Last week, Amazon bought iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner, for $1.7b. Why? Yes, their 'Rosie from the Jetsons' has AI and is in your home (which is where Amazon wants to be), but the reason Amazon wants it is because customers want it. Which leads us to ask: Why do customers want Roomba? Because it does something that humans find annoying and hate doing: cleaning. Roomba has spotted the value that robots bring to the world and it's not simply being ...
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Stop at Glassworks and Cheeks during the Annual Shadyside Sidewalk Sale, taking place Wednesday, July 27th - Sunday, July 31st from 10 am to 5 pm each day. Come to Walnut Street and it's side streets for the best deals of the season. Glassworks and Cheeks offer the best deals of the year!
The Sale features a variety of your favorite small business shops and boutiques from the Shadyside community. Many local businesses will participate, and most retailers offer their best prices of the year, up ...
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While eating a slice of coal-fired pizza at Arturo’s in Soho yesterday, and getting an occasional whiff of Houston Street garbage, I had to admit: I was at a loss for insight to share with my coworkers this week. Each week, I send out a motivational message to my team that precedes a summary of what they accomplished. We call this report the Brick report. This would be my seventy-second Brick introduction: What else could I say--and would they miss it if there was not an introduction...
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I think that Zola, an online provider of gift registries, may be harming local stores. Zola allows brides to pick things from any site, such as an indie store’s gift registry. Zola may then encourage the registrant to bypass that local store and use those gift funds with Zola. This is an issue because Zola has handled more than 650,000 registries, and its revenue is estimated to be $130m. Millions of dollars may have been diverted away from indie, brick-and-mortar stores to Zola&rsquo...
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Today’s Wall St. Journal reports on the need by retailers to quickly update prices due to inflationary pressures. We agree: Bridge has been offering an instant price update service to retailers for their websites for 14 years. On a daily basis, our Product Syncing service helps Kate Spade, Baccarat, Le Creuset, and 100 premium brands update prices for 60,000 products on 930 stores’ websites.
Scott Galloway, a business leader and NYU professor, shares that we're now spending over 4 hours a day on our mobile phones--up from just 20 minutes in 2010. (…I wrote part of this post on my iPhone.) What does this mean? Lots of opportunities for Amazon--as well as Facebook, Instagram, and other tech titans--to sell to us. Our cell phones are, in essence, 1,000 'buy buttons' in our pockets (or on our nightstands) that encourage us to buy stuff online, any time of the day.
Last February e-commerce company Shopify Inc. replaced the “Ottawa, Canada” dateline that began its press releases and earnings reports with a strange new one: “Internet, Everywhere.” The geographical shift came at the insistence of Shopify’s founder and chief executive officer, Tobi Lütke, who tends to view such matters through the prism of cold, hard logic. In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, he’d made the early, seemingly rash decision to...
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In the book Great by Choice, Jim Collins posits that processes are key to an organization's success. As an example, he cites John Wooden, the NCAA championship-winning UCLA basketball coach, who trained athletes on processes that included everything from shooting to tying one’s shoelaces. In practicing, a player may perfect their shoelace tying and do thousands of repetitive free-throw shots. When we watch a game from the nosebleed seats like me (...what can I say, I’m ...
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Scott Galloway, an NYU marketing professor and soon-to-be CNN host, suggests that when we assess a market, we start by asking how much one's experience using the service has changed in the past few decades. For example, when you go to your doctor’s office, if you were to spin around and pretend it’s 1990, how different is your experience today vs. 30 years ago? Scott often critiques doctors' offices, hospitals, and colleges because he believes they have not evolved enough in services...
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I've watched brands use social media to do an end-run around retailers. A recent article from RetailDive substantiates this. Excerpt:
"75% of social media users said they increased their purchases from brands they follow... A 2021 study from NPD found that 51% of survey respondents said they bought items thanks to content in their Facebook and Instagram feeds."
Translation: 75% of shoppers bought more from brands directly--which is bad for retailers. The article ...
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Brand new for your Fall and late Summer wardrobe, check out the P.J. Salvage Cloudy Days collection at Cheeks. Reminiscent of the sky on a partly cloudy day, the pattern is white and shades of blue that PJS calls "Denim". Pictured are the henley top and the pant, but shorts, a tank, and a robe are also available. As is the norm for P.J. Salvage, the pieces are very soft, cozy, and comfy. Stop at either Cheeks to get yours!
Glassworks and Cheeks offer some of the best deals of the year at the Shadyside Sidewalk Sale on Wednesday, July 28th to Sunday, August 1st.The event is to be held along Walnut St. during normal business hours.
Local businesses will participate and retailers will offer sales of up to 70% off! Savvy shoppers have flocked to the sale for more than 30 years. FREE 2 hour parking on residential streets just off of ...
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We launched a new version of Bridge Store in April of 2019. Since that release, we've added hundreds of new features. An easy way to see the evolution of Bridge from 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond is via a side-by-side comparison.
Shown here is the Bridge Store for Shulan's:
General public shopper viewing the Bulova home page.
General public shopper viewing the Bulova Precisionist Collection home page.
General public shopper viewing the Bulova Precisionist Black and Rose
Clients choose Bridge because we bring together many of the benefits of selling on Amazon or using Shopify.
To understand this, it helps to first view the e-commerce provider spectrum. Marketplace sites are on the left, and solo sites are on the right. In the marketplace model, the store's logo (the seller's logo) is often nowhere to be seen. The seller is like a cog in the machine working for 'da man (aka Jeff Bezos). On the other end, there is the solo website for ...
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Bridge has updated your gift registry software to make it easier for registrants and their friends to view product pictures. When a product displays more images, shoppers are more likely to purchase it. With this updated feature, your registries should convince more shoppers to make purchases.
Here is how the feature works: When a product has more than one photograph, a link will appear over the product's picture displaying the number of photographs available. In the example shown, we ...
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