How Nonprofit Software Provider Upright Local Drives Traffic into Secondhand Retailers

By David Engle, CEO at Upright Labs.

The Upright Labs story starts very similarly to that of Vonigo. Instead of running a service company like the Vonigo co-founders, here at Upright Labs we were buying and selling secondhand inventory.

We too were unable to find the software tool that we needed. So we built a multichannel listing platform from the ground up. Since then, hundreds of thousands of items have been posted to multiple marketplaces by our customers with the Upright Labs software.

Driving New Customers into Secondhand Stores

When visiting one of our earliest customers, they told us a story about how they needed a new dining room table for their house.

Even though they were an employee at this secondhand retailer, they were not sure which of their stores to visit to find the item.

We realized that we could create not only a searchable inventory management system for large pickup items but also market the inventory to the local community to drive new customers to the store location.
To accomplish this, we launched Upright Local, a mobile-first platform for multichannel listing and management for store locations.

How it Works

Upright Local allows a store associate to photograph, describe, and list inventory to multiple platforms at once. Listings on various marketplaces enable stores to bring their product to where the customer is shopping.

When a customer has found an item online they are interested in, they travel to the posting store to see the item in person. When an item sells, the store associate clicks one button, and the item automatically delists and is marked as sold on all the platforms at once. All transactions occur in the physical store location to mitigate double-sale opportunities.

With the ability to drive new customers and prior customers through the door more frequently, Upright Local has proven a successful modern marketing technique for secondhand retailers.

Mini Case Study: Goodwill Industries of South Florida

Goodwill of South Florida has implemented Upright Local in 24 of their secondhand retail stores. Upright Local enables the store managers and associates to list large, pickup-only inventory items directly from their stores to online marketplaces – all from a mobile device.

“Upright Local gives us the ability to reach customers that might not otherwise go to a store, add additional sales, and also gain new donors,” said Kevin Martin, Goodwill of South Florida E-commerce Director.

Goodwill of South Florida initially began with Upright Local in 11 stores before expanding to 24 of their store locations. Within two weeks of installing the software, Goodwill of South Florida realized increased revenue and sell through at their store locations.

Below are the results from the initial installation with 11 of their stores, and the data that was collected during the initial two-week period.

—300+ items listed
—66% sell-through of listed inventory
—$5,510 in revenue generated

More About Upright Labs

Just last year, our team helped secondhand retailers list over 750,000 unique items to multiple online marketplaces.

Upright Labs helps nonprofit retailers through three premier products:

• Upright Lister, a multichannel e-commerce listing tool
• Upright Local, an app to photograph, describe, and manage in-store inventory online for in-store only payments and pickups
• Upright Services, remote and on-site e-commerce guidance and consulting to streamline operations

Upright Labs has helped customers save a minimum of 25% per listing, mitigate communications with their customers and suppliers by 99%, list to multichannel via the web interface or API, and enable our customers to generate over $15 million in GMV.