How Prospect Hospice encouraged ecommerce operations across its shop network

Prospect Hospice provides vital support to adults in need of end-of-life care in Swindon and the surrounding area. Prospect Hospice is well supported locally, but receives just 23% of its funding through the NHS - the rest is raised via fundraising including charity retail and events.

Like many other charities of a similar size, ecommerce was not previously a high priority for fundraising, mainly due to a lack of resources and volunteers to support operations. Running a small eBay shop to sell donated items online, Prospect Hospice began to focus on growing ecommerce operations during the pandemic when its high-street shops were forced to temporarily close their doors to the public. Reliant upon its shop staff and volunteers, Prospect Hospice began to build a standalone ecommerce shop to ensure they maximised their reach around the region and beyond. But, without the resources and budget to drive traffic to the website, the standalone online shop struggled to build the traction needed to gain regular visits to the online store from its supporters and generate sales to effectively support charity fundraising.

To invest in its ecommerce growth, Prospect Hospice recruited an Ecommerce Manager, working out of the charity’s central ecommerce warehouse. The hospice team decided to focus on the charity’s eBay store, in order to access a wider pre-existing audience with a higher guarantee of conversion rates for online sales. Using eBay to manually list donated items - although a time-consuming process - meant that Prospect Hospice could benefit from the ecommerce platform’s household name and global reach to access a wider consumer base. As a consequence, when high street shops began to reopen after Covid restrictions eased, Prospect Hospice continued to drive its ecommerce operations by recruiting volunteers to join its central warehouse. 

This led to an additional challenge. With shops receiving the majority of donated items, and subsequently making sales in-store to reach individual shop targets, fewer items were being sent to the charity’s ecommerce hub, where they could potentially achieve higher prices online. To keep pace with the six months of progress made to develop an ecommerce strategy that worked to maximise fundraising for the charity, Prospect Hospice began the hunt for a software solution to streamline its ecommerce operations and engage high street shops with selling online.

After gaining insights from other charities through the Charity Retail Association, and talking to other hospices, Prospect Hospice was introduced to Shopiago. The roll-out began in May 2022, starting with implementing Shopiago’s Ecommerce services to increase the efficiency, volume and value of online listing - as well as continued use of Shopiago Trade-in (previously Ziffit) to clear excess stock taking up valuable warehouse space. 

Following a phased approach to the rollout, Prospect Hospice first trained warehouse staff and volunteers. Previously having to manually relist items that didn’t sell, and reprice items without statistics, analysis and insight tools, Shopiago became a huge resource saver for the warehouse ecommerce team.

From here, Prospect Hospice began to trial Shopiago within its high street shops, initially training shops that were already comfortable with using ecommerce tools to determine best practice and ensure the successful adoption of the software. With the help of the charity's dedicated Shopiago Customer Success Manager, a second wave of shop training was completed by November 2022, and all shops had been fully onboarded by March 2023 ahead of the new financial year.

With 100% of Prospect Hospice’s high street shops now trained to use the Shopiago Ecommerce stock transfer system, the charity’s retail teams are now able to benefit from store accreditation for items sold online to contribute to the sales targets of each individual shop, automatic relisting features, increased Gift Aid, data and insights on recommended pricing and much more. The phased approach to training has also helped to improve engagement with volunteers, tailoring training to their varied pre-existing ecommerce capabilities to ensure the successful adoption of the software.

Although still early in its journey with Shopiago, Prospect Hospice has seen a huge 118% increase in items sold between April 2022 and April 2023. As the charity continues to discover a wealth of new data through the Insights & Reporting feature, Shopiago has become an important tool for Prospect Hospice to spot issues quickly and work to resolve these with greater efficiency, and gain a deeper insight into the true value of such a vast range of donated items.

Prospect Hospice has also seen a huge rise in fundraising through Shopiago Trade-in, raising £16,368 through scanning preloved books, CDs, DVDs and computer games during the first year of the Shopiago roll-out. Shopiago Trade-in has not only benefited revenue, but has allowed Prospect Hospice to clear valuable space within the central warehouse and shops to increase efficiency of operations.

Through this engagement with ecommerce operations and a simultaneous roll-out of a soft credit process, the team were able to incentivise high street shops to send items to their ecommerce hub. This has led to higher prices for items online, resulting in an increase in sales revenue to contribute to the charity’s fundraising efforts. Ultimately, crediting the shops and adding personal sales targets through online sales will continue to inspire and motivate the charity volunteers to raise even more essential funds.

Through the charity’s incredible efforts in maximising fundraising with online sales, Prospect Hospice received its first-ever Shopiago Online Charity Award - taking the top spot for the Highest Value Item sold online. Landing the sale of a Leica M4 35MM Rangefinder Camera for £2,062, maximising the money earned from generous donations and helping the charity to offer end-of-life care services for a community of more than 300,000 people in Swindon, Marlborough and North East Wiltshire.