Staff at manor department stores like Saks are finding success with Instagram and social media. The Information shares this:
……….
Tyler Bell was encouraging all her clients to “tag your bag.” Every time Bell, a Saks Fifth Avenue stylist in Troy, Mich., closed a sale, she asked the buyer to show off their purchase on Instagram and tag her account, @tyler.saks. Bell posts Saks inventory multiple times a day on Instagram Stories. Her 27,000 followers will...
Read More
Part of my job is to review registry software. I ensure it works well for retailers, registrants, and gift-givers (family and friends). I also assess whether it offers good value (price vs. results).
When looking for registry software, some retailers consider MyRegistry.com for their registry service. I reviewed a retailer's site using MyRegistry.com and assessed how a customer would make a registry purchase. For privacy purposes, I blurred the store's name in the screenshots shown.
Small businesses are getting hacked via Facebook ads, shares Today’s The Wall St. Journal. The ads purport to offer Google’s AI engine Bard, but instead steal the business’s social media account access.
We’ve been tracking brands that try to bypass stores, from Nike to some tabletop brands that will go unnamed. While Nike has backtracked from cutting out stores, Levi’s continues on the path shares this weekend’s The Wall St. Journal.
The last fifteen years have been marked by brands investing in their websites, sucking up customers via Facebook and Google ads, and bypassing their stores.
View Post
How pre-populating information saves clients time and speeds them along a process.
June 30, 2023
Each April, I scramble to send my tax information to my accountant so I can file my taxes before April 15. Since my friends confide that they do the same, there are likely millions of people like us racing to prepare our taxes. What if there was a way to avoid this painful rush—and even the cost of it? The WSJ shares that Japan, New Zealand, and much of Europe get such relief. The countries prepare tax returns for their citizens using existing data, and the citizen just needs to review it,...
Read More
Here at Shop Local, we’ve seen brands try to cut out indie stores. We’ve seen big-name companies close accounts in good standing and raise minimum annual purchase amounts in the toughest of times in order to cut out indie stores. Well, now some of these brands are back with hat in hand.
How we can acquire new prospects by leveraging our existing network of customers.
June 2, 2023
In Andrew Chen’s book The Cold Start Problem, he breaks the network effect into three parts: engagement, acquisition, and economize. At Shop Local, we rely on the network effect and its three parts. I feel that we’re succeeding in terms of engagement but need improvement in acquisition.
Engagement
We use the 64,000 products in our Syncing service to engage 1,200 our retail clients. We email them new intros, price updates, archived items for these synced products. Once they ...
Read More
Your physical store can be a great asset in this ‘Age of Amazon’—just ask Warby Parker.
Details:
- Warby Parker has 200 stores in the U.S. and Canada.
- Retailers report that online advertising costs have increased 15%-20% in the last two years, making physical stores more attractive.
- Brands report that in-store shoppers buy more per purchase.
I believe the The Wall Journal should have noted a caveat about using Warby Parker as a poster child ...
Read More
“Baccarat’s craftsmanship and hand-made creations means a lot of soul and effort goes into creating each and every single piece. We need their story, so we can translate it into the arrangement that best conveys their message.”
GingerMite, the mother-and-son floral duo, create exclusive Mother’s Day bouquets for Baccarat
How setting goals for our new members can help them be more successful.
January 31, 2023
When growing our network, we consider what it takes to keep existing members and grow into other industries. Andrew Chen in The Cold Start Problem reports that Facebook famously wanted a user to get 10 friends in a week because then the person would likely use the service. Similarly, Slack said users with about 10 connections tend to become active users. My company currently doesn’t have such new user benchmarks and we need to develop them.
Adding New Retail Members to the Product...
Read More
In the book The Cold Start Problem, Andrew Chen says that the 'network effect’ is really three effects:
The acquisition effect
The engagement effect
The monetization effect
In the beginning, a business seeking to build a network has to concentrate on acquiring users, even if they are non-paying. Companies often give away the service, especially software companies, and we can see that with Facebook, Slack, TikTok, and many others. Bridge didn’t do ...
Read More
When we brainstorm about making Bridge better, we want to turn over every stone. We explore many avenues, from increasing collaboration to lowering product prices to enhancing marketing. What if an improvement was right in front of us—constant to all of these concepts? Regardless of what feature we offer, there is one constant: navigation. Navigation is fundamental to allowing members to easily find what they need—and discover what they didn’t know they needed.