Afrofuturism
A cultural and artistic movement that imagines futures through the lens of Black experiences, emphasizing resilience and innovation in the face of oppression. In the context of reselling, Afrofuturism might inspire alternative visions for secondhand economies where marginalized communities create new, equitable market systems.

Algorithm
A set of rules or instructions designed to perform tasks, such as sorting products, pricing, or determining the visibility of items. For resellers, platform algorithms and design govern many essential mechanisms on the platform, such how listings are displayed to potential buyers, or how content is moderated on the platform, making them crucial yet opaque factors that shape work in online marketplaces. Although resellers and other secondhand workers often talk about gaming or beating “the Algorithm” of a given platform, they usually mean the combination of algorithmic and design features characteristic of that platform. These algorithmic features are usually complex, opaque to platform users and ever-changing, making these strategies hard to verify. Moreover, it is crucial to remember that algorithmic systems are created and maintained by humans who decide on what features and outcomes to prioritize.

Algorithmic Bias
Refers to the prejudices or favoritism embedded in platform algorithms, often leading to uneven opportunities or burdens for certain groups of people. Algorithmic bias in reselling can affect which items or profiles are promoted or demoted in visibility, influencing sales performance and replicating social inequalities.

Algorithmic Governance
The management and control of human activities through automated systems and algorithms on platforms like Poshmark or eBay. Algorithms mediate things like post and account visibility, pricing, and even account suspensions, often in opaque ways (to the users). Like other users, resellers must constantly adapt to these rules, which significantly shape their business strategies and outcomes. Researchers of platform work have developed related terms to describe how algorithms, and more broadly, platforms, create mechanisms that ‘manage’ and influence workers (algorithmic management, platformic management).

Algorithmic Opacity
The lack of transparency around how algorithms operate. In reselling, algorithmic opacity means sellers often don’t know why some posts/items are promoted more than others, leading to frustration and a sense of confusion in navigating platform rules.

Aspirational Labor
A concept coined by Erin Duffy that refers to work performed in the hopes of future rewards, often without immediate compensation. In reselling, aspirational labor describes the effort resellers put into building their brand or online presence, often with the dream of achieving greater success or financial stability.

Automation
The use of technology to perform tasks with reduced or hidden human intervention. In reselling, automation tools (such as bots) can assist with cross-listing, managing inventory, or customer communication, but are also regulated by platforms. Remember the term ‘automation’ is not ‘black and white’ since many digital tools involve various kinds and levels of automation. The ways a platform defines what constitutes automation, is also the way the platform moderates its use via rules or technical means, affecting secondhand workers labor.

BOLO Brands (Be On the Lookout)
These are lists of brands that resellers, especially on platforms like Poshmark, consider valuable based on current market trends. By being aware of and purchasing these brands, resellers aim to increase profits. However, the value of BOLO brands is highly dependent on factors such as geographic location, buyer demographics, and platform-specific market fluctuations, leading some resellers to view them as unreliable guides. BOLO lists also reflect the fluctuating nature of platform work, where visibility and hype influence demand unpredictably, and also point to a place where platforms could more transparently communicate data to secondhand workers.

CAPTCHA
A security mechanism often encountered when logging into or interacting with platforms and websites. These often involve logical or visual puzzles and clicking boxes to ‘prove you are a human’. On platforms like Poshmark, CAPTCHAS are used to curb automation use, resulting in additional click work for resellers. Bots can sometimes use CAPTCHA solvers, which rely on remote workers solving these puzzles for very little money.

Care Work
The often unpaid or undervalued labor that involves maintaining the well-being of individuals and communities. In the context of reselling, care work can include the time and emotional labor spent managing customer relations, curating listings, or engaging with reseller communities—tasks that aren’t financially compensated but are essential for business success.

Collective Sensemaking
The process by which groups come together to interpret, understand, and respond to shared challenges or uncertainties. For online secondhand worker communities, collective sensemaking involves sharing insights, experiences, and strategies such as using tools to navigate platform demands, market trends, and technical issues. This process often takes place informally in online forums, social media groups, and reseller communities. Currently, reseller communities rely heavily on informal networks to interpret platform changes, algorithmic behaviors, and market fluctuations. Without clear guidance or transparency from platforms, resellers must crowdsource knowledge to adapt to new rules or unexpected shifts. This informal approach, while building forms of community, is often limited by incomplete information and driven by speculation.

Cross-listing
The practice of listing the same item on multiple reselling platforms simultaneously. Cross-listing allows resellers to maximize their exposure and coordinate listings across platforms. This kind of automation replaces repetitive data entries across platforms, and effectively creates a patchwork of different platform systems. Generally, Cross-listing is not referred to as automation, which confuses some resellers who see bots frowned upon.

