Reselling News: Amazon Lets Sellers Bid for Faster Delivery and ThredUp Posts Its 2025 Numbers

Delivery speed used to be something a marketplace either gave you or did not. This week Amazon started selling it, and the way it is priced tells you where every platform is heading.

Amazon is now taking bids from sellers who want Sub Same-Day placement

Amazon runs a Sub Same-Day network that gets certain orders to buyers in two to five hours. Products in it sit in dedicated fulfillment centers near roughly 2,300 metro areas, and until now Amazon picked what went in and charged sellers nothing for it. EcommerceBytes reported on August 29 that FBA sellers are being invited to pay their way into the network with additional products.

The mechanics are an auction. Amazon's invitation tells sellers, "You pay only for units that actually ship through Sub Same Day, at the per-unit price you bid. Participation is optional, and you're never charged more than the price per unit you set." Amazon also tells sellers that products in the network have seen 12 percent higher sales than standard FBA delivery in areas where it operates. The free placements continue, according to the same invitation: "We already place some of your products in this network based on the customer demand and supply signals, and that continues unchanged, at no cost to you."

Two things are worth saying plainly. Twelve percent is Amazon's own figure for products it selected, not a promise about the products you nominate. And a network with finite space that starts taking bids has an obvious drift to it, because every unit a seller pays to place is a unit Amazon does not need to place for free.

What to do about it: if you sell on FBA, treat a bid as a test with a number attached rather than a growth lever. Pick a handful of SKUs where velocity is already decent, bid a cent figure you can lose on every unit without flinching, and measure whether total units moved actually rose. A 12 percent lift on a product carrying a fifteen percent margin is not a lift if you bid away eighteen percent of it. If you sell used goods on eBay, Poshmark, or Mercari, the same pressure exists in a cheaper form. Speed there still costs nothing but your own habits, and same-day handling with a real tracking scan is the version of this advantage you get for free.

ThredUp published what a full year of brand resale actually adds up to

ThredUp released its fifth annual impact report on August 25. The company's release says it recirculated 1.7 million secondhand items through its Resale-as-a-Service business in 2025, the arm that runs used-goods programs on behalf of brands, and that it ended the year with more than 1.7 million active buyers shopping across more than 60,000 brands. ThredUp also says it resold roughly 90 percent of the inventory it took in last year.

Resale-as-a-Service is the reason a brand's own website now sells its used product next to its new product. That is 1.7 million items in one year that never reached a thrift bin, an estate sale, or a bulk lot, and it is a supply story before it is anything else. The brands most likely to run these programs are the mid-to-premium labels that resellers actually hunt for.

What to do about it: check whether the brands you flip most often run their own resale storefront, then go look at what those pages ask for the same item you are listing. A brand selling its own used goods sets a visible ceiling, and it is usually higher than the one resellers hold each other to, because the listing carries the brand's name on it. That is useful information when you are deciding whether to price to move or price to wait.

The takeaway

Both items point the same direction. The advantages that used to come free with a platform, fast delivery on Amazon and cheap secondhand supply everywhere else, are being priced and claimed by the people who own the pipes. The counter is knowing your own numbers well enough to tell a real gain from a rented one. Reading a fee or a bid against your actual margin is a skill worth building, and it is one of the things we work through inside The Income Lab.

Hero photo by Todd Van Hoosear, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.