platform changes the inventory everywhere else.

“Once something actually sells, you need to take down the listing from six other marketplaces,” Peng said.

Seel calls its approach an “AI consignor.” For eligible purchases, its agents use existing product information to generate a listing and can place the item across seven secondhand marketplaces. They assess comparable merchandise to establish pricing, manage the listings and, where a marketplace allows it, contact prospective buyers. After a sale, the shopper receives shipping instructions and the other listings can be removed. Seel doesn’t buy the merchandise itself. Its system seeks buyers through secondhand marketplaces, and the shopper can choose a strategy based on whether the priority is obtaining a higher price or selling more quickly.

The connection between returns and resale becomes particularly relevant with final-sale merchandise. The retailer won’t take the item back, leaving the consumer with more risk when buying apparel or other products that can be difficult to judge online.

Webster said final-sale policies can make consumers “think carefully about whether or not that is something you want to take the risk on,” particularly when an item looks different after it arrives than it did online.

Resale doesn’t provide the same outcome as a return. There’s no assurance the shopper will recover the purchase price, and the merchandise still has to find a buyer. It does, however, provide another post-purchase process for merchandise that can no longer go back to the retailer.

The continuum between the initial transaction and ultimate resale extends the useful life of the data attached to the purchase. There’s information merchants could glean from what happens later, as Webster observed: how long customers keep particular products, their condition when resold, seasonal patterns and which types of merchandise return to the market.

Watch the full interview as PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Seel Founder and CEO Zack Peng discuss:

• How shoppers decide what to do with merchandise after return rights expire, and why occasional sellers often avoid secondhand marketplaces.
• How resale prices are established.
• How final-sale policies affect the risks consumers weigh before buying online.

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