Goodwill Houston’s e-commerce program wasn’t exactly strapped for items.
They were strapped for capacity.
At one point, four trailers of donated goods were waiting to be processed. Manual research, inconsistent listing practices, and reliance on tools like Google Lens made it difficult for the team to identify, research, and list products fast enough to keep pace with incoming inventory.
Then, a colleague’s recommendation led Sarah Challender, Goodwill Houston’s Director of Digital Sales, to try pearldive.
The results were dramatic:
As Goodwill Houston continued scaling its digital-sales operation, pearldive helped remove one of its biggest production constraints.
Today, the broader department operates from a 42,000-square-foot facility and supports approximately 70 employees.
— Sarah Challender, Director of Digital Sales, Goodwill Houston
“We had a huge backlog,” Sarah says. “We actually had four trailers full at one point, on top of the space that we had. It wasn’t big enough for us, and we just grew super-fast.”At the time, the team included four photographers and six listers. Their workflow required several manual steps:
The process took time, and the results varied depending on the employee doing the research.
“We were using Google Lens a lot of the time and it’s not always accurate,” Sarah explains. “Some people were doing lots of deep research, and some people weren’t. It wasn’t uniform; there was no true consistency to what every single listing looked like.”
Unfamiliar products could require even more research, while employees with deeper knowledge of certain categories naturally had an advantage. For some team members, the process limited production to roughly 20 listings per day.
To keep pace with Goodwill Houston’s growth, their team needed a way to:
Goodwill Houston didn’t simply need experienced listers to work faster, but rather a listing process that could make more employees productive without requiring every person on the team to become a product expert.
After discussing operational improvements with a trusted colleague in the secondhand industry, Sarah added pearldive to Goodwill Houston’s e-commerce workflow in January 2026.
The change instantly reshaped how the team worked.
“It was the easiest thing in the world,” Sarah says. “It was almost unbelievable how easy it was to teach somebody how to use it.”
Before pearldive, Goodwill Houston divided its team between four photographers and six listers. With pearldive handling much of the product research and listing detail creation, now all 10 employees could focus on moving inventory through photography.
From the photos employees captured, pearldive identified the item, researched information about it, and created listing details. This included the title, description, condition information, category, and other product attributes.
The new workflow was considerably simpler:
Instead of spending a lot of valuable time manually researching unfamiliar products and writing listings from scratch, employees could move on to photographing the next item while pearldive handled the research and listing details.
Training became simpler, too.
“It’s just those three additional little steps, and hitting save, and then you’re done,” Sarah explains. “The biggest training point was just tagging pearldive. Then it was going back and fine-tuning and teaching everybody really good photography skills.”
That shifted Goodwill Houston’s training focus away from teaching every employee how to research thousands of different product types. Instead, the team could focus on a more repeatable skill: capturing the right information through high-quality photographs so pearldive could build a stronger listing.
Most retail technology is built around standardized inventory. Thrift is different. Every donated item can require identification, research, condition assessment, and unique listing details.
pearldive was built specifically for secondhand workflows. Using item photos and information captured by employees, pearldive helps identify products, research key details, and create complete e-commerce listing details to be used in Upright Lister. All without requiring every employee to be an expert in every category.
Because pearldive works directly within workflows like Upright Lister, teams can add AI-assisted research and listing automation without rebuilding their existing process.
The simplified workflow quickly won over Goodwill Houston’s e-commerce employees.
— Sarah Challender, Director of Digital Sales, Goodwill Houston
With pearldive handling much of the research and listing details, employees could spend more of their time photographing and moving products through the operation. Team members with specialized knowledge in categories like LEGO or trading cards could also focus more of that expertise on sorting and identifying valuable inventory rather than manually researching and writing every listing.
The change was particularly important as Goodwill Houston continued hiring.
Instead of teaching new employees how to research and list thousands of different product types, the team could focus onboarding on photography. Now the focus is on what details to capture, in what order, and how to document the information pearldive needs to create an accurate listing.
— Sarah Challender, Director of Digital Sales, Goodwill Houston
The quick training process also freed Goodwill Houston’s managers from spending as much time teaching manual listing and research, allowing them to focus on coaching employees and improving photography quality.
