online shopping

Charity shopping online – Freddy’s blog, Week 1 of 6

02/08/2021 08:20

On Monday 26 July, I began the first week of my six-week summer internship with the Charity Retail Association and St Elizabeth’s Centre. This internship, being undertaken as part of a university scholarship programme, aims to better promote online charity retail and help to streamline ecommerce at St Elizabeth’s Centre. This blog will detail my experiences, both practical and personal, with the project and will, hopefully, be of interest to some of you reading.

One of the first things I was told at the start of this project was that the charity retail sector was almost entirely unlike other economic sectors one could work in. At the time such a claim largely went over my head, but now here, at the end of my first week, I feel I am beginning to understand what was meant. The first week of the programme, involving preliminary research, preparatory work and pre-planning, began with a tour around many of St Elizabeth’s charity shops. While I have been in many charity shops in my time, this was my first true opportunity to see behind the curtain, so to speak, and gain a deeper understanding of a charity shop’s inner workings.

In many ways, this experience was eye-opening. Charity retail is, as was explained to me, deeply unpredictable and, hence, difficult to plan for. Seeing the ‘behind the scenes’ working of a charity shop definitely helped me to understand this point. Shops, almost entirely reliant on donations for stock, have little long-term control over what they can and can’t sell. Similarly, and more closely related to the work I will be doing over the coming weeks, many shops have naturally been forced, by present circumstances far beyond their control, to focus more heavily on online retail. Not only has this required a change in the charity’s approach to retail (training staff in online sales practices and deciding what goods should be sold online or remain in-store are two obvious examples of new considerations), but it has also put the shops at the mercy of any number of online marketplaces. Online marketplaces sometimes instigate changes in buying and selling practices, often minor, but these can have knock-on effects for the charities. Prior to this week, none of these issues would have crossed my mind, and certainly I’ve thought about charity retail more in the last five days than I have in the last 20 years.

This charity shop tour did, however, only last for the first two days of the week, after which point, I had to buckle down with my project planning and analysis. Here, the rest of the week was dedicated to research, research and more research, with only the occasional (purely professional) meeting down the pub to act as a diversionary change of pace. From Wednesday to Friday, I trawled through a number of Charity Retail Association quarterly reports and steadily made my way through numerous ecommerce webinars (so many so that I still, amazingly, have a couple more to go through). With the first week now having come to a close I do, however, feel more prepared to hit the ground running and engage with my work surrounding ecommerce (and don’t worry, details of such work which will naturally be included in subsequent blog posts for all to read).

Best wishes, Freddy

freddy