comprise repair services, fibre identification, sorting technology and take-back pathways that determine whether recommerce can operate as retail infrastructure rather than a passing trend. This year, Ebay is opening applications across the EU, Switzerland and Canada for the first time. Eight selected companies will each receive $75,000 alongside mentoring, with one named Global Winner eligible for an additional $450,000 investment from Ebay Ventures. For retailers, the message is clear that recommerce is expected to perform commercially. The expansion arrives as secondhand retail continues to harden into a category. ThredUp forecasts the global secondhand apparel market will reach $367 billion by 2029, as resale shifts from an alternative behaviour to a default one. In the US, that shift is already apparent as 58 per cent of consumers said they shopped secondhand apparel in 2024, up six percentage points year on year, according to ThredUp’s 2025 report. What is changing is habit over sentiment.  Australia, however, offers a more ambiguous reading. Seamless’ national clothing benchmark found Australians bought 1.51 billion items of clothing in 2024, even as the sale or sharing of secondhand clothing rose 10 per cent year on year. At the same time, 220,000 tonnes of clothing still went to landfill, barely shifting from the year before. Circulation is increasing, yet throughput remains high. The result is a system that moves faster, but not necessarily lighter. Ebay’s own language frames this as an operational problem rather than a moral one. Alexis Hoopes, vice president and global head of fashion at Ebay said, “When we launched the Circular Fashion Fund, we set out to support businesses turning circularity from ambition into action. Over the past three years, we’ve seen scalable solutions emerge in areas like textile recycling, resale and repair — but these businesses need capital and support to grow. With this expansion, we’re helping more founders build the infrastructure to make circular fashion an integral part of the fashion industry.” The emphasis is evident that Ebay is not arguing why circular fashion matters but concentrating on how it becomes viable. One example already within eBay’s orbit is Refiberd, a California-based company using AI to identify fibre composition in garments, addressing one of textile recycling’s most persistent failures. Without accurate fibre identification, blended materials default to downcycling or disposal. In that sense, fibre tracing is less a sustainability gesture than a prerequisite for scale. “The investment from Ebay Ventures will help us close a significant round of fundraising for the business, allowing us to expand our technology to new recycling partners, strengthen our AI capabilities, and move faster towards our mission of enabling true textile-to-textile recycling,” said Sarika Bajaj, founder of Refiberd. Australia already offers early signs of how circular fashion shifts from principle to practice. Azura Fashion Group, the business behind Azura Runway, previously told Inside Retail it was embedding resale into its returns flow rather than treating it as a standalone initiative. “We’re finding more customers in the millennial age group are interested in secondhand clothing, rather than brand new, so we’re evolving our business model to actually resell the returns that we’re getting,” Azura Fashion Group CEO Sam Wood said. What makes Ebay’s move instructive for retailers is not solely the language of circularity, but the confidence behind it. Contrary to a philanthropic exercise, it is a belief that money can be made from keeping products in circulation for longer through resale, repair, returns management and recycling infrastructure that lowers waste and unbars new revenue streams. As Ebay bankrolls the systems that make recommerce viable, the circular economy is moving behind rhetoric, becoming something retailers are expected to extract value from.