The impact of the new workflow showed up quickly.
By shifting all 10 employees toward photography and using pearldive to automate much of the research and listing creation, Goodwill Houston effectively doubled the number of people who could move products through the front end of the listing process.
Employees who had previously produced around 20 listings per day were soon working toward a goal of 75 or more.
The increased production translated into measurable business results. Within the first 30 days of implementing pearldive, Goodwill Houston’s sales increased 46%.
As pearldive adoption expanded, listing output continued to climb. Comparing the months before and after implementation, Goodwill Houston increased products created per active lister by roughly 7x.
Speed didn’t come at the expense of listing quality, either.
After the team refined its photography process, Sarah reported that the monthly value of returned merchandise fell approximately 71%, with Goodwill Houston’s current return rate dropping below 1%. Separately, pearldive-created listings averaged 55% fewer relists than manually created listings.
Fewer relists meant fewer products cycling back through the workflow for another attempt at selling. This saved additional handling time and kept more inventory moving forward.
The clearest sign of how much the operation had changed, however, was the backlog itself.
“We’re still continuing to grow,” Sarah says. “We’ve just gotten so caught up, with the software system and with hiring more people to basically sort through what’s incoming, that we’re almost out of product.”
Goodwill Houston had gone from four trailers of backlogged inventory to nearly running out of product to feed its growing e-commerce operation.
The increased capacity also helped the team grow categories that previously required more manual research and product knowledge. Apparel sales increased enough that another Goodwill organization contacted Sarah to ask what Houston was doing differently. And Goodwill Houston became a top-10 artwork seller on ShopGoodwill.
Sarah credits the combination of stronger photography and the detailed product identification, titles, and listing information generated through pearldive with helping those categories perform.
For Goodwill Houston, increasing e-commerce capacity opens doors beyond just selling more donated goods. This access to greater revenue helps support the organization’s mission and continued growth creates more opportunities for people in the community.
pearldive entered the operation at a pivotal point in that growth.
By removing much of the research and listing work that had constrained production, Goodwill Houston gained a workflow that could better scale alongside its expanding digital-sales operation.
The broader department has since moved from a 14,000-square-foot space into a 42,000-square-foot facility and grown to approximately 70 employees across its operation.
For Sarah, that impact on people matters most.
“I’m most proud of the jobs that we’ve been able to create in our community,” she says. “That’s 70 jobs that weren’t there before. That’s giving somebody a purpose. That’s changing their life through the power of work.”
The growth is also creating new conversations about how e-commerce can contribute even more to Goodwill Houston’s mission.
“We’re generating what three to five retail stores would be generating in a year,” Sarah says. “That kind of growth is way more money for our mission.”
Solving the listing bottleneck created a new opportunity for Goodwill Houston: getting more of the right donated goods into an e-commerce operation that can now process them faster.
Goodwill Houston is currently piloting pearldive Ama Sorter in three stores. Ama brings AI into the sorting process, helping employees identify donated items and determine which products may be better suited for e-commerce.
If the pilot proves successful, Goodwill Houston could explore expanding the technology across approximately 48 store locations.
— Sarah Challender, Director of Digital Sales, Goodwill Houston, on piloting pearldive Ama Sorter
For Goodwill Houston, that creates a connected opportunity: identify more valuable inventory at the point of sorting, move it into a faster e-commerce workflow, and turn more donated goods into revenue that can support the organization’s mission.
As Sarah puts it:
“We’re able to generate excess revenue for our retail operation to go toward our mission, so that we can further our mission.”
Goodwill Houston’s experience shows what can happen when teams remove time-consuming research and listing bottlenecks from the e-commerce workflow.
pearldive helps thrift organizations identify, sort, research, and list unique donated goods faster—so teams can move more of the right inventory to the right sales channel.
See what that could look like for your organization:
Intelligent Donation Sorting with AI:
How Secondhand Uses pearldive Ama Sorter
Watch the webinar on-demand!
Hear directly from thrift leaders using pearldive Ama Sorter to make fast and consistent donation sorting decisions across retail and e-commerce. See Sea-Glass in action and get an early look at what’s coming next with Ama.
