Oxfam’s retail profit fell 23% to £4.9m in the year to March 2026, down from £6.4m the year before, according to figures from Oxfam’s unpublished accounts,

The fall has cut what Oxfam’s shops send back to the charity. Of every £100 spent in an Oxfam shop, £6 now goes to its poverty work. In 2022 it was £22. Lorna Fallon, who heads Oxfam’s retail operation, told the FT: “It has been challenging … and it is going to be painful for the sector.”

Oxfam still isn’t planning to cut its shop numbers. Books and music give it a wider base than clothing alone.

The British Heart Foundation is in a tougher spot. BHF, the UK’s largest charity retailer, saw its shop profit fall from £18.8m in 2024 to £3.6m in the year to 31st March 2025, then to a £3.3m loss in 2025-26. It is now closing around 150 shops by March 2028, with the first 87 named in July and 63 more under review. BHF’s retail arm employs almost 3,700 people.

Cancer Research UK and Scope have also closed shops, or are in the process of closing them.

All this is happening while UK demand for secondhand goods keeps rising. GlobalData puts UK spending on secondhand clothing at £8.8bn a year, four times the figure of a decade ago. Less of that spending now goes through charity shops.

Vinted has taken the biggest share. The CMA’s review of eBay’s Depop acquisition found Vinted had 50-60% of UK peer-to-peer fashion resale in 2025. Vinted has since become the UK’s third-largest fashion retailer by shopper reach, behind only Next and Primark.

Recommerce is spreading beyond clothing too. In October, IKEA launched its peer-to-peer marketplace for pre-owned IKEA furniture in the UK and Ireland. refurbed, the Austrian marketplace for refurbished goods, launches in the UK this month.

For charity retailers, that growth can work against them. Now that Vinted makes it easy to sell clothes yourself, the better pieces that might once have been donated get sold by their owners. Charity shops end up with less of their higher-value stock, while still paying costs that peer-to-peer platforms don’t: shop and warehouse rents, plus the staff time needed to collect, sort, price and store donations.

However the Charity Retail Association doesn’t accept that the platforms are to blame. Its chief executive, Robin Osterley, told the Guardian: “Fast fashion has had an impact on donations quality, there’s no question about that.” On resale platforms, he said: “We don’t see Vinted or any of the other online platforms as an issue at all.”

Osterley’s view is that Vinted has made secondhand shopping more mainstream, and that CRA members earn significant income from people who buy in charity shops to resell online. He blames the November 2024 Budget more. Its National Insurance increases and lower NI threshold have hit charity retailers’ heavily part-time workforces, on top of inflation across the economy.

Oxfam GB chief executive Richard Hawkes told the Guardian that the growth of secondhand “presents real opportunities for the whole sector, but it also means we need to think differently about the traditional charity retail model.”