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Reseller

Company or individual that buys goods or services for resale

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated October 29, 2025
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

A reseller is a company or individual (merchant) that purchases goods or services with the intention of selling them for profit rather than consuming or using them. Resale can be seen in everyday life from yard sales to selling used cars.

Reselling creates a circulation of products, which extends the lifespan of products and reduces the amount of waste in landfills; a used clothing purchased over a new one saves an average about 1 kg of waste, 22 kg of CO2, and 3,040 liters of water. In 2023 the apparel resale market in the US reached approximately $193.7 billion.

01Thrift stores

Dating back to the Middle Ages, trading of secondhand clothing continues in the 21st century. Examples of thrifting organizations include The Salvation Army and Goodwill.

Women's blouse at a Goodwill
Women's blouse at a Goodwill

02Online resellers

The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Hewi, Collector Square, Depop, eBay, StockX, Chrono24, and Dotte are active in the online reselling market.

03Software and telecommunications

In telecommunications, companies buy excess amounts of transmission capacity or call time from other carriers and resell it to smaller carriers. A software reseller is a consultant who sells the software from large companies under a licence, having no legal employment status with the parent company and generally operating on a freelance basis. Software resellers work with small and medium enterprises (SMEs), local businesses and niche operators. This benefits the software house as they may not hold the resources for the legwork needed to spread their network on a lower scale. While it benefits the reseller because they can build up networks of smaller clients and become a single point of contact for them for every aspect concerned with the software, be it advice, training or updating.

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Reseller”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons:

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Related topics

Value-added reseller

A value-added reseller is a company that adds features or services to an existing product, then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated or complete "turnkey" product. This practice occurs commonly in the electronics or IT industry, where, for example, a VAR might bundle a software application with supplied hardware.

Price discrimination

Price discrimination, known also by several other names, is a microeconomic pricing strategy whereby identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers, based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of. Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.

First-sale doctrine

The first-sale doctrine is a legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works (for example, enabling individuals to sell their legally purchased books or CDs to others).