How Thrift Organizations Are Using AI to Sort Donations Smarter

Secondhand leaders share how pearldive Ama Sorter is helping teams improve training, routing, pricing and value recovery.

No thrift employee can be an expert in everything that comes through the donation door.

One minute it’s a vintage saxophone. The next it’s artwork, jewelry, golf clubs, designer handbags or a box of old media. When sorting decisions depend entirely on employee experience, printed guides and manual research, valuable items can easily be underpriced, routed incorrectly or missed altogether.

In our recent Intelligent Donation Sorting with AI webinar, leaders from Goodwill Houston and Goodwill Easterseals Miami Valley shared how they’re using pearldive to change that.

The Cost of Inconsistent Training and Sorting

Thrift Backroom Challenges Start Early

Thrift challenges often begin with a complicated training process. Sarah described Goodwill Houston’s:

“We have posters in all of our retail stores that give basic ideas of what to send to e-commerce. Then we have a training binder that’s really thick and a little cumbersome for our retail store teams to learn.”

Sam added:

“We were having folks come in for trainings regularly. We were doing store visits as much as we could. Constantly training new people, trying to keep managers long enough so that they could become experts in more categories.”

So, what happens when experienced employees are unavailable and resale teams bring in new staff? Sarah explained:

“All of that knowledge is gone. You have an expert in a back room and they leave or you have a manager who is an expert and has been training everybody and they leave—and then it’s square one.”

Sam added: “You’re doing the exact same trainings over and over for new people. A lot of stuff is going to slip through the cracks.”

So what happens when this training routine gets a thrift-specific, AI-assisted upgrade?

“A lot of time and resources are spent on training somebody to be an expert,” Sarah summed up. “With this tool [pearldive Ama Sorter], that’s really not needed anymore.”

From Manual Research to Smarter Routing

For Sam, expanding pearldive from its original 14-store pilot to all retail locations was simple:

“We had about a 20-minute Teams call with everyone and told them how to use it. We sent out an email with instruction on how to log in. The only thing I heard back was a bunch of DMs saying, ‘This is awesome’.”

And adding pearldive to the team’s workflow was easy. Sarah explained:

“All you have to do is tag pearldive, and hit save, and it literally does all the work once you’ve done the photography.”

Ama Sorter helps determine what should go to e-commerce. Auto-Lister then helps turn those selected items into optimized listings.

From Smarter Sorting to Faster E-Commerce

Ama Sorter’s impact was immediate. Both Goodwill Houston and GES Miami Valley experienced a surge in productivity and sales. Sam noted:

“It was not incremental. It was a massive expansion for us. […] It’s just been like overnight so much more capacity for listing, which then means so much more capacity needed for shelving, for shipping, for all the rest.”

At Miami Valley, managers have switched from collecting goods to manually manifest to automatically manifesting with pearldive and Upright Lister. This has led to huge time savings and a more consistent flow of goods to e-commerce:

“I would say on average [someone] had to spend half a day once a week going through and making decisions and manifesting it. And putting it in boxes, packaging it, getting it ready and everything. And now that time really just doesn’t exist. At the point that they’re making a decision [to send the item to e-commerce] using Sorter, they hit it, that part’s done.”

Now, he said, this part of the process is ‘walking in the office, printing a label, putting it on the box and putting it on a truck.’ He estimates this saves half a day per 45 locations per week.

At Houston, Ama Sorter has proved its value in helping teams correctly identify and price items. Sarah described it:

“I think that’s one thing that they really love is that it’s giving them pricing on other items that can be sold in store. The management team was just like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that I could price that at $24.99. I would have priced it at $9.99.’ They’re just seeing a lot more return on that.”

These upstream improvements are having a profound effect downstream as well, starting with listing quality. Sarah explained:

“It’s really able to give such detailed information that is way beyond anything I’ve seen. We’ve recently started dabbling with rugs. We’ve pulled some beautiful handwoven rugs out of the outlet that have all sold for over $500 a piece. [Ama Sorter’s description] was so detailed that it in the condition, it said ‘contains animal hair and needs professional cleaning’. Very specific, very much reducing our returns.”

When it comes to creating a listing, she continues:

“I’ve been doing this for years and keywords are king. And those keywords that pearldive comes up with for those titles and descriptions are what makes it sell for the most money.”

Sam agreed:

“There’s no way you could do one of these listings without putting hours into the research and titles searches and figuring out values. So that was a big surprise for us; immediately, the quality of our listings was so much better.”

After teams began using Ama Sorter, Sarah noted: “Their sell through is way better. Their acceptance rate is better. Our returns were like 1.6% last month.”

Sam added: “One of our major concerns with any AI tool was accuracy. We’ve been watching that pretty hawkishly, and it has not been a problem.”

This enhanced effectiveness does more than just keep goods moving smoothly through e-commerce. They’re also providing the most money for these Goodwills’ missions.

What If You Could Sort an Entire Cart at Once?

The webinar also touched on new and upcoming improvements to pearldive Ama Sorter. One of the most exciting is Sea-Glass, a bulk sorting feature that processes multiple donated items at once from a few photos – in some cases, up to 50 items in one evaluation.

Here’s a real-time demonstration of Sea-Glass at work:

Sam’s team has been trialing Sea-Glass. He notes:

“A store was setting everything nicely on a cart and taking a picture of it and not having to scan every book, just pulling out the ones that were going to meet our thresholds.

“You can even just walk out on your sales floor and make sure you didn’t put something out that you shouldn’t have. We’ve done the top of a golf club rack. You can just take a couple pictures of the top of it and it’ll be like, ‘You should pull that one and that one and send those to ecom’.

“You’re not going to have a golf expert in every back room. And so that’s one of the things that slips through the cracks pretty easily. And I don’t want every golf club coming to ecom to be checked. So this helps a lot.”

Finally, the webinar closed with a preview of improvements coming to pearldive Ama Sorter. Version 2 will offer redesigned settings and greater customization support, allowing teams to more precisely work with category-specific decisions. It will offer more flexibility around pricing matrices and listing creation.

And there will be support which will further streamline training:

• Artwork checks
• Product authentication
• Precious metal evaluation
• Pricing strategy recommendations

The settings and customizations will be game-changing for online listers:

• Easier category and strategy mapping
• Customizable listing templates
• Custom listing rules
• Upright Lister template imports
• Configurable pricing matrices

What Can pearldive Ama Sorter Bring to Your Organization?

Training and sorting problems make themselves felt all the way to your organization’s bottom line. But addressing the underlying issues earlier in the process can send productivity soaring and bring in more revenue. As Sam said about adding pearldive Ama Sorter,

“This is throwing everything into hyperdrive. It’s been wonderful to share with my upper management. They’re like, “Wait, what?” I’m like, “Yeah, 32% [revenue growth].”

Sam also spoke to the nearly effortless increase in production:

“I would add to the folks that are now doing the 80 a day were at like 35 or 40 a day. They were told ‘it’s 80 now’ and we didn’t have any complaints. We haven’t had any issues where people aren’t hitting their goals.”

And Sam reminded attendees that this isn’t about AI taking over jobs; it’s about giving employees the tools they need to perform well:

“Human is still human. We’re the ones doing all of it. It’s just nice to have an assistant that you can trust to be an expert on anything that comes through that back door.”

No employee can know everything about everything that arrives at the donation door. The opportunity is to give them better information when those decisions are being made.

That’s what Ama Sorter is designed to do.

Watch Intelligent Donation Sorting with AI on-demand anytime here.

And to find out what pearldive Ama Sorter can do for thrift organizations of all sizes, schedule a free personalized demo today.