Selling Second-Hand Items Can Now Support Charity

Christina Chandra

27th July 2026 - 3 min read

Selling an old phone or clearing out your wardrobe could now do more than just earn you some extra cash.

Trade2Help is a new Malaysian online marketplace where people can sell second-hand items while donating part of each sale to charity.

If you’ve ever sold something on Carousell or Facebook Marketplace, the concept is similar. The difference is that you decide how much from each sale goes to one of six participating charities. Signing up is free for both buyers and sellers.

Selling Your Unwanted Items For A Good Cause

You can list everything from books and clothing to gadgets and even brand-new items, as long as they comply with the platform’s guidelines.

Buyers pay through Trade2Help, with sellers receiving the remaining proceeds after buyers confirm they’ve received the item. The amount they choose to donate is deducted before the remaining proceeds are paid out. The website also keeps a running total of how much the community has raised for charity so far.

There’s also a built-in chat feature, while anyone listing an item must complete a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification process.

For now, users can choose to support the National Cancer Society Malaysia, Teach For Malaysia, Dignity for Children Foundation, Fugee, Care for Malaysia Welfare Centre and Al-Ikhlas Hope Society.

Built By Two Teenagers Before Leaving For University

Trade2Help was founded by 19-year-old Vijay Arren Vijdren and 17-year-old Timofey Mikhalyov. The idea first took shape in 2022 after they began looking for a way to make charitable giving part of everyday life instead of relying on one-off donations.

Arren said the idea was to make charitable giving part of something people already do, instead of asking them to make a separate donation every time they wanted to support a cause.

The platform launched this week, just before both founders leave Malaysia to further their studies overseas. Arren will study neuroscience and artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, while Mikhalyov will pursue automotive engineering at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. They plan to continue running Trade2Help remotely.

Trade2Help currently operates through its website and delivers across Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak through Lalamove and Pos Malaysia. The founders also hope to expand across Asia and launch a mobile app in the future.

Christina Chandra

Christina writes about personal finance with an eye for making the complicated feel straightforward. She is drawn to the everyday money decisions people face and genuinely enjoys finding the clearest way to explain them. Between articles, she is probably napping, on a hiking trail, or terrorising her sister’s cats.

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