ShopGoodwill.com, the nonprofit’s online charity auction site, just closed out its best year in its 26-year history and quietly crossed $3 billion in cumulative lifetime sales along the way — proof that thrifting has evolved from a weekend errand into a genuine e-commerce category with its own loyal, competitive bidder base.

A Record Year Built on Steady Growth

The platform generated roughly $450 million in gross merchandise value in 2025, a 22 percent jump over 2024 and the highest annual total in ShopGoodwill’s 26-year history, according to Modern Retail’s reporting, which cited the platform’s own sales figures. Holiday-quarter sales alone grew nearly 50 percent year-over-year, the report noted, suggesting the growth is accelerating rather than plateauing. That single year’s total sits on top of a much longer trajectory: ShopGoodwill crossed $1 billion in cumulative sales five years ago and has nearly tripled that figure since, passing $2.5 billion at its 25th anniversary in 2024, per The NonProfit Times’ milestone coverage.

How the Auction Model Actually Works

ShopGoodwill launched in 1999 as an initiative of Goodwill of Orange County, California, and describes itself as the first e-commerce auction platform created, owned, and operated by a nonprofit, according to The NonProfit Times. Today it draws inventory from more than 135 independently run Goodwill organizations and roughly 2,500 brick-and-mortar stores across North America, feeding an inventory pipeline that Modern Retail reports now lists between 130,000 and 140,000 new items per month, aided by an AI-powered cataloging tool built with Microsoft. About 90 percent of each final sale price flows back to the local Goodwill organization that donated the item, funding job training and placement programs in each community, per The NonProfit Times.

Why Online Thrifting Keeps Growing

George Burt, chief operating officer of ShopGoodwill.com, told Modern Retail that the broader resale market is expanding fast enough to support multiple competitors at once rather than forcing a zero-sum fight for the same shoppers. Modern Retail’s reporting points to several forces behind that expansion: reduced stigma around buying secondhand, value-conscious shoppers responding to inflation and tariffs, a wave of younger buyers entering the resale market for the first time, and the growing normalization of giving secondhand items as gifts. Even so, ShopGoodwill.com’s online arm still represents less than 10 percent of Goodwill’s overall retail revenue, per Modern Retail — a reminder that, for all its growth, digital resale remains a supplement to Goodwill’s roughly 2,500 physical stores rather than a replacement for them.

A Bigger Resale Market, Uneven Results

ShopGoodwill’s steady growth stands out partly because it isn’t universal across the resale sector. The secondhand apparel market as a whole is projected to approach $80 billion in sales by 2026, according to Retail Dive’s coverage of the resale category, but profitability has proven elusive for several of ShopGoodwill’s for-profit peers — the same Retail Dive report noted that resale marketplace ThredUp cut 15 percent of its workforce amid widening losses, even as the broader category continued expanding. ShopGoodwill’s nonprofit structure, funneling proceeds directly back into workforce programs rather than chasing shareholder returns, may be part of why its growth curve has stayed so consistent while venture-backed rivals have struggled to turn a profit on the same underlying demand.

What $3 Billion Actually Represents

It’s worth sitting with what that lifetime total means in practice: every dollar of ShopGoodwill’s $3 billion has come from individually listed, individually bid-on items — a single donated lamp, a box of vintage vinyl, a rack of designer jeans — rather than bulk wholesale liquidation. That auction-by-auction model is slower and more labor-intensive than simply palletizing donations and selling them off in bulk, which is exactly why the site’s expansion into AI-assisted cataloging matters: it’s an attempt to keep that item-level, treasure-hunt shopping experience intact while listing tens of thousands more pieces per month than a manual process could handle. The Microsoft-built tool Modern Retail describes isn’t just a productivity play, either — the same reporting notes it’s designed to create employment opportunities for people with disabilities within Goodwill’s cataloging operations, tying the technology upgrade back to the organization’s core workforce mission rather than treating it as a pure efficiency play.

None of this happened overnight. ShopGoodwill spent its first two decades building the operational muscle — regional Goodwill buy-in, shipping logistics, a trustworthy bidding platform — that made a 22 percent single-year jump possible in year twenty-six rather than year three. The $3 billion milestone isn’t really the story so much as the acceleration underneath it: a 26-year-old nonprofit auction site just posted its single best year yet, and the forces driving that growth — inflation-weary shoppers, a generation raised on resale apps, and a cultural shift away from secondhand stigma — show no sign of slowing down heading into 2026.