Zhuanzhuan is moving its second-hand goods business into larger physical spaces.

During the National Day holiday, its second Super Zhuanzhuan store opened for trial operations in Shanghai, occupying two floors with a total area exceeding 6,000 square metres, nearly double that of the first Super Zhuanzhuan location.

Compared with the Beijing debut store, the Shanghai flagship has expanded further in scale, with both floor space nearly doubling and the number of items increasing to 50,000.

Inside the store, categories such as pre-owned bags, jewellery and watches, apparel and footwear, digital products and trendy toys each have dedicated display areas, while a category wall featuring bags, trendy toys and digital goods is set up at the entrance to create an experiential space through concentrated display of second-hand products.

Beyond store size, the location of the Super Zhuanzhuan Shanghai flagship also merits attention.

The new store is situated at No. 2066 Nanjing West Road in Jing'an District, at the intersection of Yongyuan Road and Zhenning Road, surrounded by the Jing'an Temple commercial area and distinctive streets such as Yuyuan Road.

This location may be intended to capture spillover foot traffic from core commercial districts and connect with consumer groups from nearby communities, while also giving the store the conditions to display goods in a concentrated manner with a relatively large operating area.

"Shanghai, as China's fashion frontier, has a mature domestic second-hand luxury market and trading population. At the same time, the Shanghai store has added brand zones as well as trendy toy and bicycle categories to meet more needs of in-store consumers," a Zhuanzhuan executive explained.

The executive did not respond to whether the Shanghai store has profitability requirements.

It is evident that Zhuanzhuan is trying to change consumers' perception of traditional second-hand e-commerce platforms through offline stores.

Consumers can directly enter the store to select and compare products, thereby forming an offline-driven online sales model to accelerate turnover.

In addition, categories such as second-hand luxury goods and trendy toys can also break through the platform's established 3C digital consumer mindset through physical displays.

This also poses more challenges to Zhuanzhuan's platform supply chain and store operation capabilities.

Hu Weikun, co-founder and COO of Zhuanzhuan Group and CEO of Hongbulin, mentioned in a previous interview that Zhuanzhuan will continuously adjust the space utilisation of large stores, with shelves that can be flexibly moved and quickly changed according to user needs.

The opening of the Super Zhuanzhuan Shanghai flagship is only part of Zhuanzhuan's offline layout.

Since 2025, Zhuanzhuan's offline store system has accelerated its expansion, gradually building a three-tier store matrix of "Super Zhuanzhuan + Circular Store + Convenience Store."

As Zhuanzhuan's mid-sized store format, the first Circular Store opened in October last year in the Garden Road commercial area of Zhengzhou, and this year the format has further penetrated into leading shopping malls.

In July this year, Zhuanzhuan's fourth Circular Store opened in Guangzhou Fashion Tianhe Commercial Plaza, marking its first entry into a core commercial district of a first-tier city.

Before the National Day holiday, Zhuanzhuan opened its first Foshan store and second Zhengzhou store, located respectively at Foshan King Platinum Center and Zhengzhou Erqi MixC Phase II.

While pushing into core commercial districts of first- and second-tier cities, Zhuanzhuan's Circular Stores are also strengthening multi-category layouts through new stores.

At the new Foshan and Zhengzhou stores, in addition to traditional categories such as mobile phones and digital products, Zhuanzhuan introduced sports equipment for the first time.

It is understood that the sports category will also become a key focus for Zhuanzhuan's continued investment, driving its business to extend from second-hand mobile phones and luxury goods to broader daily consumption scenarios.

In short, Zhuanzhuan is accelerating its capture of the offline market with a differentiated store format strategy.

Zhuanzhuan Circular Stores undertake the function of "experience plus conversion" in core commercial districts of first- and second-tier cities, with a customer profile of local high-frequency young users and interest-driven consumers.

