Living in Shanghai can be expensive. Besides skyrocketing house prices, quality furniture and home appliances can be a bothersome expense base, especially when you already own those particular items in your home country.
After ranting about these costs, a friend recommended us a second hand shop. He visited the place before and bought a projector for 700 RMB (€ 70/80), allowing him to throw movie nights and play games in grand on his living room wall. I thought: A second hand shop in Shanghai, what a great idea! Overseas expats like to live quality lives here but usually only stay a few years, creating opportunity to buy their stuff for a fair price.
The shop the friend recommended is called Shanghai Secondhand and is idea of a US expat in 2008. She asked her Chinese teacher whether she was interested to start the business as a partner. They applied for a business license, setup a simple website, moved in a small apartment and they were in business! The concept is simple:
If you have items you would like to sell please email us with a detailed description of all items along with pictures. We will then reply back to you with our offer and any questions we have. We may pick up your items from you if you have enough items. You set the price of your item, and we
take care of selling it on the site catalog and in the shop. You then keep 80% of your price and we keep 20%.
My girlfriend visited them last week and described the place as a apartment packed with second hand stuff. The girl (we didn’t know who she was) was speaking perfect English and there were a lot of things to discover for reasonable prices. We bought a blender and a toaster for 180 RMB and have been eating crunchy toast with fresh tomato juice in the morning ever since.
Donations
Besides for profit trading they also do some philanthropic activities, including the gathering and distribution of second hand clothes for Chinese people in need. An American called Jeff donated a big pile of items to sell for charity.
The second hand shop also collects donations for the “River Of Heart” charity organization and an orphanage called Starfish, founded in Xian in 2005. Since then they took care of 55 babies, had 16 adoptions to Europe and US and have arranged for more than 40 surgeries. In the fall of 2009, secondhand shop Shanghai donated 16100 RMB to Starfish to help at he surgery of a kid named Teresa, whom has recovered well ever since.
