Retailers have had a difficult time in recent years, as brands have increasingly circumvented them. With the advent of e-commerce websites and social media, brands are pitching their wares directly to consumers and cutting out retailers.
I’ve sometimes wondered: What if the factory decides to do the same and cut out the brands? If the retailers don’t like it, how will the brands? Some businesses are now trying this. Services like Italic allow a consumer to bypass...
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While watching Salvage Kings, a Hulu TV show about a Canadian salvage company, I learned that the Nash automobile company’s 1920s slogan was "Give the customer more than he has paid for.” From Wikipedia, I learned the cars lived up to their slogan:
“Innovations included a straight-eight engine with overhead valves, twin spark plugs, and nine crankshaft bearings in 1930....A long-time proponent of automotive safety, Nash was among the early mid- and low-priced cars ...
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Many brands are growing their DTC (D2C) channels, but a recent report by BMO Capital Markets suggests they may be a shooting themselves in the foot--which their retailers may be happy to hear. The report shares that wholesale is more profitable overall than selling direct.
A few things have enabled brands to grow their DTC aspirations:
Selling to customers via the brand's own e-commerce website.
Tracking customers using social media and ad networks (aka surveillance,
When it comes to gift registries, Bridge helps indie stores rank higher in Google than other players in the retail industry. In the example shown, we see four retailers using Bridge to rank on page 1 of Google. Two retailers beat The Knot, and four beat Walmart.
While our indie stores are just a fraction of the size of The Knot or Walmart, they outrank them because they use Bridge's technology. Bridge's software and network of websites offers advantages that bigger entities can't overcome ...
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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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I’m seeing a disturbing trend online. Stores are not sharing news and events on their websites. Instead, they are relying on Facebook (and Instagram, which it also owns) to perform this task. That’s like a customer coming into the physical store and the store manager saying: "Want our news and events? We don’t have it here. Go to the coffee shop next door—which will be filled with our competitors pitching to you."
This past week I finally started doing a better job of sharing our vision. A company’s vision and how it shares this story is a key pillar in its growth. A company can grow without being a good vision sharer (storyteller), but it makes the growth slower and harder. When one gets up on stage (metaphorically) and shares their vision, with passion, it’s magnetic and can help split the sea. What medium did we add to our story-sharing tools this week? Video. I made and shared ...
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Online advertising is great for brands. It's bad for: indie stores.
Why? Before the Internet, there were few ways for brands to cut out stores. They may have an annual warehouse sale, but that was about it. Today, a customer visits a retailer website and looks at brand X. Or it visits brand X's site to do some research. The issue for indie stores: thanks to online advertising, now I'm being marketed to across the web. I'm reading news on the New York Post website and being encouraged to...
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ModernRetail shares some insights about boosting traffic:
"About 26.8% of Amazon’s traffic comes from search engines ... while close to half — 43.8% — of Walmart’s web traffic comes from search. Boosting those numbers is a simple matter of boosting external links. Because most major search engines give significant weight to the number of referral links that drive people to a given page, one way for Amazon to ensure that its products rank highly in search results ...
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Bridge has created a new feature that helps sales reps stay up-to-date with wholesale orders. At the end of each day, at 5 pm EST, your Bridge will email you a summary of wholesale orders placed over the Bridge network. The email bundles together orders from different brands and inputs them into one email. If you would like to see an order's details, there is a link to each respective order.
You often do not need to take action on the orders as they were ...
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Recently, there has been a big push to shop local in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Small businesses are promoting each other through signs posted in windows. It's great to see indie shops build a network of support and take a stand against big-box stores!
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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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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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Allison Zisko in this month’s HFN shares that The Knot has launched its own direct-to-consumer sales channel—seeking to cut out its long-standing brick-and-mortar partners like Macy’s, Target, and indie stores.
This new sales channel raises the stakes on the growing battle between The Knot and Zola.
Macy’s, Walmart, and Target would be wise to team up and launch their own gift registry platform—akin to how the TV networks collaborated to ...
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Good news: Bridge is helping your business make more sales and stop Amazon's growth. The reason: your Bridge team has gone to great lengths to ensure your Bridge software loads very quickly for your shoppers. A report shares that 41% of shoppers jump to Amazon when a site is slow. The report shares that the fastest site tested loaded in 2.2 seconds and the slowest was 43.9 seconds. Bridge's sites often load within 2 to 3 seconds, which places your Bridge Store at the front of the pack in ...
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VIETRI AND BRIDGE PARTNER TO HELP INDEPENDENT STORES
Retailers Can Receive $150 For Joining Bridge Network
July 15, 2020
NEW YORK, NY – VIETRI, known as the premium importer of luxury tabletop goods from Italy, has launched a new program to help its independent specialty retailers online and in-store. VIETRI has agreed to offer its authorized retailers a credit of $150 towards future purchases by opening a free account with the e-commerce community ...
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When a business offers a website, it's a costly venture. A business, such as an indie store, brand, or sales rep group, will build the site and then have to maintain it. On a day-to-day basis, it has to ensure the pages load quickly. This often requires the business use image-optimization software to reduce the page size and a CDN (content delivery network) to get the content closer to the visitor's geographic location. These costs add up.
Bridge and Shopify both bundle many services under a ...
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