Shop Local has been busy adding new registry features to help your indie store sell more. We have stores doing $1,000,000+ in registry sales a year. This can be you 😉
We're excited to share 7 new registry features with you:
Your Registry Overview Page
One page to get a bird’s eye view of 10 key metrics.
See new registry activity and updates as they occur in real time.
How to view: Log in → Hover over "Gift Registry" → Click &
Your Shop Local Store has an updated feature: You can now change your wedding registry plan. This feature helps you more easily manage your business's registry subscription.
Previously, your business had to message a Shop Local coach to request a plan change. With this update, you can upgrade or downgrade your registry plan at any time. The new "Change Plan" modal also shows discounts and monthly savings for each plan, helping you see savings and make the best choice.
How Store Owners Can Trade Wasted Labor Costs For a New Tesla Car
March 10, 2024
No one likes to pay for gas—just ask Tesla drivers. Chris Kornelis, a reporter for The Wall St. Journal, shares this week how he switched to a Tesla to save $100 a month ($1,200 a year!) on gas.
This story is important to us because if someone will pick a car to save $1,200 a year, we should be able to find what they need to save in order to pick Shop Local’s Online Store. Let’s learn from Chris and his Tesla choice.
Making Replacement Savings Easy to See
The new ...
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Great news: You can save 20% off your annual service.
This is like receiving almost 2 and a half months of service for free.
This 20% discount is double our normal 10% and has never been offered before.
This offer is only good till December 13, 2023.
I imagine you wish to take more vacations in 2024 (Paris or Patagonia?), see family and friends more often, or eat at that (expensive) new restaurant. When you pay for Shop Local's service for the year, you'll have more money to do ...
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A retail client recently decided they'd like to delete some past wedding registries to "save money." This raises the question, "Does deleting old registries save money?" We assessed the question and found that deleting old registries likely doesn’t save a retailer money. The reason is that it costs more to replicate our automated marketing efforts with more costly manual efforts.
How a company's sales and growth can be affected by the message it conveys to customers.
July 18, 2023
Allbirds stock is down 95% since its November 2021 initial public offering. People may say the company launched the wrong products (did you buy one of their puffer jackets?) or tried to grow too quickly. I believe there is a larger reason: you can’t scale a company by leading with an environmental message—which is Allbirds’s pitch. Consumers rank saving the planet as one of their least pressing concerns when making a purchase. The leading factors consumers look for when ...
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How allocating our resources efficiently can help us save time, save money, and deliver value to our customers.
May 9, 2023
You've heard of Salsa-fy? It’s national, was started in Dallas, is used by 60,000 employees, and is used at more than 1,600 corporate locations. Salsa-fy helps businesses steer clear of trouble, offer the best value, and ensures profitability. You may interrupt me here and ask, “Jason, don’t you mean the software company Salesify?” No, I’m talking about the restaurant chain Chili’s and its approach to managing salsa, french fries, and its business. ...
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The sale you can't miss runs from April 1 through April 11. From floor to ceiling, once-a-year savings: 20% off over a thousand items! The Home Sweet Home Sale Event includes ALL Furniture, Lighting, & Rugs and also selected other Decor. Sale begins this Saturday. Stop in at either store to place your order.
How we can celebrate indie stores and promote sales by hosting a Save Local event.
February 23, 2023
When one thinks of shopping locally, some consider it an act of charity. One may pay more and get less selection. That’s not a recipe for success. In contrast, the world’s most successful retailers, Walmart and Amazon, operate on just the opposite principles: low prices and massive selection. When I’m in Walmart's Panama City Beach location, it’s so massive I feel like I’m in the Giants' stadium. Amazon sells 12m items on its website (350m if you count the third-...
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In a 2007 article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and an author, advocatedthat more hospitals use checklists. He cited many medical studies showing how checklists save lives (and money). Implementing one checklist, a hospital "…prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs." The startling part: the list was only five steps long! In other words, people don’t consistently follow...
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In a recent NY Times article about working out, the author Christie Aschwanden gives readers tips on how to make working out more enjoyable. (Read the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/well/move/habits-motivation-exercise.html). In reading this, I saw many parallels between working out and helping our stores get their websites ‘in shape.’ The author encourages readers to not think of working out as exercise and instead think of it as "hanging out with friends...
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Relying on file-sharing services like Dropbox to sell products often costs stores an extra $750 per brand and hurts sales
I work with 900 retailers who tell me they are drowning in a sea of Dropbox folders containing Excel files and product images. What can we do about this? First, let’s review what’s happening: When a brand wants to share products with a store, it emails the store a link from Dropbox or a similar file-sharing service. A store may receive five to ten Dropbox links...
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This advertisement reminded me of our goal at Bridge: save you time. You weren’t born to update your website. Many retailers report that Bridge cuts their website maintenance by 80%—which means 80% less time in front of a computer.
We save Kenny Cohen, owner of Contemporary Concepts in Pittsburgh, PA, hundreds of hours each year. He remarked about Bridge:
"When we switched to Bridge Store, we cut our website maintenance costs by 86%. Instead of ...
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MEMBERSHIP SURGES 50% IN E-COMMERCE COMMUNITY Online Shopping Boom Drives Retail Industry to Team Up On Bridge
NEW YORK, NY, July 30, 2021 – Bridge, an e-commerce community, reported a record increase in membership as the pandemic continued to rattle the retail landscape. In the last 12 months, 275 retail stores joined Bridge, bringing the total membership to more than 826 stores—a 50% increase. ...
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Your Bridge has a new feature: it now outputs the savings on sale items. When an item is on sale, it will automatically calculate the percent off the list price and output the savings.
In this example, we see the tray was $170 and is on sale for $119. That is a 29% savings.
When you run an online store, a major cost is adding and updating products. Adding 1,000 products to your website often costs about $750 and requires 50 hours. What if there was a cheaper, quicker way? And what if you could offer better product data at the same time? There is: Smart Products.
The Smart Products service outputs in your Bridge Store all the products from a brand that you sell, with professional pictures, accurate prices, and product dimensions. This service is...
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Bridge clients receive a special discount of 10% when they pay upfront for a year of Bridge service.
For example, a client's existing plan may be $300/month.
With a 10% savings, they would:
Save $360/year • Pay just $3,240 for a year (instead of $3,600)
What if there was a way to cut your labor costs and boost your sales? There is. Your employees work the cash register, stock shelves, clean, and provide customer service. They also: update your website. As you know, these days customers expect a website to offer tens of thousands of products. Amazon has hundreds of millions of products. You have to add products to your site to survive.
You need someone to add products to your website, then update those products. On ...
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We have updated your 'Join Us On Bridge' page. The page now outputs how much time and money a store will save by joining you on Bridge.
In the example shown, we see Juliska's Join Bridge page. The page shares that a store would normally spend $518 to add Juliska's products to its website and pay $130 over the course of a year to maintain those products. Using Bridge and the Smart Products service, the store can save this money completely: syncing ...
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