The concept of thrifting clothes is not a new one and it’s more than likely you can find numerous thrift stores in your own neighborhood that are just waiting to be explored. However, along with physical thrift stores, the presence of online thrift shopping has been growing and with National Thrift Shop Day amongst us, we wanted to share our top tips for making the most out of resale in retail and thrift shopping online.
Tip 1: Know Your Personal Style
One of the best things you can do before choosing to shop online is to identify and understand what your own personal style is. Knowing your signature style can help to serve as a filter, allowing you to shop more strategically and intentionally.
When you buy pieces that you know you’re going to absolutely love that are not only going to flatter your personal style, but also represent your personality, that’s when you know you’ve captured the vision of your best self.
Tip 2: Select Your Color Palette and Know What You’re After
Shopping online can certainly feel overwhelming at times so nailing down concepts like your own unique color palette and which key pieces of clothing are missing from your wardrobe can help to prevent you from rushing to fill a gap or getting sidetracked and purchasing something you don’t really need.
A key benefit of knowing your preferred color palette is that this can help you stick to the colors you know work best for you, permitting you to maximize wear and establishing more versatility with the ability to mix and match items much more easily.
Tip 3: Choose a Shop with Spot-on Site Search Results
Even if you know what you’re looking for when you go thrift shopping online, it’s going to be next to impossible if the search results aren’t bringing you the pieces you actually want.
In order for you to be able to find what you’re actually looking for with the least amount of clicks possible, then 10+ pages of irrelevant results isn’t going to cut it.
When an online shop uses granular, customer-centered product attribution data and enables long-tail contextual searches, you can easily be guided directly to the items you really want without the hassle of endless scrolling.
Tip 4: Leverage a Tool Like thredUP’s “Thrift the Look”
Using an online tool with shopping can help you to remove some of the noise and prioritize what works best for you by finding the right matches to your sizing, price range, brand preferences, and even color palette.
thredUP, the world’s largest online secondhand shopping destination with thousands upon thousands of like-new styles from favorite brands around the world at up to 90% off the price of estimated retail, functions similarly to most online shopping platforms. However, they put themselves high above the rest with their tool, “Thrift the Look.” This innovative tool, co-developed by Lily AI allows you to recreate the outfits you love sustainability, matching your most-hearted looks with similar styles.
With more than 100,000 items arriving every day from sellers’ closets, thredUP works to categorize and tag products at tremendous scale. Its inventory includes more than 50,000 brands and hundreds of categories, each with dozens of attribute groups—any of which could lead you to the item you want.
Lily AI’s Product Intelligence helps thredUP shoppers like you to find what you’re looking for more exactly with two to three times as many attributes to search and explore for the perfect outfit.
On average, Lily AI has increased sell-through by 15%, along with
- Tagging 275,000+ images per week
- Providing a 2%+ conversion rate lift for customers who’ve purchased >2 times
- Producing a 2.8%+ conversion rate lift on iOS
- Increasing favorites per user by 2.1%
- Co-developing the cutting-edge “Thrift The Look” shopping experience
