A $10 ThredUp Credit and the Early Days of Online Secondhand Shopping

In February 2013, online shopping was already becoming an increasingly normal part of everyday life, but the idea of buying secondhand clothing online was still relatively new.

One small promotion from that period offers an interesting snapshot of how online retail and deal-hunting were evolving. On February 19, 2013, Faithful Provisions published a post titled “Free $10 Credit to Thred Up = FREE Name Brand Clothes!” The post promoted a limited-time $10 credit for new ThredUp customers.

The promotion was straightforward: new customers could receive a $10 credit toward their first order, with no minimum purchase requirement. The post explained that customers would still have to pay shipping, while orders above $40 qualified for free shipping under the terms described at the time.

Today, the offer is long expired, but the post is interesting as a piece of early-2010s internet and e-commerce history.

The Deal

The promotion was aimed at people looking for inexpensive children’s clothing.

Faithful Provisions described ThredUp as a source of like-new children’s clothing from recognizable brands. The author also mentioned having used the service previously and recommended browsing items priced below $10 to make the most of the promotional credit.

The concept was simple:

Find an inexpensive item → apply the $10 credit → pay only the remaining applicable cost and shipping.

For bargain hunters, that made the promotion particularly attractive.

The post encouraged readers to use brand filters and also pointed out that some items were listed as “New with Tags.”

Why This Was Interesting in 2013

The promotion represents an early stage of the online secondhand-fashion market.

Buying used clothing traditionally meant visiting thrift stores, consignment shops, garage sales or local community markets.

Online resale changed that model.

Instead of being limited to whatever happened to be available at a nearby thrift store, shoppers could browse a much larger inventory from home.

This also created a different kind of shopping experience. Search and filtering made it possible to look specifically for a particular brand, size or type of clothing.

For parents trying to save money on children’s clothes, the concept was especially appealing because children can outgrow clothing relatively quickly.

The Rise of Deal Websites

The post also illustrates another important part of early internet culture: deal blogs.

Websites such as Faithful Provisions published short posts highlighting coupons, promotions, free products and limited-time offers.

Readers could subscribe to the site’s RSS feed and return regularly to discover new savings opportunities. The page itself prominently encouraged visitors to subscribe to its RSS feed.

This was before today’s social-media-driven shopping environment became dominant.

There was no TikTok Shop culture, no modern short-form shopping ecosystem and no algorithmically personalized shopping feed in the form we know today.

Instead, bargain hunters often followed dedicated deal websites and blogs.

A good promotion could be discovered through a blog post, email subscription, RSS reader or social-media share.

A Different Kind of Online Shopping

The ThredUp promotion is also interesting because it wasn’t simply about buying something cheaply.

It was about changing people’s perception of secondhand clothing.

Online resale services needed consumers to become comfortable with the idea that used clothing could be attractive, convenient and worth buying.

The description on the 2013 post emphasized “like-new” clothing and recognizable brands.

That language was important.

For secondhand shopping to succeed online, customers needed reassurance that they weren’t simply buying unwanted or damaged clothes. Instead, the experience could resemble conventional online shopping, with branded products, searchable categories and convenient delivery.

The Appeal of Children’s Clothing

The promotion specifically focused on children’s clothing, which made the economics particularly interesting.

Children frequently grow out of clothes before those clothes are worn out.

A shirt, dress or pair of pants might still be perfectly usable even though the original owner no longer needs it.

That creates a natural resale market.

One family can pass clothing to another family, allowing the item to remain useful for longer while reducing the cost of buying new clothes.

Online platforms made it possible to organize this process at a much larger scale.

The Importance of the $10 Credit

The $10 amount may look small today, but the psychology behind the promotion is worth noting.

A credit with no minimum purchase made the offer easy to understand.

Instead of requiring customers to spend $50 before receiving a discount, the promotion effectively gave new customers a reason to explore the marketplace immediately.

The original post even encouraged readers to search for items priced below $10, potentially allowing the promotional credit to cover the merchandise itself while the customer paid shipping.

That is a classic customer-acquisition strategy:

Give someone enough value to try the service once, and hope the first experience turns them into a repeat customer.

The Deadline Created Urgency

The offer was only available until Friday, February 22, 2013.

The author emphasized the deadline and encouraged readers to act quickly.

This is another familiar online marketing technique.

A limited-time promotion creates a sense of urgency. Instead of telling consumers that a discount will always be available, the retailer gives them a reason to make a decision immediately.

Today, countdown timers, flash sales and limited-time coupons are common. In 2013, deal blogs played an important role in spreading exactly these kinds of promotions.

Looking Back From Today

The most interesting thing about this old post is not the $10 coupon itself.

The promotion has long expired.

What makes it worth preserving as a log is what it tells us about the internet at the time.

In 2013:

• Online shopping was rapidly expanding.
• Deal blogs were an important source of consumer information.
• RSS subscriptions were still widely used.
• Online resale was becoming more organized.
• Consumers were becoming more comfortable purchasing secondhand products online.
• Promotional credits were being used to attract first-time customers.

A short deal post could therefore capture a surprisingly important moment in the development of digital commerce.

From Deal Blog to Internet Archive

There is also something nostalgic about finding a page like this more than a decade later.

The original post was only a few paragraphs long. It wasn’t intended to become an important historical document. It was simply a timely announcement about a promotion that was about to expire.

Yet the page remains accessible and preserves the details of an ordinary internet transaction from February 2013.

That is one of the interesting things about keeping digital logs.

Not everything worth remembering is a major event.

Sometimes a small coupon, an old shopping promotion or a short blog post can reveal how people were using the internet at a particular moment.

Final Thoughts

The 2013 ThredUp promotion was ultimately a simple bargain: new customers could receive a $10 credit toward their first purchase, with the original post highlighting inexpensive children’s clothing and the possibility of finding items for around the value of the credit.

But viewed from more than a decade later, the post represents something larger.

It captures an early stage of the online resale economy, when companies were encouraging shoppers to move beyond traditional retail and discover secondhand clothing through the internet.

It also captures the culture of deal blogging, where a short-lived promotion could become a useful piece of information for thousands of bargain hunters.

The $10 offer disappeared after February 22, 2013.

The larger idea behind it, however, continued to grow: buying and selling previously owned products online could become a normal part of everyday shopping.

That makes this small 2013 promotion an interesting snapshot of how online commerce was changing—one bargain at a time.

Original source: Faithful Provisions, published February 19, 2013.

Note: The promotion described in the original article is historical and should not be treated as a current ThredUp offer.