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Enter consignment inventory from phone photos with AI that fills in brand, category, description and a suggested price

who Caitlin Shannon, founder of Fiddle & Find, a children's and maternity consignment boutique in Holliston, Massachusetts with 432 active consignors, in a SimpleConsign customer story

The problem

With more consigned items arriving than a small team could keep up with, entering each item by hand (brand, category, condition, description, price) became the bottleneck, and she spent a lot of time reviewing newer staff's entries and signing off on prices.

What happened

Per SimpleConsign, the shop entered 1,385 items in April, which she calls a fairly typical month. The vendor estimates entry time fell 25-50% and per-shift output rose about 65% (from about three bags of inventory to closer to five) without adding staff, and part-time staff who were limited to the register can now move inventory through the system. These figures come from the vendor's story.

Quoted in the source: Caitlin Shannon, founder, Fiddle & Find. Source: SimpleConsign: Fiddle & Find, How AI Item Entry Helped a Boutique Children's Consignment Shop Scale (Sabrina Jowders) (2026-05-21) · Added 2026-10-17.

How to set it up yourself

1. What Fiddle & Find uses: SimpleConsign's AI-Automated Item Entry. Staff photograph each item on a phone, the AI drafts description, category, brand and suggested price, staff batch-review on a desktop, and the owner does a final pricing pass before tagging.
2. If you already use SimpleConsign, ask them to turn on AI item entry for your plan, then run one intake shift with it side by side with your old process to compare time and accuracy.
3. Set the review rules before you scale: who may accept AI-suggested prices, which brands or categories always get the owner's eye, and what condition notes staff must add themselves.
4. On another point-of-sale system, a DIY version: photograph a batch of items, upload the photos to ChatGPT or Claude with the prompt below, and paste the results into your system's import sheet after checking each price.

Copy-paste prompt

These photos are consigned items for {STORE NAME}, a {STORE TYPE, e.g. children's and maternity consignment boutique}. For each photo, give: brand (or 'unknown'), category from this list {CATEGORY LIST}, size if visible, a one-sentence description in our style ({STYLE NOTES}), visible flaws, and a suggested price using our price guide {PRICE GUIDE}. Output one table row per item. Mark anything you're unsure about with '?' so a person checks it.

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