Goode Company's gifting business started with homesick Texans wanting to share a slice of home. When customers moved away, they'd call founder Jim Goode and ask if he could ship them one of his pecan pies. That request became a mail-order business, then a catalog, then e-commerce, and eventually a corporate gifting program built around the signature Brazos Bottom Pecan Pie, a pie Bloomberg later named the best mail order pie in America.

The pie needed a way to travel. So Jim built it a signature wooden gift box and branded the lid with a line about counting your lucky stars you're in Texas. The box carried more than a pie. It carried a feeling of Southern hospitality, the kind people wanted to pass along to someone else.

Today Goode Company ships nationwide to individuals, families, and corporate buyers, with single orders that sometimes reach over a thousand recipients. Corporate gifters can even put their own brand on the box, with a literal brand: a fire-branded lid carrying their company logo. As Taylor puts it: "When someone opens it, they don't necessarily think Goode Company sent this. They think their client did."

That's a beautiful gift. It's also an operational puzzle. And as gifting volume grew, so did the challenge of managing it.

The challenge: gifting breaks the rules of standard e-commerce

Standard e-commerce runs on a simple assumption: one order, one recipient. Someone picks a product, checks out, ships it to one address. Gifting flips that. One order might be a spreadsheet of 200 recipients, each with a different address, a different gift message, and maybe a custom-branded lid. Every detail has to be right, because there's no graceful recovery from the wrong message reaching the wrong recipient.

That single problem actually splits into two. Some orders are big and complex enough that customers want Goode's team to run them. Others are small enough that customers would rather place them in a few minutes, themselves, without an email thread. A gifting program has to serve both, and standard e-commerce serves neither well.

The build: a solid in-house system that outgrew itself

When Goode moved to Shopify Plus, Stephen Capps went looking for native multi-recipient checkout. He was sure it existed.

"I thought, there's no way Shopify doesn't have a built-in B2B multi-recipient checkout experience. There's just no way that doesn't exist. And sure enough, it didn't."

So Stephen built one. An internal app that ingested spreadsheets, validated addresses, generated invoices, and managed recipient lists. It worked. Stephen rates it "a solid 6 out of 10." What wore on the team was carrying a solo-maintained system through the busiest weeks of the year with no margin for error. As Taylor puts it: "Some systems just break down. They start to put the wrong gift message on the wrong thing, or you get someone's first name as someone else's last name."

The switch: one app, two jobs

Ahead of their second gifting season on Shopify, the team found Send To Many, a Built for Shopify certified app purpose-built for multi-recipient gifting. For Stephen, who had built the in-house version himself, the upgrade spoke for itself.

"It's the most valuable B2B app that Shopify has on their marketplace today. Whatever little Toyota Camry I built, now we're driving a Cadillac." — Stephen Capps, Director of Technology, Goode Company

The key was that one app finally did both jobs. Goode had been stitching together separate tools: one for the order upload the team runs in Shopify admin, another for the self-service checkout customers use on the storefront. Send To Many handles both, so the same recipient data, validation, and order logic power the high-touch path and the do-it-yourself path alike.

On the storefront, that shows up as three journeys that don't trip over each other:

• One recipient. Standard Shopify checkout. Nothing extra required.

• Do-it-yourself multi-recipient. A "ship to multiple addresses" option opens the Send To Many experience. Customers add recipients by hand or by spreadsheet, write gift messages, choose shipping, and schedule a ship date, all without leaving the cart.

• White-glove bulk. Larger accounts submit an inquiry and a spreadsheet. The team runs the order end to end through the Send To Many backend.

Across all three paths, Send To Many validates addresses before orders ship, attaches gift messages and inserts at the order level so they can't get mismatched, and generates recipient orders automatically without re-entry.

Results: faster team, bigger channel

The payoffs came on both sides.

On the operations side, Send To Many removed the technical drag that used to consume the team's time, the manual re-entry, the address-checking, the scramble when something broke. What stayed was the human touch: a dedicated team of permanent and seasonal reps helping customers with any order that needed a hand. The difference is where that time goes now.

"The amount processed in Send To Many in our pilot year was about 40% higher than previous years. A sales rep is able to process approximately that much more. I attribute that to speed, and to less time fudging with program freezing and the glitches you get with custom development" — Taylor Clark, Director of Supply Chain, Goode Company

• 40% more processed per rep in the first full year on Send To Many, with the same seasonal team

• Highest output per employee yet across all prior programs

• Fewer resends from address validation catching bad addresses before shipment

• One order instead of batches for large recipient lists

On the storefront side, Goode became the first merchant live on Send To Many's new self-service checkout in October 2025, drawn by the single-page experience and a team willing to build alongside them. Comparing that checkout to the prior multi-ship app over the holiday season:

• Overall multi-recipient orders up 12%

• Recipients per order up from 4.3 to 5.1, a 17% increase

• Orders with 11+ recipients nearly doubled, with total recipients via those orders up 134%

• Multi-recipient total sales up 24%

The two sides feed each other. Smaller orders that once started as inquiries now flow through as self-serve checkouts the team never touches. Large orders move from inquiry through payment to order generation without the manual steps that used to slow every stage. More volume, handled by the same people, and more of it arriving on its own.

Hear Taylor and Stephen walk through how Goode Company built this gifting operation in our webinar. Watch the full conversation.