Sneaker Resale is Broken: A Year over Year look at a Month on eBay is Astonishing

Last month I wrote a post on how resale was slowing down on both StockX and eBay. During the time since I wrote that post, Sneaker Twitter and Sneaker IG have exploded with discussions on Marcus Jordan backdooring Trophy Room kicks and Benjamin Kickz getting 500 pair of the coveted Union Air Jordan 2. The sneaker market is getting more competitive as part time sneaker hustlers have entered an arena that was once controlled by businesspeople who were plugged in and capable of keeping things under control. Today as more and more people see sneakers as the investment holy grail, things have changed considerably. Buy and hold has turned into move fast and move faster. Store managers, store owners and employees are in on the sneaker grind making it much more difficult to capitalize on what was once a market that didn’t seem as if it was ever going to slow down. The reality was and is… the trend for sneakers has been pointing south for years. Outside of a few anomalies like post-Covid Quarantine, I’ve shown a consistent decline in resale. Why this has happened can be attributed to a variety of reasons, but when you tie in strategies by brands to recapture a lot of those sales via programs like Nike Refurbished, adidas’ partnership with ThredUp, increases in the SRP and the supply chain limiting the number of sneakers available, the decline in resale accelerated. You wouldn’t know that from how Sneaker Twitter and IG are angry about the Trophy Room scandal and the Union AJ2 launch, but the evidence is readily available in my SRP from January of this year. Now this month long analysis of eBay confirms the slowdown has happened there as well. Resellers are paying more for kicks now and those who have access to the shoes have loyalty only to their pockets. What was once treated like sneaker mafia, is now treated like mafia families with no Dons at the table. The person with the most money wins which leaves everyone scrambling for whatever they can grab. Since the top of sneaker resale is FUBAR (including botting), arbitrage, which was once a safe haven for smart resellers, is compressed as well.

Sneaker Sales Slow Down on Third Party Sites – ARCH-USA

In the post on the link above I wrote the following at the start of April:

To imply that sales are down, requires proof. I took a moment to utilize a research tool to search the term “SNEAKERS” on eBay. The result gives a metric showing the decline in every aspect from Mar 28th to April 3rd, 2021 compared to March 21st to March 28th, 2022. The research tool only allows research over the course of a year. Since today is the 28th, I can only search from the 28th. What you’ll find below is that all of the following metrics decreased since last year:

	2021	2022	Percentage Change
Average Sold Price	$99.15	$91.00	-8.22%
Total Sneakers Sold	199,832	174,881	-12.49%
Total Sellers	56,803	51,589	-9.18%
Total Sales	$19,813,342.80	$15,914,171.00	-19.68%

This is a troublesome chart for a variety of reasons, but like StockX, eBay limits the amount of research which can be done on the platform. StockX lists sales for up to a year. To truly understand the gravity of this topic, research would have to begin now, and it would have to document every month in 2021. As the months arrive in 2022, numbers would have to be checked according to the same search requirements. This is only one researched post on the topic. the chart above doesn’t even approach the Sell Through decline. Look at the year over year drop off for these time periods. I will do an update on this post at the end of April to compare a longer timeframe. My predictions will be that sales in April of 2022 will show a decline of 13% – 18%.

The Year Over Year Month Update April 2021 compared to April 2022

I predicted the decline would be 18% at its worst for my research on the keyword “sneakers” I never imagined I’d be so wrong. Any loss year over year is bad, but to utilize the same research keyword and find sales decreased -25.96% should place eBay Sneakers in an active state of finding a way to correct the declines across the board. Comparing a week to a month is a much better way to analyze how sneaker resale has shifted. Sneaker sales have always slowed in April so it’s a very good month to gauge growth in this segment. The peak times of the year, Black Friday, the Holiday Season, Back to School and Tax Time, would create outliers that would rely heavily on the number of sneakers dropped at the height of purchasing. But based on these numbers if I were to continue looking at the statistics, I’m almost certain they would trend in the same direction. The chart below shows the data. To conclude this I’m going to also do a search on brands for the month of April. I wish I would have done this before the data disappeared last year, but I just thought about. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, you can reach by e-mail: cburns@arch-usa.com

Brand Performance on eBay in April 2022

Breaking down brand performance would require a more concise measurement to be done. Access to data with that amount of detail isn’t available. The numbers you’ll find below should be considered approximations. There will be considerable overlap in Nike and Jordan Brand, as well as Yeezy and adidas since sellers will list products using multiple terms and keywords. I used the top sneaker brands from Hypebeast’s Hype Index for the 6 brands below. What do you think of the numbers in this post?