Ghost Is a B2B Marketplace for $1B in Excess Inventory

01 /The Concept

Ghost calls itself the world's largest marketplace for excess inventory – the unsold stock sitting in warehouses of retailers and manufacturers. Whether that claim holds up at every scale, the numbers are hard to argue with: over $1 billion in merchandise (at recommended retail prices) is currently listed on the platform.

Ghost is strictly B2B. Individual consumers cannot make one-off purchases here. Buyers must be businesses – retail stores, chains, distributors, foreign importers, other marketplaces – buying in wholesale quantities.

Sellers have fine-grained control over visibility. They can restrict which buyer categories and geographic regions can see their listings, so they avoid undercutting their own distribution channels or domestic operations.

Pricing is volume-dependent: the more units and styles in an order – different colorways and sizes of apparel, for example – the lower the per-unit cost. To support buyers, Ghost provides market price benchmarks and historical price trends for every listing, so purchasing decisions are grounded in data rather than guesswork.

Negotiation is also built in. Buyers can either accept the listed price outright or send a counteroffer. Sellers can accept or reject depending on their current inventory pressure and cash needs – a mechanic that mirrors how excess-inventory deals actually happen offline.

Once an order is placed, payment happens directly on the platform. Ghost coordinates all logistics between seller and buyer.

Traditional B2B payment terms – net 90 or net 120 days after receipt – are a painful reality for sellers trying to free up cash. Ghost flips that equation: sellers receive payment immediately after shipping, with Ghost advancing the funds and then collecting from the buyer on its own timeline.

Ghost also launched a browser extension that lets buyers add items from any vendor's website to a wishlist – products they want but won't pay full price for. Ghost then alerts the buyer when those exact items appear on the marketplace at a discount. The extension presumably does double duty: Ghost's team almost certainly uses those wishlists as outbound leads to approach the retailers whose products keep appearing, nudging them to offload their excess stock through the platform.

More than 1,000 companies are now active buyers on Ghost – a strong result for a marketplace that launched publicly just a year ago, when it was [first covered here](/review/pomozhem-im-jeto-prodat). In that year, listed inventory grew sixfold and total sales volume grew more than tenfold.

Ghost's previous $20M in funding came at launch ($13M equity, $7M debt a few months later). The latest round adds $30M, bringing total funding to $65M.

02 /Why It Matters

Excess inventory is frozen capital with a carrying cost attached. The scale of the problem is routinely underestimated by people outside retail.

US Census Bureau data put retail inventories (excluding auto and parts dealers) at $561 billion in mid-2023 – and that figure had held roughly flat for months, ruling out a seasonal blip. The inventory-to-sales ratio tells the story by category: apparel, footwear, and accessories sit at 2.39, meaning nearly 2.5 times as much is stored as is sold in any given period. Shopify data from its merchant base puts annual sell-through rates at 47.8% for cosmetics and 68.7% for clothing and footwear – meaning 30–50% of purchased stock ends up as dead weight.

Combine those figures: if inventory levels run at 1.4x–2.4x monthly sales, and 30–50% of that inventory never moves, the deadstock problem is roughly equal in size to the active retail market itself. Ghost's theoretical ceiling – if it became the Amazonof excess inventory – approaches the scale of Amazon's main retail business. The math is rough, but the order of magnitude is striking.

The opportunity has not gone unnoticed. Max Retail, [covered previously](/review/srazu-stat-globalnym), is pursuing the same thesis with a different angle: targeting the smaller end of the buyer market – individual retailers and small chains that make up 98.6% of all retail operators by count. Ghost goes upstream; Max Retail goes wide. Both bets make sense in a market this large.

03 /Opportunities

The play here is the shadow retail market – not selling to consumers, but liquidating the inventory surplus that accumulates across every retail category. The addressable market, as the numbers above suggest, is not much smaller than conventional retail itself.

Ghost and Max Retail are both reasonable reference points for the core marketplace model, which is structurally similar to any two-sided B2B platform. The differentiation opportunity lies in the intelligence layer on top.

The natural extension is an AI-powered inventory management tool for retailers – one that tracks stock levels, models sell-through probability, and automatically surfaces a recommendation: keep trying to move these units through your existing channels, or liquidate at a price that maximizes recovery while freeing the capital. That tool creates lock-in on the seller side and makes the marketplace itself more defensible. It can be built as a standalone product with a marketplace attached, or as a marketplace feature that deepens over time.

The entry angle matters: a standalone AI inventory tool has faster initial sales cycles with retailers; a marketplace-first approach builds the liquidity that makes the AI tool useful. Either path is viable – but the window to build meaningful market position is narrowest at the top of the liquidation cycle, not the bottom.