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Ghost lets businesses offload surplus stock to vetted B2B buyers with full seller control – no public markdowns, no competitor access.
ENTRY ANGLES
B2B liquidation marketplace for retail excess inventory (Ghost/Max Retail model) · Marketplace enabling small entrepreneurs to source clearance inventory at negotiated discounts for resale · Closed B2B platform with limited supply per item to prevent direct-to-consumer arbitrage
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
B2B marketplace platform development and operations, Supplier relationship management with large Western retailers, Inventory sourcing and logistics coordination
GHOST FOUNDER
“turning a side hustle into a real business by launching an online store from a spare room”
Ghost is a B2B marketplace where companies can sell excess inventory to other businesses.
Sellers aren't limited to goods that have been sitting in the warehouse with no prospect of moving – they can also offload items that simply make more financial sense to liquidate now than to continue storing or mark down for retail customers.
Crucially, sellers retain control over who can buy their goods. They can block competitors, regional distributors with exclusive agreements, or any buyer they don't want seeing their prices. The marketplace itself is private: there's no public browsing, which gives all parties a baseline of transactional confidentiality.
Once a deal is agreed, Ghost handles the logistics.
The platform currently lists inventory from over 4,500 brands. Vetted buyers collectively hold more than $1 trillion in purchasing capacity – not all of which will flow through Ghost, naturally. Total supply on the marketplace now sits at over $2 billion at retail prices, with actual transaction prices reflecting the wholesale discounts sellers offer.
A [related review](/review/tvoi-dengi-lezhat-u-nih-na-sklade) from last summer noted listings at just over $1 billion. The platform has roughly doubled its inventory in a year – and, judging by the fundraising momentum, revenue has followed. Ghost just closed a new $40 million round. For a startup founded in November 2021, the pace is striking: $5M at launch, then $13M in equity plus $10–20M in debt through 2022, $30M in the summer of 2023, and now $40M more – over $100M raised in total.
The pace of investment makes more sense once you see the market size Ghost is targeting.
The founder claims US retailers alone are sitting on roughly $500 billion in inventory, and the global figure is four times larger. Excess stock – the result of wrong sizes, seasonal shifts in demand, or overbuying – accounts for about 20% of total inventory, putting the addressable US market for goods sellers want to offload at around $100 billion.
US government statistics back this up: non-automotive retail inventories at end of month ran around $540 billion throughout 2024. Shopify data adds texture: across its merchant base, only about 70% of apparel, 50% of cosmetics, 60% of fragrance, and 90% of home goods sell through within a year – consistent with Ghost's 20% overhang estimate.
Max Retail, [covered here](/review/razmoroz-500-milliardov-ih-dollarov), is also going after this market and closed a $15M Series A in April, bringing its total funding to $20.9M.
One of the most interesting signals in Ghost's recent positioning is a shift in who they consider the primary buyer. A year ago the company talked about large wholesale purchasers, off-price chains, and international distributors. A Fortune article covering this latest round describes the typical buyer as a small business owner cobbling together five to ten pairs of shoes – sourcing a pair or two at a time from different sellers.
Ghost's updated website confirms the shift. One of its headline use cases is now "turning a side hustle into a real business by launching an online store from a spare room" – because good inventory at good prices is available precisely because it sat too long in a big retailer's warehouse.
This reminded me of what Paul Graham once called the flywheel theory of marketplaces:
1. "For a marketplace like Airbnb to succeed, it can't just attract existing landlords. New people have to decide to buy apartments specifically to rent them out. The marketplace has to become a new way for new people to make money."
2. Amazon and Walmart Marketplace didn't grow because existing stores migrated to them – they grew because an entirely new category of sellers emerged who decided to earn money through those platforms. Uber worked the same way: a wave of new drivers who had no prior connection to the taxi industry.
3. The same pattern holds across successful marketplaces. The ones that didn't generate new suppliers didn't become the giants.
4. A healthy marketplace spins up a supply-demand flywheel. More sellers attract more buyers. More buyers attract more sellers. Repeat.
5. If you're building a marketplace, the key early question is: will new sellers emerge who want to earn money through this platform in a way they couldn't before? If yes, you have a real shot.
Ghost seems to be testing exactly that hypothesis – whether its platform can seed a new category of resellers who source discounted branded inventory to sell in their own stores. If it can, the flywheel spins.
Retail inventory overhang is a multi-trillion-dollar problem on a global scale – roughly $2.5 trillion when you combine US and international markets.
The obvious opportunity is building B2B liquidation marketplaces in the Ghost or Max Retail mold. The more interesting question is: why now?
Two structural forces seem to be converging. Tighter financing conditions are pushing large retailers to free up working capital more aggressively – sitting on $500 billion in inventory when credit is expensive is painful in a way it wasn't a few years ago. Separately, the model of "buy from one marketplace, sell on another" has become mainstream for small entrepreneurs. A huge share of listings on large e-commerce platforms is simply goods sourced from AliExpress or Temu with a margin on top. Sourcing from a Ghost-style marketplace is an extension of the same playbook – except buyers get steeper discounts because sellers need to move the stock fast, and the inventory is from known Western brands rather than generic imports.
The attractive wrinkle compared to AliExpress-style reselling:
- Purchases come at negotiated clearance discounts built in from day one. - The marketplace is closed to retail consumers, and supply per item is limited – so the reseller doesn't face the risk of their own customers going direct to the brand at a lower price.
If the market has truly hit the point of readiness, entering now – before the best supplier relationships get locked up by competing platforms – is the right call.
One underexplored angle: applying the AliExpress/Temu cross-border model to this category. A marketplace that sources excess inventory from sellers in one market and connects them with small retailers in other markets could be a compelling wedge.