GoodwillFinds to Scale Operations with Retail Technology Partners
GoodwillFinds, the recommerce venture launched by the national non-profit in 2022, is scaling up its operations to reach more shoppers and stores.
The group on Tuesday announced a strategic partnership with technology providers Neatoscan and Upright Labs to manage secondhand inventory and provide multi-channel listing solutions. The technologies, which have been employed by a number of Goodwill stores in the past, have aided those individual locations with the listing of inventory across popular online marketplaces.
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Now, according to GoodwillFinds CEO Matthew Kaness, the technology will be used to allow Goodwill stores across the nation to list and sell products seamlessly on GoodwillFinds.com.
Kaness, the veteran chief executive of Modcloth, told Sourcing Journal that the partnership will bring state-of-the-art reselling software and inventory management tools to the company’s backend operations. The platform will now allow Goodwill stores to list products on GoodwillFinds.com as well as on other third-party resale sites, increasing efficiency and getting the pre-owned products out in front of a bigger audience.
On the flip side, the integration gives shoppers access to a larger selection of secondhand goods like jewelry, apparel, sporting goods, electronics and other collectibles.
“We are focused on building a platform for Goodwill members across the United States to list their donations,” Kaness said. The venture launched two years ago with four out of 154 Goodwill locations contributing to the online marketplace, and after experiencing “a tremendous response” from digitally native consumers, the group added 10 more stores to the roster in 2023. “Last year we did over $25 million in gross merchandise value,” he added.
“This year, we’re really leaning into extending the platform to increase and widen both the supply side and the demand side,” Kaness said.
About 100 Goodwill stores have already been using Neatoscan and Upright Labs to list products to eBay, Amazon and other web-based selling platforms. “This partnership integrates their products into our platform so that Goodwill members can list items through that workflow and that software,” he added. “This is going to greatly accelerate our ability to go from 14 to 24, to 40, to 80, to over 100 Goodwills over the next few years, which is really exciting.”
According to Kaness, the idea isn’t necessarily to compete with other marketplaces, but to give GoodwillFinds a bigger footprint on the web. “We’re really trying to build out a vibrant ecosystem around this platform,” he explained. “We’re an easy preferred partner for other entities to work with because of the brand equity that Goodwill has, and because the proceeds that we generate from the platform go back to local Goodwills serving their missions.”
What’s more, “Because our nonprofit status, we can extend tax write off status with any kind of [revenue] share deal that we might cut” with another retail partner.
“We’re building a B2B2C business model”—business to business to consumer, he said. “We are not just planning on continuing to work with businesses and software vendors on the supply side that are servicing the Goodwill network, but also, we’re having a lot of discussions on partnerships on the demand side to build a much bigger audience beyond our dot-com.”
Kaness believes the sky is the limit for the venture, and that omnichannel efforts, like in-store customer activations and shop-in-shops, could be a part of its future. GoodwillFinds is also exploring leveraging Goodwill’s reverse logistics to help retailers manage their own inventory waste, like returns that would have once been marked unsalable.
“We’re really thinking broadly about various formats for how partnerships could come to life,” the CEO said.
