Goodwill, Price.com Take On Amazon With Lower Price Visibility

To help tell consumers about less expensive alternative offerings, Goodwill Industries of Greater New York and Northern New Jersey is teaming with Price.com. The organization is tapping into Price.com’s browser extension, which lets shoppers searching for new items on other platforms find cheaper used options on its site, Chain Store Age reported.

Goodwill NYNJ Executive VP for Retail Operations Lennox Thomas said, according to the report, “Our goal is to offer affordable shopping options to customers using the Price.com for Enterprise white-label browser extension. People who shop at Goodwill triple their impact. They find unique pieces and their purchases create jobs locally, which results in positive environmental outcomes for the global community.”

For now, the extension only price matches products at Goodwill NYNJ. However, it is said that future iterations of the offering could bring the capabilities to other Goodwill organizations in the U.S. Currently, there are 161 Goodwill locations in the U.S. and Canada.

In another tie-up between a Goodwill organization and a tech firm, Goodwill of Orange County’s ShopGoodwill.com is tapping into solutions from product authentication technology company Entrupy. The organization uses a device with a high-powered magnification lens, which can be used on an iOS device to take a picture of the material of a handbag, for example. That picture is then sent to the service, which analyzes the material via machine learning technology and provides an opinion about the item’s authenticity.

“The whole process in general takes about a minute or so,” ShopGoodwill.com Senior Director of Online Operations Ryan Smith told PYMNTS in an interview in January, adding that the technology is “exceptionally easy” to use. If a product is deemed authentic, a certificate from the company is created. ShopGoodwill.com then includes the certificate in the product’s photo on its platform to help increase consumer confidence.