Pricing Guide

In the stores

Retiring the Binder

Before the Pricing Guide, pricing was done by hand. KARM used a big binder of printed materials, which took a lot of maintenance to review and update throughout the year and to get distributed to all the locations, and a lot of training so that pricers would use it in the same way. Even then there was still inconsistency, because it took a lot of effort to open the binder and do all of the work that was needed there. Other thrift stores all did different things again.

The goal was standardization, between the people pricing at the same store and across all of the stores, by giving pricers a much easier way to find a suggested price for their item.

The guide is installed on iPads and used on Chromebooks with keyboards in the stores, and it’s designed primarily for landscape. You start from a category, say Clothing and then Tops, find the brand on the label, and the guide shows you the range that brand sells for in that category. You pick the item’s condition, from New With Tags down to Fair, type the price you’ve settled on, and it’s saved against your shift. Then you can start over, or price the same item again, and a running count of your shift shows what you’ve priced by category.

Plain on purpose

Minimal by Design, Quick Underneath

The Pricing Guide isn’t very exciting to look at, and that was intentional. It’s an internal tool meant to serve a utilitarian purpose, and the number one goal was making it as easy and intuitive to use as possible, minimal by design, with a plain list or a short form on every screen and nothing a pricer doesn’t need.

There’s a lot going on behind that, and it leans heavily on Turbo Frames and Turbo Streams to be as quick and responsive as possible. The whole flow runs inside one frame, so moving from a category to its brands to a price point swaps just that part of the page. The brand results update in a frame of their own as you type, a new brand is added in a form that opens in place in the list and lands in it with a Turbo Stream when it’s saved, and pricing an item swaps the form for its confirmation without a page load.

It’s also a responsive website, so the same pages fit a landscape iPad, a Chromebook’s screen or anything narrower, and the keyboard tips are hidden on small screens, where there’s no keyboard to use them with.

The shared library

One Library for Every Store

The Pricing Guide isn’t only used by KARM’s own stores. It’s a paid product, and other thrift store chains around the country pay to gain access to it. So I added a Shared Pricing Library: brands, categories and price points that belong to no one store, which every organization with access to it sees alongside its own.

A store can still add a brand the library doesn’t have, and it stays that store’s own. In the guide it carries an Unverified badge, which says it hasn’t been checked yet, and every brand shows its tier, A, B or C, beside its name.

Those brands and price points are fed into a review workflow, so the more organizations use the platform, the more price point data there is to aggregate and summarize. It’s a feedback loop, and it benefits everyone who has access to the system. It’s also what makes the library hard to keep, because every store adds its own brands, in its own spelling.

The search

A Search That Doesn’t Mind How You Spell It

The hardest part of the Pricing Guide turned out to be the part that looks simplest: finding the brand. People type the same brand a lot of different ways when they’re working quickly, so H&M comes in as H & M, H. and m or handm, and O’Neill with or without its apostrophe, and every one of them has to find the same brand.

The names themselves aren’t tidy either. They’re typed on iPads and Chromebooks and pasted in from elsewhere, so the same brand can arrive with curly quotes, long dashes or odd spaces, and some older records had a stray character from Windows where an apostrophe should be, which made a brand like Levi’s hard to find at all.

Then there are the typos, and the short names where one wrong letter makes a different brand, and a list that has to put the brand you meant at the top, every time you press a key. And because every store adds its own brands, one store’s spelling can’t be allowed to become everyone’s duplicate.

Keeping it honest

A Library With a Gatekeeper

A library that lots of stores add to fills up with near duplicates, so I built the part that keeps it tidy, in two halves. The screens here are ThriftTrac’s admin running on demo data.

The automatic half runs every night, folding a store’s own brand into the library’s when they’re plainly the same brand, with its price points and priced items moved across and a record kept of what moved.

Everything else goes to a person, in a review queue in ThriftTrac’s admin, with the names that matter most at the top. A reviewer opens one, reads how it’s priced and what a decision would move, and chooses: merge it into the brand it looks like, add it to the library as a brand of its own, or keep it local. A reason is required, and one decision covers the name for every store.

The hard part is that names which look alike aren’t always the same brand. Patagonia Inc is Patagonia under its registered name and Patagonai is a typo, but Nike Golf may not be Nike, Coach isn’t Couch, and Vans is not a Van. A wrong merge moves another store’s price points onto the wrong brand, and nothing puts them back, so a name the rules can’t explain is left for a person rather than guessed at.