Number of Resale Transactions in June 2021
I had 292 transactions in June 2021. The majority of footwear sold was in the mid-tier price range. This again reinforces the majority of sneakers sold aren’t at the high to premium end. There has to be a caveat here. If you reach out to a reseller who utilizes bots and backdoors to get their inventory, that seller will have more sales at the high to premium end. Numbers will say what you want them to say, but my numbers are closer to what you’ll find at retail and that is an important distinction.
A lot of people are enamored with resale, which makes sense. The powerful sneaker media sites deliver story after story of the shoes that are garnering high resale, but the reason many of these shoes trade at a higher value us because they are limited releases. The shoes aren’t driving the interest and to be honest they aren’t selling in the same consistent numbers that some less written and discussed footwear is selling. For instance, The Vintage Blazer in White and Black BQ6806-100 has sold 18,497 times since March 2019. The Air Jordan 1 Defiant BQ6682-006, released at the same time has only sold 2053 times on StockX. Nike continues to produce runs of the less expensive Blazer and they sell through on every release, but a model that was expected to trade over and over again, under-performed and isn’t a resale sneaker. Here is the compelling information, The Air Jordan 1 Bio Hack 555088-201, has sold 30,193 pair since September 2020. That would make it sound like the Jordan 1 is the best option for resale. Here is the catch, the Bio Hack is a shoe trading at the higher price range. It is being bought to be resold. The Blazer is being bought to be worn and the customer buying that model isn’t looking for “heat” they are looking for a model that is typically in stores. The 18000+ people are possibly new shoppers learning more about the resale platform and they are likely to return again since they can purchase a shoe at around retail. This is a dangerous thing for retailers. It makes StockX as a third party platform a viable component of a sales strategy for the brand. Who would you rather have visiting your site? A customer arriving to shop for themselves, or a customer arriving to buy and flip a finite number of shoes? 30,000 isn’t anything to balk at, but driving up the price of one shoe doesn’t create new sneaker fans does it? If a person is visiting to buy and hold a shoe as an investment is that customer as important for the third party platform? That’s not a rhetorical question. In StockX’s case that customer is important. In a 3rd party platform like eBay, that customer is not. eBay doesn’t have fees on men’s sneaker sold for over 100 dollars. The Blazer on eBay compared to StockX has completed sales at 163. Now it could be that StockX’s interface allows for the shoes to sell quickly, but the Bio Hack on eBay only has 521 pair sold. This is interesting stuff.
As inventory levels are getting better, there still isn’t a lot of hyped, high end footwear available. This means there are fewer resellers being born who can actually create true businesses. If my sales are down, sales for all resellers are down. From May to June my sales dropped from 350 to 292. That’s a stark 16% drop in resale. As I mentioned in part 1, I shifted to wholesale and sold over 500 pair wholesale (primarily Air Force 1s). This 16% drop doesn’t seem to be getting much better in July and wholesale remains a driving force.
IMPORTANT NOTE: All sales are before StockX fees of 11%.
Pricepoints are below:
Low – $1.00 to $60.00
Mid – $60.01 to $120.00
High – $120.01 to $180.00
Premium $180.01 to $240.00 and up
