"AI has been life changing for us."
Helen & Douglas House operate 25 charity shops across Oxford and the Thames Valley, supporting hospice care and families. Like many charity retailers, their e-commerce workflow was a bottleneck - manual product uploads took 20–30 minutes per item, limiting how much they could sell online. With Minimist, all of that changed and so did the sales outlook.
Listing speed & performance
Without a doubt, the biggest levers for change have been doubling the amount of listings the team are publishing to eBay AND ensuring more of that stock sells instead of just sitting stagnant online.
With a mobile app in the hands of their store and e-commerce teams, Helen & Douglas house are now averaging between 50-100 listings per day with staff and volunteers across their operation equipped to sell more goods online.
The team now simply takes a photo of a product, gets a quick price check, and with a single swipe decides whether it goes to the shop floor or straight to the eBay team for online listing. What could previously take 20–30 minutes per item now takes seconds.
And once online, that stock is now selling more frequently, with SEO optimised listings, virtual models and automated sizing ensuring items get found, added to cart and purchased.
The result? The team has doubled their listing output and saw the strongest single sales week and month in their history - a big milestone for a team that's been selling on eBay for 20 years.
Key results
With automated listings, the team doubled their daily listing output
Best week and month ever selling on eBay - their strongest sales in two decades
Manual uploads that took 20–30 minutes per item now take seconds
All 25 charity shops across Oxford & the Thames Valley now remotely feed e-commerce
The AI journey is just beginning.
So what's next for AI and Helen & Douglas House? Adding more marketplaces (e.g. Vinted, Discogs) and rolling out AI pricing tech in the shops.
Beyond e-commerce, Minimist's AI can also be used by physical charity retail shops, helping them quickly and accurately price donations, and the work has already begun!
In one of our trials that we did in our shops, we did a comparison year on year and discovered that through using the Minimist app, the average selling price had gone down slightly, but the revenue had gone up by thousands on a weekly basis. So what that showed us was... the staff had been pricing a little too high, and the app had just regulated that correctly. It's just phenomenal the growth that shop has seen since the use of that. - Katie Stuart-Cox
No matter if it's applied to online or bricks and mortar retail, Minimist is a key that unlocks smarter, effortless charity retail. Get in touch with us to learn how it can help you.
