Thrift Shopping Network

Lockdown

Donations In, No One Through the Doors

This was a project for the parent company of KARM Thrift Stores, called SMCo Thrift, who we have a great relationship with, after the OnTrac point of sale we built for KARM’s stores. Early in the Covid lockdown, donations were still being received and processed, but there was no foot traffic in the stores to sell them to.

KARM wanted to keep people working and employed, and to keep generating money to fund their mission work and help the community. Their idea was to take thrift sales online: identify the most relevant, unique or valuable items among the donations, put the effort into curating them, and sell them on a platform of their own.

Discovery

A Home Shopping Network, With Pickup

We had that first conversation a few weeks before we started building, and used our discovery process to work through the idea with KARM and explore the platforms and technology already out there. It felt like a lot of work to bend tools that just weren’t built for what KARM envisioned needing to succeed. SMCo Thrift was trying to find ways to monetize during the lockdown, so they wanted a purpose-built tool.

What came out of it was a new, standalone product, Thrift Shopping Network, and a bit of a play on the Home Shopping Network: live webcasts showing the items in real time, with live sales, which were quite popular, alongside sales planned out ahead, and a local pickup at the store at the end of it.

It was built as a network rather than a shop, because the plan was for other organizations to use it and sell online too. Any seller could sign up for a monthly plan, add its locations and run its own sales from a seller’s portal, and shoppers could browse every sale on the site, near them or nationwide, signing in with Google or Facebook if they liked.

The sales

Three Ways to Hold a Sale

Not every sale needed to be live, so a seller could choose from three kinds, each with its own dates, banner, location and items.

A Flash Sale puts every item up at once, for as long as the sale runs. A Recorded Sale plays a video from the seller’s Vimeo account, uploaded from the portal or chosen from ones already there. Its items are revealed one at a time as the video plays, the first after a delay and each one after that at an interval, both set by the seller in seconds, so they can appear in step with the video. A Live Sale is the real thing, streamed as it happens, with the seller unlocking each item from the portal as it comes on camera.

Each sale also decides when its invoices go out, either the moment someone claims an item or when the sale closes, and how long a shopper has to pay, anywhere up to three days.

Going live

One Show an Hour

Live sales were streamed on the platform’s own livestream.com account, with the seller joining as a guest host, so they had to be booked. A seller picks a date, and the portal offers the hours still free that day, one show an hour from 8am to midnight Eastern, with any hour another live sale has already taken left out.

Booking a slot sends a request to the platform’s producers, who approve or reject it from the admin’s calendar and add the stream’s links, and approving it tells the seller the show is booked. A second email sends them the link to host from, once a producer adds it.

Real time

Everyone Watching at Once

A live sale only works if everybody sees the same thing at the same moment, so the sale page holds a WebSocket open to the server, run by AnyCable as its own small app beside the main one.

When the seller unlocks an item on a live sale, it isn’t unlocked straight away but twenty seconds later, to line up with the delay on the shoppers’ live stream, so nobody can claim it before they’ve seen it. Then it lights up on every screen with a note that a new item is available. When someone claims one, its count of claims ticks up for everyone, the shopper who claimed it is told their place in line, and everyone else sees who just claimed what. When the sale opens or closes, every page watching it reloads itself.

The connection is only opened when it’s needed. A page for a sale more than fifteen minutes from starting just checks back every five minutes, and a closed sale never connects at all, so the only connections held open are from people actually there for a show.

Getting paid

Money Straight to the Mission

Each seller connected its own Stripe account through Stripe Connect, so a shopper’s payment went straight to the seller, with the platform’s fee taken on the way. Sales tax is worked out per location, and only on the items that are taxable.

A shopper pays an invoice online and can download it as a PDF, and a pickup order then shows the store’s own pickup instructions, while the seller can only print a packing slip once the payment is in.

Shipping

From the Store to Your Door

Pickup at the store was the plan from the start, but by September we’d built shipping too, and shoppers used it, so a shopper didn’t have to live near the store to buy from it.

A seller connects its own EasyPost account from the portal, which registers each of its stores as a place parcels ship from. Then, for any item it’s happy to ship, it enters the box’s size in inches and its weight in ounces, up to 70 pounds.

When an invoice goes out for shipping, the app builds the order with EasyPost from the shopper’s address and each item’s box, picks the cheapest rate and adds it to the invoice, before the shopper ever sees it. On the payment page they can choose another rate or another address, and the total updates to match. If EasyPost can’t find a rate at all, the invoice quietly falls back to pickup.

Once it’s paid, the seller buys the postage with one button and prints the label and the packing slip, and the shopper gets an email as each item ships, and again when it’s delivered, each with a link to track it.