[Korea Seven]
In most cases, secondhand trades in South Korea are done by selecting a place to meet and trade between a seller and buyer. Remote trading using local parcel delivery services became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic because of social distancing guidelines. However, some fraudsters tricked buyers to send money first without sending the product. In 2021, a 40-year-old man was arrested for molesting a female victim after he lured the woman by saying he would give away secondhand items for free.
To reduce such incidents, Korea Seven launched a safe offline secondhand trading service called "Seven Pickup" by partnering with Joongonara, the country's largest online secondhand market platform run by Eugene Asset Management. After a test run at some 250 stores for two weeks starting on January 9, the company expanded the trading service to 6,000 stores on January 31. The total number of transactions has exceeded 2,000.
Korea Seven said in a statement that 70 percent of Seven Pickup users were women. "We want to highlight that our service is safer as we adopted non-face-to-face methods in offline spaces," Korea Seven's spokesperson Lee Min-ji told Aju Business Daily on February 8. The company said those in their 40s used the platform the most with 40 percent, followed by 30s with 30 percent.
Data released by the Korea Internet & Security Agency, South Korea's internet watchdog, showed that the country has an online secondhand trading market standing at about 24 trillion won ($19.1 billion) as of December 2021, about six times larger than four trillion won in 2008.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.