The Times covers how indie shops in Austin helped develop SoCo and now are being edged out by Hermès and Lululemon.
Excerpt:
“The story is always the same,” said Mr. Hodge, who owns the Big Top Candy Shop and Monkey See Monkey Do novelty shop. “The scrappy locals go into a run-down area, they take it over, they rebuild it into a destination area that’s attractive.”
But the quirky ambience on the grand avenue doesn’t last long, he ...
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New York magazine reports that shopping on Amazon is a mess. It’s got an antiquated interface and lots of spam results and reviews. It’s not a nice experience and you’re not sure what you’re buying.
Excerpt:
“There was the ’90s-retro e-commerce interface, which conceals a marketplace of literally millions of sellers, each scrapping for relevance, using Amazon as a sales channel for their own semi-independent businesses. It subjected ...
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How to promote post-wedding discounts to registrants to receive more orders for unpurchased items.
February 7, 2023
Your Bridge has a new feature: You can now promote post-wedding discounts on unpurchased registry items to your registrants. Your store can turn this feature on or off. This discount keeps your business competitive with major registry players (e.g. Zola may offer a 20% discount).
If you choose to offer a post-wedding discount, you can offer the following percentages off:
5%
10%
15%
20%
Once the feature is turned on for your store, the post-wedding discount is promoted to ...
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According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 50% of businesses fail within five years of opening; fewer still make it to their 10th anniversary. So a company with legs surely must doing many things right, right? Not necessarily. Even if you’re providing a great product or service, the most important requisite to success lies in the customer experience. If customers feel ignored by your support team after having a bad experience with a product or service, they’ll shift for a ...
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"A 2021 Harris Poll Consumer Shopping Study showed that 71% of Americans would prefer to buy from an independent retailer over a national chain, as long as they were equally convenient and reliable."
~ SpotOn
I believe these survey results. Shoppers want to shop local, but they don't want to sacrifice selection, price, or speed. Consumers will shop with your indie store if you can offer the same selection, price, and delivery speed as, say, Amazon. Is ...
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How we can bring clients together to build a larger network.
February 4, 2023
Economist Bent Flyvbjerg encourages us to find our “Lego” in his new book “How Big Things Get Done.” Mr. Flyvbjerg, whose new book is reviewed by Ben Cohen in this week’s The Wall Street Journal, says that most large projects that are completed successfully use a modular approach. Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:
“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big ...
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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 let customers know that your store will call them to receive payment for their order.
January 17, 2023
Some Bridge merchants do not accept credit cards online. The merchant calls the customer (after they placed the order) to collect the customer's credit card information. For merchants that do not accept cards online, your Bridge has an updated feature that makes it easier for customers to expect a call from the store. A customer will now see a banner with a green telephone icon on the final checkout page. The banner displays this message:
I discovered a page on Amazon’s site proclaiming that Amazon supports small businesses. That is news to me and many small businesses which have been attacked by Amazon, its deep pockets, and its army of millions of delivery people and thousands of warehouses. Amazon’s page says it helps small businesses, which it defines as having under 100 employees and less than $49 million in sales. (It says it uses Gartner’s definition.)
At the Dallas trade show this week, I’ll be sporting our new Shop Local t-shirt. In flight to the show, I’ll be reading how network effects help businesses, including retail shops. Indie shops and network effects go hand in hand. Retailers can effectively grow via network programs, including Bridge’s Product Syncing service and referral and affiliate programs. To learn how networks can help your business, I recommend picking up a copy of The Cold ...
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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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Your Bridge has a new feature: We've made it easier to navigate to important pages on your Bridge account. Hovering over the user profile icon at the top of the page reveals a drop-down list with links leading to your business profile settings, retail orders you’ve received, wholesale orders you’ve placed, and products you’ve liked.
With this update, one can use the links in the user profile drop-down to get to the desired content more quickly.
While buying a beer this past weekend in Philadelphia, I spotted this cool beer can with a ‘Back to the Future’ themed design. I was happy to see on the can, which is brewed by Three 3’s Brewery, a “Drink Local” campaign. Supporting local businesses, whether they are breweries or gift shops, is a mission dear to us.
With our retail members in the throes of the holiday season, it was nice to read an article by Retail Dive providing some insight into Q4 2022. Retail Dive, a retail industry publication, informs readers that big-box stores share much of the same friction as our indie retailers do. I appreciated the acknowledgement that independent stores may feel disruptions quicker and may even have an edge on providing a more superior customer experience to gaining loyalty. The good news is that there are ...
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Seasons greetings from the PNW everyone! I was out shopping today and came across a sign in the wild promoting Shop Local, a concept near and dear to us and something we have believed in from the inception of the company..helping support local businesses in a way that's beneficial to all. So much so that we began transitioning Bridge to ShopLocal earlier this year.
This particular sign was in a mall similar to one that you may have near you. Having been decimated by big name brands pulling up...
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