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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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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Companies that sell brands on Amazon are increasingly profiting by using a series of checklists, some with 503 steps, to ensure they maximize a brand's potential.
This article leads us to ask: if we could make a checklist with 503 to-do items, what would those be? What checklist should a retailer follow to succeed online? A brand? Bridge offers members a variety of checklists to help them succeed in including the New Member Success Checklist and the Smart Brand Boarding Checklist....
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Yiren Lu shares her experience of setting up a Shopify store in the New York Times magazine. Ms. Lu reports the setup process was easy, but her online Shopify store failed because it lacked marketing, aka eyeballs and orders. In her next article, I hope Ms. Lu tries Bridge. Bridge Store helps members fill the marketing component that Shopify is missing. When a store joins Bridge, Bridge instantly points hundreds of links to the store from other Bridge members, which Google sees and ...
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Alec MacGillis shares in the Times how online shopping and Amazon in particular are wrecking havoc on retail.
Highlights:
Nationwide, 9,800 stores shuttered in 2019, among them 220 Sears stores.
Analysts predict that brick-and-mortar store closures could reach 25,000 by year’s end.
J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and J. Crew filed for bankruptcy, Macy’s furloughed nearly all of its 125,000 workers for months, and countless independent businesses have closed for good.
Our indie retailers are being hunted by four major forces:
Amazon
Big-box stores
Brands (selling direct)
Zola
While we've known about Amazon and big-box stores for some time, they are becoming more sophisticated. Amazon is so powerful now that it's the focus of anti-trust inquiries by the government. Big-box stores are spending millions on their digital operations.
Bridge's goal is to give indie stores great software that reverses the gains being made by these forces.
...
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Saks Fifth Avenue just launched a new website. Since more than 600 stores rely on Bridge Store to power their websites, I decided to compare the new site, which likely cost millions of dollars, to an indie retailer's Bridge Store software. An indie store pays pennies compared to Saks' millions, so the Saks site must be a million times better, right?
After a careful review, I'm happy to share that our indie stores have the better website. And, it sort of 'saks' for Saks that it spent millions ...
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Your Bridge Store ranks highly in Google. As a test, try this: Google "Juliska Dinner Plate." In the results, you'll see two indie stores outperform Zola (a million-dollar funded online retailer) and Houzz (another well-funded, venture capital-backed player). The two indies stores do not have any venture capitalists or bankers funding them. They simply use: Bridge.
Thalia and Dahlia, an Ohio-based store, use Bridge. It ranks just below Saks Fifth Avenue--and it's just 3 ...
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That is the question my family posed to me last night during our more-frequent FaceTime conversations.
With the passing Labor Day weekend, students entering their in-person or online school year, and the ending of a strange summer season during a global pandemic, people are looking forward to a time that can bring spirit and happiness to the darkness: the holidays.
But how holly and jolly will this holiday season be in terms of shopping? After all, the holidays are notorious ...
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Many businesses are struggling during the state-mandated shelter-in-place orders. One industry that is weathering the storm well is technology. Technology companies often deliver services digitally, which obviously makes them ideal to side-step these orders--but they often utilize another feature that makes them profitable now and in general: subscriptions.
Scott Galloway, a business leader and host of an online business class called 'The Sprint,' recently brought to my attention the ...
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Do businesses like Amazon that short-change our community affect our ability to respond to a crisis?
In this pandemic, Bridge thanks first responders and the many people that help our communities work together. When I think of communities during Covid-19, Amazon comes to mind. I do think there is value in looking back at the last 24 months leading up to today and asking: did Amazon slow down our community's ability to respond?
Amazon historically pays less in corporate taxes than other ...
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Covid-19 has changed how people are shopping. Many states have banned stores from being open. And, Amazon is processing millions of online orders. Let's get your website ready for this new era.
You're invited to a new, free webinar:
Website Preparation in Response to Covid-19
Sadly, we learned of this hack LAST week when it actually happened in...wait for it...April 2019–almost a year ago.
I predict that hacking is going to happen to more and more brands and stores in our industry. I think these victims will either turn over most online operations to a third party—or close due to costs. I know of a jewelry ...
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News outlets like the Wall St. Journal have shared that Amazon is full of fake products, counterfeits, and listings with exaggerated prices. In today’s WSJ, Amazon shares it removed 1 million fake health products related to the Coronavirus. Amazon’s action supports the accusations that Amazon often fails when it comes to policing its marketplace. It’s rare ‘action’ is actually a sign of larger ‘inaction.’ While these Coronavirus products may have ...
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February 29, 2020
February 29, 2020
Think that your business should be making big bucks selling online? Wrong. Most businesses lose money online and have unprofitable online operations. Walmart’s online operations and Wayfair both lose money, and thousands of other businesses do, too.
There is a popular myth that online sellers are casino-like winners with the winning slot machine bells sounding with each order—generating buckets of quarters (profit) for the business. Casinos often produce losers, and most ...
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