This startup helps enterprising resellers prevent nearly a million pounds of returns from ending up in landfills

Americans are likely to have spent a record $1 trillion-plus this holiday shopping season alone, and about $5.5 trillion in retail sales in all of 2025, according to estimates by the National Retail Federation. That includes many unhappy returns for retailers: And when it comes back to them, a lot of the $850 billion in returned merchandise is often cheaper to discard than to inspect, sort, and resell—adding millions of tons to landfills every year.

“This is a massive ecological problem, as well as a financial problem for these companies,” says Ryan Ryker, CEO of rScan. Based in South Bend, Indiana, the startup has developed software and logistics services to help transfer these products from the beleaguered original sellers to resellers more eager to do the work of making money on a returned product. “There’s a lot of people who are looking to make side cash,” says cofounder and chief logistics officer Julian Marquez about their small-business clients.

But it’s not easy. Instead of getting, say, a shipping pallet of all the same product, such as a power tool, resellers have to sort through a mishmash that can contain dozens of different items—including many one-offs. rScan’s offering for them sounds simple: a barcode-scanning app. But behind that is an entire data infrastructure to help resellers understand what they’ve got and how to sell it. Scanning the UPC barcode on a box pulls up the item’s product name and brand, images, detailed descriptions, and manuals. Resellers can first ascertain the product’s condition and whether everything that should be in the box is.

If they decide it’s worth selling, rScan can pull from its database the dozens of product attributes required by online marketplaces and format complete product listings tailored to venues such as Amazon, eBay, or Shopify. The company regularly scrapes these sites to survey what products are selling for and estimate a price for the reseller’s listing.

rScan charges 30 cents per month per unique item that is scanned and in their catalogue for as long as it’s listed for sale online. (So selling 10 of the same product would cost 30 cents per month, total.) The company also takes a percentage of monthly sales, from 1% to 3.9% on a sliding scale that ramps up as vendors sell more. Clients range from newbies working out of a garage to what Ryker calls, “sellers that are doing multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”

Retailers from High School

For Ryker, rScan was tailored to the challenges he’d personally encountered. “Resale is something I previously dabbled in prior to the pandemic. From there, there was a lot of returns going on with COVID, the rise in e-commerce sales, things of that nature,” he says. 

But his retail experience goes back to high school in the 2010s when he and Marquez established their own apparel brand, called Culture Clothing, which ran for a couple years and grossed about $45,000 in its best year. They mostly sold at concerts and show venues, but also called on another classmate, Rod Baradaran, to set up an ecommerce site.

In 2021, the three reunited to cofound rScan. Baradaran reprised his tech role, coding the app and the online services, developing the price-setting algorithm, and serving as COO. (A fourth cofounder, Michael Altenburger, joined a few months later.) The company—which was bootstrapped by the founders—now has 36 employees.

Taking on a Clunky System

It’s not that returned goods would all go into the trash without rScan. “The real advantage of being able to get this online faster and on ecommerce [platforms] is that you have a much wider market where these products can be distributed and actually used,” says Baradaran.

The three seem especially proud of helping side-hustlers make ends meet. Marquez also works in the RV manufacturing industry around South Bend—which has taken a hit in recent years, with hundreds of layoffs in 2025 alone. He helped one of his coworkers get into online resale as a safety net when his earnings dropped. 

“If he didn’t have rScan at the time, he would have had to either sell something or lose a part of the lifestyle that he was already used to living with,” says Marquez.

He was able to take advantage of rScan’s physical as well as virtual services. The company runs a warehouse to receive returned goods from retailers, hold them for small clients who don’t have their own storage space, and help arrange shipping to buyers. It was also a chance to test and refine the software by running their own resale business. “We kind of dogfooded our own product when we first started,” says Baradaran. In May 2025, rScan upgraded to a 53,000-square-foot warehouse in South Bend.

Living Up to Values

While they have eschewed outside investors so far, rScan recognizes it may need to go that route to scale up. “We want to make sure that they share the same vision as us, and as long as that’s aligned—absolutely,” says Baradaran.

Helping not just sellers but the planet is a key part of that vision. By its own accounting, rScan says it has saved over 840,000 pounds of products from going into the trash.

After rScan scales more, the founders plan to seek independent verification of their ecological impact in the process of becoming a Benefit Corporation. To be certified as a B Corp, a company has to pass an initial and ongoing evaluation by the nonprofit B Lab of its environmental impact, social responsibility, transparency, and accountability to all stakeholders—not just investors.

“Ultimately, our goal is to democratize entrepreneurship,” Baradaran says in an email. “In doing so, we drive sustainability by extending the lifecycle of consumer goods that would otherwise end up in landfills.”

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