NAICS 45951Industry · 5-digitlocal market

Used merchandise retailers

This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in retailing used merchandise. Establishments primarily engaged in retailing antiques are also included. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA
1,507
with employees · summed from 6-digit industries
Under 10 employeesA
51%
most common size: 1–4
01

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–450634%
5–925617%
10–1922115%
20–4933122%
50–9918712%
100–19960%
200–4990—
500+0—

Of 1,507 Canadian establishments with employees, 51% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario55937%
Quebec27218%
British Columbia24716%
Alberta17311%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA
Retail Trade, US · opened 2020
88%
1 year
72.3%
3 years
59.8%
5 years
44.2%
10 years
opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.

02

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 459, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

A mixed bag — pets, florists, books, hobby, used goods. The categories that hold up are the ones with service, expertise or immediacy attached.

Who sets the price
Online marketplaces set the ceiling.
The software it runs on
Specialty retail point of sale and e-commerce.
03

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 4595 Used merchandise retailers covers it.

04

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

Sold across the wider branch

Cross-industry softwareScreenedfiled at 459 Sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument, book, and miscellaneous retailers
Marketplace Management — One Catalogue Across Amazon, Walmart and the Brand's Own StoreOne thing must be true
binding constraint: defensibility
Incumbent Rithum (CommerceHub + ChannelAdvisor, merged), with Feedonomics inside Commerce.com

The platform owns the API, and every feature in this category is one the platform can ship for free. Amazon Seller Central and Shopify's own Marketplace Connect are given away with the account, which sets the price floor before an independent quotes anything [C, vendor]. The evidence is in what happened to the category's only pure-play public company. ChannelAdvisor grew revenue from $145.1M in 2020 to $167.7M in 2021 — about 15% in the single largest year online retail has ever had — then agreed to sell itself to CommerceHub in September 2022 and deregistered that November [A]. It trades on as part of Rithum [C]. Feedonomics, the other scaled independent, sits inside Commerce.com (Nasdaq: CMRC, formerly BigCommerce Holdings), which reports one operating and reportable segment, $342.3M of FY2025 revenue growing 2.8%, a workforce reduction in January 2026 and another in September, and an activist Schedule 13D filed in August [A]. Meanwhile the pool underneath is enormous and untouched: Amazon's third-party seller services line alone was $172.2B in FY2025 and its advertising line $68.6B [A]. Demand is not the question. The question is whether anything built on top of someone else's API compounds. An entrant rents its integrations from the same four companies it competes with for the seller's attention, and each of them has already shipped the adjacent feature at least once. The NAICS anchor is navigation only — 459 is miscellaneous retail, and the buyer for this software is any brand on any marketplace, in any sector.

NAICS 4598 vendors named5 sourced figuresOpen →
05

Who works here

The occupations employed in Retail trade, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →

06

Inside this industry

1 row sits directly beneath 45951. Each has a base report of its own.

CodeIndustryEstablishments · CAWhat is known
459510Used merchandise retailers1,507screened at 4595