In contrast, the larger Super Zhuanzhuan is positioned as a "brand flagship store" for the mass market, with a user base mainly comprising female users while also reaching families, middle-aged and elderly consumers and high-end clientele, relying on scale and atmosphere to build awareness of "quality second-hand."

As Zhuanzhuan targets the offline market, competitors such as ATRenew and Xianyu are naturally unwilling to fall behind, strengthening their offline fulfilment and delivery capabilities through store expansion or multi-category business development.

According to ATRenew's second-quarter 2026 financial report, its multi-category business maintained rapid growth, with luxury goods recycling service revenue increasing 77.3% year-on-year in the second quarter.

In addition, ATRenew upgraded some core stores and created luxury-themed stores.

According to the financial report, the group plans to further expand the layout of multi-category themed stores within the year, covering luxury-themed stores and sports-themed stores.

Xianyu, which laid out all-category stores offline even earlier, has spent the past year continuously adjusting the operating model of its Xianyu Circular Store format.

After some early stores were closed, Xianyu Circular Stores gradually shifted from a community store positioning to locations in commercial districts and creative distinctive streets.

For example, it further segmented store themes, such as launching Xianyu Circular Store ACG trendy toy collection stores and other vertical themed stores, to differentiate from other physical second-hand stores.

Currently, Xianyu Circular Stores operate nearly 30 locations nationwide, forming a store matrix of "all-category stores plus vertical themed stores."

Similar to Xianyu's vertical themed stores, second-hand e-commerce platform Duozhuayu has also chosen a path different from large all-category stores.

This circular store, which started with second-hand books, places more emphasis on creating a lifestyle space offline, with books and apparel as its core categories, and continuously attracts consumers by hosting cultural events.

From small recycling outlets to large shopping spaces, from communities to core commercial districts of first-tier cities, from all-category stores to vertical themed stores, the competition among second-hand e-commerce platforms for offline space is shifting from simply adding transaction touchpoints to exploring different consumption scenarios.

In recent years, China's second-hand goods market has continued to expand, forming a trillion-yuan market.

Online, according to Frost & Sullivan statistics, the overall transaction scale of China's second-hand consumer electronics rose from 369.8 billion yuan in 2021 to 851.8 billion yuan in 2025.

The expansion of market scale has also attracted more participants.

Currently, online competition among second-hand e-commerce platforms is intensifying, with rising traffic acquisition costs, and platforms such as Xiaohongshu have also begun to enter the idle goods trading sector.

For leading second-hand e-commerce platforms such as Zhuanzhuan and Xianyu, how to find new long-term growth has become an important issue.

According to Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting and retail e-commerce industry expert, the acceleration of second-hand e-commerce platforms such as Zhuanzhuan into offline core commercial districts and the opening of large stores is essentially about building trust infrastructure through physical consumption scenarios and breaking through online traffic growth bottlenecks.

Compared with online transactions, offline stores allow consumers to directly touch products and understand product condition and pricing.

At the same time, large stores can also attract more consumers who originally had no clear second-hand shopping needs through rich product displays and consumption experiences.

Zhuang Shuai believes that from the perspective of user structure and business attributes, these second-hand e-commerce platforms' offline multi-category and all-category stores have already begun to compete directly with traditional retail in the in-store consumption scenarios of young customer groups.

However, the expansion of physical store scale also means platforms need to bear higher operating costs, and supply chain requirements rise accordingly.

Zhuang Shuai pointed out that second-hand goods have non-standardised characteristics, with supply mainly from C-end consumers, making it difficult to plan recycling time, product categories and quantities in advance, and there is a natural contradiction between the massive SKUs needed by large stores and rapid inventory turnover.

This means platforms must find a dynamic balance between expanding product richness and maintaining high turnover rates.

For Zhuanzhuan, as stores such as Super Zhuanzhuan expand from Beijing and Shanghai to more cities, how to rely on its existing recycling, quality inspection and warehousing systems to stabilise supply, and improve inventory turnover efficiency through online and offline product allocation, will become the key to replicating its mid-sized and large stores.