How to set up your first charity shop

Start selling your branded gear and unique gifts online. You’ll be able to reach more audiences and give them ware to tout for all occasions. Setting up an online charity shop or e-commerce site increase accessibility and visibility.

Here, we offer our top tips and tricks to setting up and running your first charity shop.

Decide what to sell

Are there items, experiences, or services you’re selling? Most charities take advantage of their retail outlets and bring them online. They mirror their in-person shop, selling second-hand homeware, clothing, and branded items.

For those with brick-and-mortar shops, deciding on what to sell is easy – take a look at existing inventory.

Charities without retail outlets can still design an e-shop. Consider what items can be brought online, including experiences and specially branded goods (think calendars, mugs, t-shirts, hats etc).

Choose a platform to showcase your wares

An e-commerce platform is where vendors sell their products. They also have many other ancillary functions, which is helpful for charities who want to grow their sales.

Shopify, one of the industry leaders, suggests choosing a platform based on key requirements including:

Ease of use

Consider how many people will be managing the platform and how easy it is to use. If you have a small team, you may want to prioritise user-friendliness over the bells and whistles a platform has to offer. A drag-and-drop shop builder typically works well for those starting out

Customer support

There may be quirks to the system, or glitches you can’t fix yourself. A dedicated customer support line is essential for those less tech savvy managers.

Easy payment

You’ll want a platform that reduces cart abandonment, the number of clicks to payment, and processes most forms of card payment.

Web hosting

The back end of the store can’t be forgotten. The platform will need a web host to store information about site traffic and cookies. Some platforms don’t include this, so watch out.

Design and graphics matter for every product

Online shopping is the future of some brick-and-mortar shops, especially given the rising cost of doing business. Shopping, while not the same as the in-person experience, can be pleasurable.

Sum Up, the payments processor, offers design advice. They remind charity shop owners that customers are visual creatures. Don’t overload the site with graphics and colours and use consistent colouring and fonts.

Sum Up says to make it easy for customers to buy things – make the navigation menus always available, and don’t make checking out more than a couple of clicks. Focus on payment, not collecting information.

Think about how to manage your inventory

Part of managing any shop is ensuring that supply meets demand. For retailers, that means controlling when and what products are available.

Inventory management can be done directly from the e-commerce platform or from a dedicated service. Shopify offers both in-house management and is compatible with plug-ins.

Other digital tools help sellers with multiple sites. DEAR Inventory works for small and medium sized vendors. The cloud-based service takes care of all the back-end, including inventory control, sales channel tracking, warehouse management, and supplier overview.

Agiliron is another system that appeals to charities with multiple sales channels. In addition to the basic services, it manages multiple e-commerce sites so charities can update from one platform to be dispersed across all outlets.

Plan for digital payments

At Charity Digital, we’ve highlighted how important digital payments are to fundraising. For an online store, it is a must. The best payment systems typically offer processing for both digital and live storefronts, with the advantage that leaders get an overview of all sales transactions.

One thing to watch out for is pricing. Some payment systems will require charities to rent the hardware and pay processing fees, so it’s important to pick the right fit for your set-up. 

Our top tip here is to ensure that you’re able to process GiftAid.

Delivering to your customers

Bringing on a fulfilment specialist ensures reliability and scalability. Tackling the logistics of getting the product to the customer can be done with a single supplier.

Aside from mainstream shipping companies like UPS, Hermes, and Fedex, smaller companies like ShipBob, Huboo, and Zendbox pick up, pack, and ship items. Many of the smaller UK competitors even offer similar services like real-time tracking and next day delivery.

Reward loyal customers

Many shoppers are incentivised by redeeming points or special discount codes. To push your e-commerce business further, consider setting up a retention programme. Loyalzoo and others take the memory work out of remembering every frequenter.

Cally, another digital loyalty programme, provides instant ‘bonus’ schemes for clients. Rewarding loyal customers keeps them coming back to both your online and live shop.