This week, we take a look at the rise of auctions as a business model for secondhand fashion. Auctions provide a potential deal and gamification for customers, higher prices for sellers and a good source of data for the marketplaces that host them.

Thanks to the rise of resale and live shopping platforms like Whatnot, more Americans are buying their secondhand fashion in competitive auctions, rather than straight transactions. Whatnot, which operates livestreamed auctions, reached a $20 billion valuation with over 20 million new accounts created this year, for example. Adobe data from this spring found that nearly 40% of American consumers had purchased from a livestreamed auction.

Bezel, a marketplace for secondhand watches, sells in both a marketplace model and with auctions, with auctions rapidly growing in popularity. Auctions now make up around 45% of all sales on the Bezel platform, according to co-founder and CEO Quaid Walker.

The move toward auctions has also come for resale platforms that don’t typically sell in that channel. ThredUp, known for its typical marketplace resale model, partnered with Whatnot earlier this month to begin hosting livestream auctions from its distribution centers in Dallas and Atlanta.

ThredUp’s leadership pointed to the $22 billion market value of the live shopping industry as reason for the move. The idea is to bring the millions of SKUs that ThredUp handles to Whatnot’s massive audience.

“With fashion as one of Whatnot’s largest categories, and with a highly engaged community of buyers, we see this as an incredible opportunity to meet the next generation of secondhand shoppers where they are,” James Reinhart, CEO of ThredUp, said at the time of the launch.

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