Why it’s important to motivate your shops to sell online
One element of retail fundraising for charities lies at the very heart of this model: the shops. And that remains the case as you take your sales model online.
At Shopiago, we want to help charities maximise this core resource in the move to ecommerce and use it to their full advantage. That means motivating individual shops for the wider good of the charity and its cause. And to ensure more items go to new homes, not to landfill.
Why are shops so important in charity ecommerce?
A shop is two things: a location and an interface. Or, to put that in human terms, people and places. Some of the most important benefits of a charity shop to the organisation are:
- Staff who can assess, value and list stock
- A human point of contact for donors
- A local point of contact for Head Office
- A physical drop-off and pick-up location for items
- The frontline face of the brand
Why is motivating shops key to online selling for charities?
Shops are the heart of the retail charity operation. They are the customer interface and the physical representation of the brand. And, previously constrained by their physical locations, they can now sell to anyone, anywhere.
Unlike commercial retail branches, charity shops have their own unique inventory. Some stores will have stock in common, either the same or similar. Most will have one-of-a-kind items and want to find a wider market to maximise their chance to be reused or recycled.
This unique position creates three opportunities for individual shops:
- To broaden their customer base for unique or hard-to-find items
- To learn from other stores in order to improve
- To act as a click-and-collect location for other stores, and vice versa
How can Shopiago help to motivate charity shops?
Shopiago’s suite of tools are designed to deliver credit where it’s due – at shop level. Recognising a real need for stores to feel involved in the retail journey, we have developed the ability to track items through the sales process, crediting sales to individual sites while removing barriers to ecommerce success.
Our software has communication at its heart. Stores can communicate between each other and HQ to have total visibility over what is happening to individual items. That means that organisations are free to adopt a hub sales model that retains the crucial soft crediting of the sale to an individual shop. Or to run click-and-collect with a hub, branch or hybrid model.
The bottom line is that you can sell any item from any location to anyone, anywhere – and the sale is recorded to an individual shop, rewarding that outlet.
Other benefits of Shopiago’s leading charity ecommerce platform
Shopiago can help motivate shops to up their ecommerce game, but it also helps them learn from one another, and to help the charity at large to manage its network more successfully.
There’s a huge amount of data available from which to pull insights into buyer behaviour and spot successful sales patterns that might be rolled out across the network. It’s also a powerful problem solving tool, giving charities the opportunity to spot and rectify issues faster and work towards longer-term fixes.
It also means shops can share information about what’s selling well – or badly – and where. Shopiago has a communication board for informal observations so shops can share knowledge, and the software can produce ‘league tables’ to show which locations are performing best to motivate performance at shop level.
Shops are essential to the charity retail sector and need to feel involved in order to be motivated. Shopiago helps your charity make that happen, no matter which ecommerce model you choose.