Design Fiction
A method that uses fictional narratives or speculative designs to explore how future technologies or systems could shape society. For reselling, design fiction can be a tool to reimagine platform dynamics, fairer market practices, or the integration of emerging AI tools in a way that benefits marginalized workers.

Diverse Economies
A concept that broadens traditional views of the economy by recognizing non-market and informal work as valuable economic activities. In the context of secondhand economies, it highlights how resellers contribute to a circular economy that operates outside the boundaries of traditional capitalist production, incorporating donations, bartering, gifting, inheriting and alternative exchange systems.

Double Burden/Shift
The dual responsibilities of paid employment and unpaid domestic or care work, often disproportionately done by women. The double burden reveals deep gender inequalities within economic systems, as domestic responsibilities are often undervalued or ignored by traditional economic analyses. This impacts women’s career opportunities, income, and overall well-being. Many resellers and other gig workers feel this double or even triple burden: they use reselling as an additional flexible form of income to accommodate care work; but also have time constraints which can limit their business.

Gig Work
Temporary, flexible jobs often mediated through digital platforms, where workers are paid per task or project without a relationship of traditional employment with the company. Resellers operate outside of traditional employment protections, navigating income instability and platform control over key aspects of their business. Note that the IRS classifies reselling a s kind of gig work.

Image Processing
The use of AI tools to automatically enhance, recognize, or sort images. One tool which is essential to resellers based on image processing (and large datasets of entries historically generated by users like resellers) is Google Images. Reselling platforms often use image processing for visual searches to make suggestions for listings and identifying counterfeit products. This may help streamline operations but can also introduce errors. These systems can disproportionately harm people from marginalized groups given the biases in datasets and biased decisions of the engineers. For example, it could result in penalizing resellers with darker skin color.

Information Asymmetry
A situation where one party has more or better information than another. In reselling, platforms gather data about customers, sellers, behaviors, and inventories, having visibility into patterns of use which giver the platform more control and power over all parties. Additionally, information asymmetries also arise from the ways platforms build their technical backends, with algorithmic and other mechanisms mediating interactions on the platform.

Infrastructural Fictions
Related to Design and Speculative fictions, infrastructural fictions focuse more on the underlying systems (like logistics, platforms, and supply chains) that structure society, challenging us to rethink who designs, maintains, and benefits from these complex networks. By making these invisible infrastructures visible, this narrative approach critiques how they shape power dynamics and daily life.

Intersectionality
A framework for understanding how various social identities (e.g., gender, race, class) intersect and impact individual experiences, particularly with regard to power and oppression. In reselling, intersectionality helps explain the diverse challenges faced by resellers from different backgrounds, especially in navigating platform rules and market dynamics.

Invisible Labor
Work that is essential but often goes unpaid and unrecognized within traditional economic metrics. This includes caregiving, emotional support, and community maintenance, which are predominantly performed by women and marginalized groups. These forms of labor sustain households and communities but are typically excluded from standard economic models. In the context of reselling, invisible labor extends to caring for and repairing secondhand items, as well as the demands imposed by digital platforms. Platforms further obscure this labor through the extensive, unpaid time resellers spend finding, cleaning, and preparing items for sale. Additionally, resellers face hidden labor demands in meeting platforms’ interaction requirements, such as constant sharing, listing updates, and engagement.

Moderation
The control over the users behaviors on the platform by human and automated means. This includes reporting of counterfeit items or inappropriate behaviors by other users, the platform’s regulation and control of bots through technical means and actions on users, and the automated detection and decision-making on cases by algoirthmic systems. The use of AI to automatically monitor and enforce platform rules, such as detecting prohibited items or inappropriate listings is a hot subject of research which platforms currently consider as ways of leaning their moderation efforts and human labor. Automated moderation in reselling helps platforms manage large volumes of content but can lead to errors, penalizing resellers unfairly or inconsistently.

Platform Co-operatives
Platform co-ops are digital platforms owned and governed by the workers or users who rely on them, rather than by private corporations or external shareholders. Rooted in principles of cooperative economics and solidarity, platform co-ops aim to distribute profits more equitably and give members direct control over platform policies and practices. Examples include worker-owned delivery services, freelance marketplaces, and artisan selling platforms. Platform co-ops face challenges such as securing funding without compromising cooperative principles, scaling governance effectively, competing with well-funded corporate platforms, and ensuring members have the technical and managerial skills needed to sustain operations.

