Recommerce or reverse commerce, refers to the recovery of products over electronic systems, such as the Internet, or through physical distribution channels.
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History of the term
In February 2005, in an interview for The New York Times, George F. Colony, chief executive of Forrester Research, was the first to introduce the term recommerce to answer a question about the increase in spending: "There's a lot of shelf-life issues out there. People are a couple of releases behind. Older PCs. There is a move to really go back to - we call it 'recommerce'. Instead of 'ecommerce', it's 'recommerce'". He said.
Later, the term was used by Martin Tobias on the news site Xconomy technology in October 2008, appeared in France in February 2010 in the newspaper Les Echos and in Germany in 2011 in Deutsche Startup. In October 2011, Trendwatching, an independent source for Consumer Trends and Insights, published an article presenting the recommerce as a trend for consumers to sell their property as easily as they buy them.
In March 2011, Fast Company published an article to promote some recommerce initiatives.
In November 2011, The Boston Globe published an article about recommerce.
How it works
Recommerce allows users to sell a property:
This kind of resale allows sellers to overcome some marketplaces drawbacks, by providing a means of simplified acquisition, and immediate and guaranteed value.
Types of purchased products
Examples of the main assets of companies acquired by recommerce include:
Many ecommerce services have introduced recommerce solutions, including distributors, online retailers, and chain retailers.
The various marketing positions recommerce
Multiple types of recommerce services are available:
Recommerce companies
Various private companies compose the recommerce market. They provide business-to-business solutions (online, in-store/in-warehouse) to operators, retailers and manufacturers; business-to-customer (B2C) websites intended to provide access to these goods to end consumers; or consumer-to-consumer platforms that facilitate recommerce directly between consumers:
Benefits
Many studies show that the depletion of natural resources is mainly caused by the household consumption, through the processes of manufacturing, transportating, distribution, and use of a product.
The reuse of a product is an effective means of reducing products' environmental footprint.
By leveraging the best practices of e-commerce and the geographical location of outlets, recommerce recreates, online, functions performed locally by second-hand brick-and-mortar shops that have many constraints for the product holder.
The product holder increases its purchasing power to acquire a new product by selling back its old one.
The development factors
Several factors have greatly accelerated the development of recommerce in developed countries, including:
In France, the rise of recommerce is partly supported by the "Grenelle II" Law, which states that when they are sold under the brand name of a single dealer, it must "provide or contribute to the collection, removal and treatment of electrical and electronic equipment waste instead of the person who manufactures, imports or brings in the domestic market (...) this equipment regardless of the selling technique, including distance selling and electronic sales".
Issues of recommerce
Recommerce requires a special organization of many functions, such as: logistics management, information systems, customer relations, price control and treatment of the product in the shop, promotion, retention, and resale. Functional products recovered via recommerce solutions are usually put back on the market by the recommercer. Moreover, when this product exceeds local demand, recommercers sometimes turn to foreign markets to sell the products they have purchased. Thus, the recommercer sells some of these used functional products in emerging markets where access to technology and accelerating economic development are reserved for some part of the population.