# Settling secondhand sales: Pricing symbolic items in an emergent online marketplace environment

## TL;DR

Secondhand clothing resellers use community knowledge and online tools to set prices for symbolic items in online marketplaces.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a sociological framework for understanding pricing practices in emergent online secondhand markets.

## Key findings

- Resellers use offline and online immersion to gain pricing knowledge.
- Pricing practices are shaped by community structures and marketplace interfaces.
- These practices help justify prices to diverse marketplace participants.

## Abstract

How do sellers on online marketplaces determine agreeable prices? This question is a theoretical concern for sociologists but a professional one for secondhand clothing resellers. Thousands of resellers across the United States purchase items from physical secondhand clothing sources and then resell them for a profit on sites such as Depop, Etsy, and Poshmark. They confront two pricing challenges: secondhand clothing items are aesthetic items of non‐standard, uncertain quality, and online marketplaces offer limited explicit institutional support to back pricing claims. I analyze interviews and fieldwork to theorize how resellers price items for sale on online marketplaces. Resellers gain knowledge of secondhand community values and online marketplace technologies via immersion into offline (local reselling networks and secondhand sources) and online spaces (social media and the marketplaces themselves). Resellers selectively draw on these sources of pricing knowledge to deploy similar but varied pricing practices. These situated valuation practices reveal how resellers rely on reselling community structures and reflexively invoke pricing displays on marketplace interfaces to price secondhand clothing. These practices increase confidence in exchange as resellers can suitably justify the prices of material goods to online marketplace participants with varying levels of knowledge and experience.