After defining your recommerce goals, the next critical step is gap analysis — comparing your desired future state with your current capabilities and identifying what’s missing. Most retailers find gaps in four main categories: technology, data, operations, and people.
1. Technology gaps
Many retailers lack systems that can handle serialized or individualized inventory, which prevents scalable resale or rental operations. Without this, it’s impossible to track condition, images, and pricing per item across multiple channels.
- Build or buy? Most retailers benefit from adopting existing software like Twice Commerce, rather than building from scratch. This allows fast pilots and low-cost testing without multimillion-dollar development efforts.
2. Data gaps
Data fragmentation is another common issue. Returns, sales, and inventory data often live in different systems, making it difficult to generate a full picture of what’s available and in what condition. A connected platform bridges these data silos — powering personalized listings, resale pricing, and reporting.
3. Operational gaps
For many retailers, the challenge isn’t tech — it’s people and processes. Do your employees know how to inspect and grade items? Should you train them or partner with a third-party refurbisher?
- Specialized retailers should invest in employee know-how; customers expect expertise.
- General retailers might rely on partners for refurbishment and imaging, keeping focus on core operations.
4. People and user experience
Even the best system fails without adoption. That’s why intuitive software design is key. Twice Commerce, for instance, scales from small shops to enterprises — simple enough for a new user to grasp in 30 seconds, yet powerful enough to serve teams of hundreds.
A scalable approach
Gap analysis isn’t about perfection — it’s about filling the most critical gaps first so you can launch, learn, and grow. The goal is to create a flexible, horizontal system that allows selling items multiple times, across various recommerce models, without locking you into a single use case.
Karri: Now you know your capabilities and based on those now you have some kind of a goal. Then the next step is probably kind of merge this into an analyze if there is any gaps that need to be filled or resolved before actually moving on.
Tuomo: Definitely so dependent on your ambition level you've defined what you want the reality to be and then you've done your analysis of what can be done right now and then most likely you have some gaps in some of the capabilities. Maybe you're lacking a system that can handle serialized or individualized inventory management which prevents you from in a scalable way selling items in in-store, in a shop-in-shop or online or both at the same time with unique product images and pricing and so on. So then it's up to you to then define how do you how do you bridge the gap. Classic one is that either you build or you buy. So either you build the solution yourself or you go and buy it from the market.
Tuomo: In terms of software we at Twice Commerce would say that probably better to buy. There's us and couple of other players in the market that are helping retailers to bridge the gap in an efficient way where you don't have to spend hundreds of thousands or even millions in software development building a system that you're not yet fully committed to. You just want to launch for example a test drop in one store. So that's where companies like Twice Commerce help you a lot so you don't have to front load a lot of investments in software.
Tuomo: Where I think it gets more fuzzy is then if you have gaps in your operational capabilities. So for example the inspection process. So if your store employees can't yet do it do you build so do you invest in their capability of knowing the products better or do you have some kind of a partner that you kind of direct all of your product returns to a partner warehouse that handles all of that and kind of gives you as a feedback the information of the grading and valuation of items and maybe takes those product images that you can then use in your own online store maybe with a system like Twice Commerce.
Tuomo: There I think it's super case by case because if you think about it investing effort in your own employees knowing some product category is better is something that retailers anyhow usually would do. You have product category leaders, you have team coaches, product coaches that coach people around hey how to sell this product how to kind of showcase this product in the best way to your your customers. You have like Apple experts and and so on. There whether it makes sense to have a partner and buy the service or invest in your own store employee capabilities it's more case by case. I would probably try to do a bit of both so for a specialized store I would say invest in your store employee know-how because that's probably the reason why customers come to you. For a more general purpose merchant maybe the partner model makes sense for some product categories and then deeper knowledge and investing in employee knowledge in some key areas makes sense.
Karri: Okay so the main categories to look for in the gaps are basically tech data operations and people.
Tuomo: Yeah I think that would that would summarize all of that quite well. In tech you can also split it into like inventory and catalog management which are the important things like what are you actually what do you actually have the inventory side of things how are you selling them forward the catalog side of things and then you have sales channels and maybe payments so there's a question like okay so I now have this serialized individualized inventory I now have a catalog that is capable of showcasing all of my items in a in a nice way in a resale catalog friendly way. Now do you have a sales channel where you can showcase it do you have a shop in shop environment where employees can then read those items in or the online store and then maybe the payment side of things if you if you would have gone to for example rentals you might need things like deposit handling and all of these but it all in my thinking falls under the category of tech and operations.
Karri: Twice Commerce probably has a pretty nice all-in-one solution for this.
Tuomo: Yeah definitely that's that's what we are building that we help you in whatever the model is we help you off the ground and scale quite far. We have retailers that have tens like 50 or or even closer to 150 retail locations that are running their store operations on top of us with hundreds and thousands of employees using the system in various touch points and then we integrate with other players like Wix or then the APIs you can connect us pretty much to anything.
Tuomo: Our idea and thinking is that when you launch into re-commerce you probably don't want to go knees deep in one model and then have a vertical specific SaaS model that is only fitting one model because at the end of the day your business idea should be that you're capable of selling items more than once twice or more and then you have various different models to choose from that fit your current capabilities or future capabilities. So you probably want some horizontal capabilities in terms of software that help you do the key things super well so tracking that individualized inventory having a catalog that is friendly for re-commerce and then being able to bridge that gap to your existing sales channels I think those are the key things and that's where we've done a lot of effort in making that easy.
Tuomo: And regarding the people capabilities that's the reason why we put a lot of effort in trying to figure out as intuitive UX as possible so from our perspective it scales for that entrepreneur who's just launching their store so it's an intuitive software that doesn't overwhelm you but the same capability then scales to large enterprises and retailers whose challenges that they have a lot of employees and a lot of turnover with employees so they can't be there constantly training every employee with some kind of a system specialist the software should be as simple that an average employee can run with it if they're kind of putting in front of that system for 30 or 60 seconds that they can get forward without any training.