Everything was ready. A few weeks before Christmas, Angélique carefully chose, bought and then wrapped a pretty plaid for her husband, to slip under the tree during the holidays. But before the official New Year’s Eve party, a couple close to her is ahead of her: without knowing it, they offer their friend the same type of blanket. By opening the gift from his wife, eight days later, the element of surprise is somewhat spoiled for the father of the family. “It’s a pity, but it doesn’t matter: he simply decided to resell the duplicate on the Internet”, says Angélique, without taboo. The day after Christmas, the man posts a photo of the plaid, completely new, on the eBay platform. It will be resold for ten euros. “It prevents it from taking up space for nothing in a closet, and we reinvest this money for something else. I didn’t take it badly, I prefer it to be useful!” comments this childcare assistant, whose daily life has been largely impacted by inflation.
For “three or four years”, the couple no longer hesitates to resell the gifts received in duplicate, the decorative objects offered by the family and which do not always please them, or video games, board games and other picture books that did not convince their children. “We avoid telling the relatives who gave them to us, but it allows us to put some money aside”, they explain, estimating that they have earned “300 to 400 euros over a year”. And during this holiday season, these Ile-de-France residents are far from the only ones to scour online sales sites to resell their freshly received gifts. Between December 24 and this Monday, December 26, the management of eBay France thus indicates to L’Express to have received nearly 600,000 new advertisements on its site. By January 3, the platform estimates that nearly 3 million publications will have been posted.
The same results for the specialized company Le Bon Coin, which observes a peak in traffic each year “of around 10%” on its site during the holiday period, in particular in the categories “games and toys”, “decorations”, and “multimedia”. In two days, the online resale site Rakuten claims to have recorded nearly 800,000 new ads on its platform. “It does not surprise us: each year, we have an increase in attendance at this period, and the number of advertisements is always more important”, specifies the company. According to a barometer made by Rakuten and published on December 15 in partnership with Ipsos, no less than half of French people were considering reselling one of their Christmas gifts if they did not suit them – an increase of 8 points compared to Last year.
No less than 39% of new buyers indicate that they resell these gifts “because they will not be used” – a trend up 7 points compared to 2021 -, while 20% explain that they wish to participate in the circular economy, by offering a second life to objects that they do not wish to keep. And while 53% of those questioned admit that inflation has impacted their purchasing power, 16% of those polled say that their gifts will be resold for budgetary reasons. In 2021, only 10% made this argument. At each sale of second-hand gifts, the few euros recovered by Angélique thus land in “a small savings box”, which allows the family to afford an entry for an amusement park or a show, for example. “Without that, we couldn’t necessarily afford it,” she breathes.
“Me, it will allow me to buy furniture for my new apartment”, justifies Mehdi, account manager for a Parisian communication agency. For the first time this year, the young man has decided to resell a few gifts received for Christmas on the Rakuten site: fifty euros for the new speaker offered by a member of his family, a hundred euros for a bag chosen by his sister… “These are things that I already have… So I prefer to resell to invest in something that I really need”. For him, no secrets: his relatives are already aware of the resale of these gifts. “It’s not always very pleasant, but they understand. People are gradually becoming more complex around this subject”. According to the study carried out by Ipsos, one in three French people would say they were “understanding” if they learned that a gift they had offered had been resold.
“Social norms are slowly changing, but they are still changing. Just like for the second-hand gift, which was previously quite frowned upon, we are increasingly normalizing the fact of reselling an object offered on the Internet”, deciphers Valérie Guillard, professor of marketing at the University of Paris-Dauphine. According to this specialist in the second-hand market, the proliferation of platforms or dedicated sites would have greatly multiplied this type of resale. “Returning a gift you don’t like has always existed. But now you can do it easily, anonymously, and on a massive scale.” According to a Kantar study for eBay published in mid-December, the resale of these gifts would have made it possible to reinject, in 2022, more than 336 million euros into the French economy.
