Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room

About Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room

Giovanni’s Room is the oldest LGBTQ & feminist bookstore in the country. After 41 years of serving the LGBT community in Philadelphia, the store closed on May 17, 2014. Soon after, it was announced that Philly AIDS Thrift signed a two-year agreement to become the proprietor of Giovanni’s Room. The new venture was named Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room will continued to sell LGBTQ books–both new and used–as well as clothing, bric a brac, housewares and art.

Their goal is to sell the lovely, useful, interesting, amusing, and sometimes mysterious stuff generous people donate to our thrift store and then distribute the proceeds to local organizations involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

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The Challenge

Philly AIDS Thrift rescued this beloved historically significant bookstore from closing its doors forever and needed to bring the store up to speed technologically. They had a collection of websites that did not communicate with each other, Square for Point-of-Sale and inventory management and Ingram for book ordering. Online orders were a manual, multi-step process and they did not have a dynamic way to browse books online.

Not only does the team at YIKES have a keen eye for design, I am pretty sure they are magicians. Magic is real, and YIKES proves it. We came to the folks at YIKES with a project others said was impossible. Not only did they make it happen on time; everyone at YIKES was respectful, fun to work with, and pros at making the technical aspects easy to understand for everyone on our team. If you’re lucky enough to have found YIKES, look no further, you’re in good hands.

Alan Chelak, Manager

PAT @ Giovanni's Room

The Solution

We combined their various sites into one WordPress site using WooCommerce for ecommerce synched with Square for inventory and Ingram for book data. The site has the ability to order out of stock books by dynamically creating new WooCommerce items via an Ingram search. Now PAT @ Giovanni’s room staff can accept and ship online orders in addition to products and event tickets.

As a certified LGBTBE, it was a dream come true to build the site for Giovanni’s Room. We are forever grateful to Philly AIDS Thrift for saving this Philly treasure from extinction.

Tracy Levesque