Platform Work
Work that is mediated by digital platforms, where resellers operate under specific rules, algorithms, and interfaces that govern their interactions with buyers, suppliers, and the platform itself. Resellers rely on platforms for visibility and transaction management, but also face challenges like fluctuating fees, algorithmic changes, and platform governance.

Prefigurative Politics
The practice of enacting the change you want to see in the world through current actions and systems. For resellers, this might involve building more cooperative or equitable business models within the existing constraints of platforms, using their practices to critique or subvert the dominant capitalist system.

Recommender Systems
Algorithms designed to suggest products or listings to buyers based on their browsing history, preferences, or other data. For resellers, recommender systems are vital as they determine how often and to whom their items are shown, thus directly impacting sales. Note that recommender systems also interact with the user interface and default settings. On Poshmark, the importance of sharing is due to the default ordering setup which is “last shared”.

Reseller
An individual who buys goods (often secondhand) and sells them at a markup. Increasingly, resellers rely on platforms like eBay, Depop, or Poshmark. Resellers are integral to the secondhand economy in the US, often operating as gig workers under platform-imposed constraints, which affects their pricing, visibility, and business strategies.

Share Jail
A colloquial term similar to ‘shadow ban’ used by resellers on platforms like Poshmark to describe the temporary suspension of the ability to share due to reaching sharing limits within a given period. The share jail is usually felt through share limits rather than receiving an explicit notice from the platform. This emphasizes how platform rules around content interaction impact reseller visibility and sales. "Share jail" is an example of how resellers’ control over their visibility is mediated by algorithmic limits imposed by platforms and how reseller communities make sense of technical mechanisms of control.

Share Train
A cooperative effort among resellers, especially on social selling platforms, where members take turns sharing each other’s listings to increase exposure and sales. This social practice underscores the communal aspects of reselling and how peer support helps resellers navigate platform-imposed limits. The "share train" represents an organic workaround to algorithmic restrictions and reflects collective forms of labor within the gig economy.

Sharing Bot
An automated tool that performs repetitive tasks, such as sharing listings or following users, on behalf of resellers on Poshmark.com. While bots can save time, their use possibly violates platform rules, putting resellers at risk of suspension. The enforcement of bot moderation is ambiguous on Poshmark, highlighting the tension between automation and platform governance.

Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction is a genre encompassing works that imagine alternative realities, exploring "what if" scenarios that challenge existing social, political, and technological norms. It tends to focus on specific ‘artifacts’ or scenarios, and includes science fiction, fantasy, and other genres. By suspending the constraints of current reality, speculative fiction allows readers and creators to explore new possibilities and question the status quo with compelling visuals and stories.

Terms of Service
The rules and guidelines that users must follow to participate in a platform. For resellers, violations of the Terms of Service (ToS) can result in suspension, reduced visibility, or other penalties, making them essential to understand and navigate when managing a business online. It is often unclear how platforms enforce these terms and whether they are uniformly enforced, especially when the moderation is done algorithmically.

Time Poverty
A concept referring to the lack of time available to complete necessary work and personal tasks, often affecting gig workers like resellers who must juggle multiple roles. Time poverty highlights the unpaid or invisible labor in platform-based economies, where algorithmic demands (e.g., constant sharing, listing updates) add to the workload without compensation.

Time Use
A way of measuring how time is being allocated to different activities, including paid and unpaid tasks, usually to identify, measure and intervene on time poverty. For resellers, time use reveals hidden labor such as sourcing, cleaning, photographing, and constant platform interactions needed to maintain visibility and sales. A focus on time use advocates for platform designs and policies that respect workers' time, reduce repetitive tasks, and support a healthier work-life balance.

VERO (Verified Rights Owner) List
A list of brands and products monitored by platforms like eBay for intellectual property violations. Sellers must avoid listing items from these brands without proper authorization or avoid using copyrighted materials to prevent their listings from being removed or accounts being suspended. The platform delivers the violations notices but is often unclear about the reasons or how they were detected. This increases the information asymmetry in the way platforms and corporate actors govern reselling work on platforms.

Wellbeing
In feminist economics, well-being goes beyond just profit, focusing on factors like work-life balance, health, social support, and autonomy. Gibson & Graham discuss 5 kinds of wellbeing in their well-being scorecard: Material, Occupational, Social. Community and Physical. In secondhand economies, we can use this perspective to understand what aspects of our secondhand activities contribute to our individual and communal wellbeing. This focus can help resellers advocate for fairer income structures, supportive community features, transparent systems, and legal protections.