Bring cheerful, artistic energy into your home with Moda, a vibrant blend of contemporary design and art deco heritage. Made to be mixed and matched, the collection invites you to create your own perfectly unique table, and every combination makes a striking statement.
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I have been writing a blog for my fellow independent retailers for many years now (there are over 750 entries so far). Jason has suggested that I add these Specialty Shop Retailing posts to my shop's Bridge feed every Monday, so I'm going to try to do that. In the meantime, I invite you to take a look at some of the past entries - and to watch for "Savvy Store Solutions," my bimonthly column in Gifts and Decorative Accessories magazine. I want us all to be successful!
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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 ...
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Susan Gravely – alongside her sister, Frances, and mother, Lee – founded VIETRI 40 years ago after a serendipitous vacation where they discovered the charms of Italian ceramics. Gravely’s new book, Italy on a Plate, equal parts travelogue/cookbook/memoir, is a culinary delight celebrating four decades of bringing the best of Italy’s tableware to an adoring fan base.
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You and I go back almost to the start of VIETRI in 1983. [Editor&rsquo...
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How registrants can invite friends to open a registry at your store via text.
May 24, 2023
Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: Registrants can now invite friends to open a registry at your store. The new "Help a Friend" feature on registry lists allows registrants to send a text message to their friends with an invitation to open a registry.
In the example shown, we see a registry list at Luxury Gift Shop. In the "Help a Friend" box, the registrant can click the "See Details & Invite Friend" link to refer their friend to your registry service....
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What an honor to be featured in the Sunday edition of The Mercury News.
"It has been 40 years since Morhauser launched Annieglass in a tiny studio in downtown Santa Cruz... By the mid-1990s, then-first lady Hillary Clinton invited Morhauser to attend a White House celebration of American artists, and Morhauser had moved her company to her current 17,000-square-foot studio, allowing it to grow to the 22 employees it has now. The studio operates 30 kilns and turns out more than 20 ...
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I was happy to see Tableware Today magazine share our experiences and lessons regarding the power of free shipping.
You're invited to read the article below:
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THE LAST WORD
FREE SHIPPING PAYS OFF
by JASON SOLAREK
Most indie stores don’t have the technical ability or people power to track pricing and offer discounts like free shipping. Indie stores need this information or they’ll be left behind. This information can make a difference: in ...
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How to connect with or invite the sales reps assigned to your brands to sell more and quickly access their contact information.
March 20, 2023
Your Online Store has an updated feature: you can now more easily connect with your sales reps.
On a brand's home page, you can invite your sales rep to join you on the Shop Local platform. Your store can also edit or remove a sales rep assigned to a brand.
Connecting with your sales reps helps your store contact the right rep more quickly, sell more products, and work more efficiently.
Bridge analyzed the websites for the top-40 selling brands in the tabletop and giftware industry. We assessed what promotions and discounts, such free shipping, brands offer. Bridge did this because a product's price, which is impacted by discounts, is often the leading factor when shopping online. More than 67% of the brands surveyed by Bridge offer free shipping.
How to encourage registry customers to purchase from a registry by sharing previous gift givers' names
February 16, 2023
Your Bridge Store has an updated feature to encourage customers to complete a registry purchase. Your Bridge Store displays gift givers' names on a registry's list.
Previously, the gift givers' names were only displayed by rolling over "Purchases" at the top of a registry list.
Now, the gift givers are also displayed in a box at the footer of a registry's list.
In the example shown, we see a registry list at The Ivy House, a fine china store in Dallas. At the ...
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How integrating a messaging service into our e-commerce platform can help us acquire new customers.
January 31, 2023
It takes a lot of people to build a bridge, but just two to tango. This applies to the analog world as well as the digital one. In the digital space, I'm using tango to refer to messaging between two people. I believe messaging is a service we can add to our offering to diversify how our company Shop Local grows.
Different Networks Require a Different Number of Users in a Group
Andrew Chen in The Cold Start Problem states that a key difference among network models is the required minimum ...
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How to view key wholesale information for your brands to save time and avoid errors when processing orders.
January 4, 2023
Your Bridge has a new feature: We've made it easier to access wholesale information for the products on your Bridge Store. Viewing an order's Details page displays wholesale information for products purchased by your customers.
Previously, when your store viewed a retail order's Details page the information displayed was limited to just details about the product’s brand.
With this update, the Order Details page includes:
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 ...
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More than 65% of brands surveyed by Bridge offer free shipping, while just 14% of indie stores do. Brands often charge just $118 to quality for free shipping, while stores charge $190 (a $72 difference). Where would you shop?
Bridge analyzed the websites for the top-40 selling brands in the tabletop and giftware industry. We assessed what promotions and discounts, such free shipping, brands offer. Bridge did this because a product's price, which is impacted by discounts, is often the leading ...
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