{"title":"Settling secondhand sales: Pricing symbolic items in an emergent online marketplace environment.","authors":"Ryan Fajardo","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13168","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do sellers on online marketplaces determine agreeable prices? This question is a theoretical concern for sociologists but a professional one for secondhand clothing resellers. Thousands of resellers across the United States purchase items from physical secondhand clothing sources and then resell them for a profit on sites such as Depop, Etsy, and Poshmark. They confront two pricing challenges: secondhand clothing items are aesthetic items of non-standard, uncertain quality, and online marketplaces offer limited explicit institutional support to back pricing claims. I analyze interviews and fieldwork to theorize how resellers price items for sale on online marketplaces. Resellers gain knowledge of secondhand community values and online marketplace technologies via immersion into offline (local reselling networks and secondhand sources) and online spaces (social media and the marketplaces themselves). Resellers selectively draw on these sources of pricing knowledge to deploy similar but varied pricing practices. These situated valuation practices reveal how resellers rely on reselling community structures and reflexively invoke pricing displays on marketplace interfaces to price secondhand clothing. These practices increase confidence in exchange as resellers can suitably justify the prices of material goods to online marketplace participants with varying levels of knowledge and experience.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"British Journal of Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13168","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
How do sellers on online marketplaces determine agreeable prices? This question is a theoretical concern for sociologists but a professional one for secondhand clothing resellers. Thousands of resellers across the United States purchase items from physical secondhand clothing sources and then resell them for a profit on sites such as Depop, Etsy, and Poshmark. They confront two pricing challenges: secondhand clothing items are aesthetic items of non-standard, uncertain quality, and online marketplaces offer limited explicit institutional support to back pricing claims. I analyze interviews and fieldwork to theorize how resellers price items for sale on online marketplaces. Resellers gain knowledge of secondhand community values and online marketplace technologies via immersion into offline (local reselling networks and secondhand sources) and online spaces (social media and the marketplaces themselves). Resellers selectively draw on these sources of pricing knowledge to deploy similar but varied pricing practices. These situated valuation practices reveal how resellers rely on reselling community structures and reflexively invoke pricing displays on marketplace interfaces to price secondhand clothing. These practices increase confidence in exchange as resellers can suitably justify the prices of material goods to online marketplace participants with varying levels of knowledge and experience.
期刊介绍：
British Journal of Sociology is published on behalf of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is unique in the United Kingdom in its concentration on teaching and research across the full range of the social, political and economic sciences. Founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the LSE is one of the largest colleges within the University of London and has an outstanding reputation for academic excellence nationally and internationally. Mission Statement: • To be a leading sociology journal in terms of academic substance, scholarly reputation , with relevance to and impact on the social and democratic questions of our times • To publish papers demonstrating the highest standards of scholarship in sociology from authors worldwide; • To carry papers from across the full range of sociological research and knowledge • To lead debate on key methodological and theoretical questions and controversies in contemporary sociology, for example through the annual lecture special issue • To highlight new areas of sociological research, new developments in sociological theory, and new methodological innovations, for example through timely special sections and special issues • To react quickly to major publishing and/or world events by producing special issues and/or sections • To publish the best work from scholars in new and emerging regions where sociology is developing • To encourage new and aspiring sociologists to submit papers to the journal, and to spotlight their work through the early career prize • To engage with the sociological community – academics as well as students – in the UK and abroad, through social media, and a journal blog.
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