Liz Randle wants to know where else you could find a ra-ra dress next to a pair of pyjamas on a sales rack. She pulls the dress out, and its blue sequins glitter under the warehouse light.
“Only here,” Randle says, before moving down the next aisle, where TV monitors sit on shelves next to fluffy rugs, which sit next to outdoor TV projectors, which sit next to rows and rows of new shoes, all still in their boxes.
The warehouse in Melbourne’s industrial south-east is filled to the brim with goods Vinnies Victoria is going to sell in its new online store. Workers meticulously sort through items before they’re photographed, uploaded to the cloud and put on the website for sale.
They’ve called it the “shop that never sleeps”.
“Our customers have been asking for this for a while,” Randle says. “So we thought, right, let’s go, let’s get serious about this.”
Over the past 10 years, op shops around Australia have changed. No longer are they small stores where bargain hunters find $1 bins; now they’re often stylish, with a high level of visual merchandising. And increasingly, they’re moving online.
Salvos has had an online store for five years, while Vinnies Victoria launched theirs late last November and Vinnies NSW are about to establish an online fashion store, one to rival Asos.
Randle says while they’ve only had an online store open for a few weeks, the idea started 10 years ago – with 700 Star Wars figurines.
“Back then we got a donation from the general public, from a collector of Star Wars,” she says. “His whole house was covered with them.”
They split the collection into affordable groups and put them up on eBay. Buyers – including one from South America – snapped them up.
“That opened our eyes,” she says. “We were like, ‘This has got amazing reach.’”
From clothing to electricals, the online store sells an eccentric array of items – Randle says one benefit is being able to find a market for items they couldn’t put in stores.
“The other day, and I’m not even joking, [someone] donated a caravan,” she says. “We sold that in 48 hours.”
A hospital bed worth $7,000, an Olympic-level training bike for paraplegics – they’ve gone up online and out the warehouse door at a discounted price.
Most of it is not niche or unique – it’s good quality garments and bric-a-brac that will appeal to a wide customer base, she says.
“You won’t be finding a $2 T-shirt,” she says.
Randle says this won’t replace the brick-and-mortar stores. Vinnies has 121 stores around the country and has opened 11 in the last six months. Last year they sold 4m items – up from 1m the year before.
“Driving that is a huge shift in the market around sustainability, and ‘buy nothing new’ trends, with the younger generation really bringing that to the fore,” she says.
“But we’re seeing an increase in working poor over the past five years. You’ve got families out there where mum and dad are both working [and] it’s still a struggle.”
Sophie Noonan is the founder of Oppspot – a website where op shops around the country can put their goods online. They take a 2% commission, which is low compared with sites like Depop which take 8%, and offer a “sell it for you” package, where they collect, photograph and ship the stock for Melbourne’s stores.
She says op shops moving online is important – not just for the major players so they can fund their social programs, but for smaller stores so they can continue to compete.
“Many op shops, they’re largely volunteer run,” she says. “If someone calls in sick or goes on a holiday, sometimes that op shop doesn’t open and they don’t raise funds that day.
“We’re really about making sure that they have a shopfront that is always open 24 hours a day. Rain, hail or shine.”
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By early May, Vinnies NSW will launch its new online store – with a twist. Marketing and communications director Tom Morgan flicks his mouse through the beta version of the site, moving between brands.
“We’re very excited about this,” he says. “What we’re launching is a fashion site, aimed at gen Y, gen Z, millennials.”
It looks fresh, like a thrifty version of Asos with a socially conscious catch. Customers can filter between price points of under $10 and under $100. None of it will be fast fashion.
“There’s going to be no Uniqlo, there’s no Target, there’s no Kmart,” he says. “Because we know that it doesn’t last, and it stretches, and there’s drama with it.”
There won’t be bric-a-brac or electronics. Instead, shoppers will flick between Adidas, New Balance, and high-end brands.
“As we go live, we’ll have around 1,000 different brands on the website,” he says.
“They’ll be 30,000 products on day one.”
While there is a rush of charities wanting to get online, some have long been in the game. The Brotherhood of St Laurence has been selling books online since 2009.
The books are donated through their op shops before being checked for defects and personal messages so that information can be included in the selection.
“Since launching, we’ve sold hundreds of thousands of books, with 77,000 books finding new homes last year alone,” BSL’s head of social enterprises, Alison Fletcher, says.
“Demand fluctuates throughout the year, peaking during key sales periods like EOFY and Black Friday. Rare and collectible books, literary classics and fiction remain particularly popular.”
As stores move online, though, they have one challenge to contend with: how to keep prices low while including postage.
Salvos has more than 400 stores around the country. One way around it is by giving customers the option to pick it up from a store if the product is close to them, says general manager of customer and strategy Sarah Knox.
They launched their online store in 2020 when Covid forced their brick-and-mortar stores to close. Knox says it was so popular the site crashed within 10 minutes. Now capable of handling a lot more traffic, she says they keep seeing an increase in customers.
“There is an increased demand for secondhand clothing,” she says.
“Some people are keen to shop secondhand because they know that it has a positive impact on the environment, and they can contribute to a circular economy.
“We also know that we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, and some people, they know that shopping secondhand is a more affordable way of clothing their families.”