Cost, slave labour and scams: the drivers for teenagers buying online

© Jose Maria Calsina Val |

As we bring The Loadstar’s ecommerce series to a close, we are going to end with teenage buyers: what makes them tick?

Ecommerce, as everyone knows, is driving demand in air cargo. But, as we have explored over the past fortnight in The Loadstar’s ecommerce series, there are significant numbers of existential threats to the ecommerce model currently used by several large platforms.

Governments are eyeing the sector – for lost taxes, environmental and labour concerns, surveillance and security worries, among other things. But in addition, both the economics of airfreighting a $2 t-shirt, as well as the emissions from that shipment, indicate the model of shipping direct to consumer from the factory in China is simply not sustainable.

Aside from governments however, which tend to act slowly and unilaterally, it could be the buyers that start to make a stand. But what makes an 18-year-old ecommerce buyer tick?

The first thing is price. And that has sparked a wave of interest in second-hand clothes. Vinted, a Lithuanian unicorn with more than 65m registered users, available in 21 countries, is wildly popular. It doesn’t take a mandatory fee from the buyer or seller, but offers a paid-for guarantee, or a cost for promoting items. Often the clothes sold on the platform are new, or worn just once or twice. It’s a massive clothes library, with badly wrapped parcels to-ing and fro-ing all over countries every day. It’s sustainable in some ways, which is on the ‘nice-to-have’, rather than ‘required’, list for teens – but relies on getting its used wares from the Sheins of this world.

One 18-year-old told The Loadstar she spends about 80% of her clothes budget on Vinted – about four items a week.

“If I get something from Vinted and I don’t like it, then I’ll try and sell it on almost instantly. It’s easier to sell back on Vinted than to do returns from one of the other platforms, so you also can find lots of new clothes on it.”

Any sanctions that would raise costs for buyers, such as the new French law, would stop teenage shoppers buying on ecommerce platforms.

“I’m very poor,” said one 15-year-old. “I would buy a pair of jeans for £3.50 – but I wouldn’t want to pay for shipping on top of that, or any other fees.”

The teen shoppers also had concerns about forced labour being used in the clothing’s manufacture – more so than the environmental cost of ecommerce. The 18-year old noted that she didn’t like some of the large Chinese platforms for that reason.

“Everyone was excited by one platform, because you could get clothes for £2, but when you go and look, they are throwing sales at you and you know this isn’t actually good for anyone. It makes you feel a bit gross, because you know people are being exploited.

“Everyone who buys from [that one Chinese platform] knows the clothes are being made by slaves. It’s not one of those things people don’t know about.”

The other concern is of being scammed. One site, said the shopper, “just looks like scamming, it looks so cheap”. She once bought from TikTok Shop, “but it never arrived. I got a refund, but I won’t use it again.”

And data sharing may be a concern for governments – but not teenagers.

“As an 18 year old, I don’t really care how my data is being used. It’s not something that affects me. I don’t know what they’d want to use it for.”

The second-hand ecommerce market is perhaps another existential threat to the new platforms, and although they take the vast majority of their goods from other fast fashion sites, there are a lot of clothes already in the market. It was estimated – in 2019 – that more than two tonnes of clothing are bought each minute in the UK. That number is on the rise, so sites like Vinted will have feedstock for some time.

Ecommerce itself is clearly here to stay. But the impact of airfreighting cheap clothes, and concerns over China’s dominance of the market, could in time slow the demand for airline capacity as governments – or shoppers – start to act.

Which means it’s probably time to start looking for the Next Big Thing in air cargo.