This Market Needs Its Own Shopify

01 /The Concept

Minimist helps secondhand stores grow their business.

The company has identified a significant gap in the European market: while 80% of European consumers prefer to browse and buy online, 93% of secondhand shops still operate exclusively in person – no online listings, no digital storefront.

One major reason is the sheer hassle of digitizing inventory. Unlike new goods, where retailers can simply pull images and descriptions from manufacturer catalogs and set prices with a standard markup, every secondhand item is unique. Photographing, describing, and pricing each piece by hand is slow and tedious.

Minimist built an app that promises to cut that digitization effort by 95%.

The workflow is simple: a seller photographs an item, and within 30 seconds the app returns a title, description, and structured list of attributes. An AI model identifies the product from the photo, searches the web for relevant information, and assembles a ready-to-publish listing.

It also suggests a price, benchmarked against what similar items are actually selling for online.

All of this can happen at the point of intake – the moment a customer walks in to sell something. The seller snaps a photo, gets a description and pricing recommendation, and links the item to its supplier in the app's built-in CRM, keeping inventory and accounting clean from day one.

Pricing runs from €29/month plus 10% of sales at the entry tier, up to €199/month plus 2% at the top tier. Higher plans unlock higher scan volumes and extras like automatic cross-posting to secondhand marketplaces.

Minimist is based in Austria and launched last summer. Since then it has signed up 14 European stores, including one of the largest secondhand retail chains in the world.

02 /Why It Matters

The secondhand goods market has been on a sustained growth trajectory across Europe and globally. In 2021, European resale was a €21 billion market; globally, it reached $86 billion. By 2028, European secondhand is expected to hit €86 billion, with global volumes approaching $346 billion.

A few numbers reveal just how far this trend has penetrated. Secondhand apparel sales in the US last year grew seven times faster than total retail – a clear sign that resale is actively cannibalizing the new-goods market. And this isn't just a budget phenomenon: sales of pre-owned luxury items – designer clothing, bags – have grown at 1.5x the rate of new luxury goods since 2017.

The trend cuts across age groups. Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X are all buying secondhand at roughly similar rates. Only Baby Boomers (60+) are meaningfully behind the curve. And by country, around 60% of both Americans and Brits bought at least one secondhand item in 2023, closely followed by French, German, and Mexican consumers – suggesting this is a mainstream behavioral shift, not a subcultural one.

The most popular secondhand categories in the US, in order: clothing, footwear, books, movies and games, fashion accessories, furniture and home décor, consumer electronics, appliances, toys, luggage, pet supplies, sporting goods, and garden items. Broad enough that almost any retail category has a secondhand layer developing beneath it.

03 /Opportunities

As demand grows, so does the supply side – both online marketplaces and physical stores are multiplying.

For Europe's offline secondhand shops – Minimist's immediate target audience – there are roughly 75,000 of them. The US has around 25,000. And that's before counting the rest of the world. The addressable market for tools like Minimist is genuinely substantial.

The natural next thought: what if someone built a Shopify equivalent for secondhand retail? With its own category-specific features, starting with exactly the kind of fast digitization Minimist already offers. That, in fact, could be one plausible direction for the company itself.

Here's why the Shopify analogy is apt. Early investors famously passed on Shopify because they thought 40,000 existing online stores was too small a market.

What those investors got wrong, as Shopify's founder later explained, was that they failed to anticipate how dramatically Shopify would lower the friction of starting an online store. Once that friction fell, virtually every offline retailer came online – and a wave of new digital-only sellers followed. Shopify didn't serve the existing market; it created a new one.

The secondhand market may be in exactly that position now. Consumer demand is there. But friction still stops sellers – especially offline shops – from going digital. Whoever removes that friction stands to capture serious value.