Shop Local members and Jason Solarek, Founder and CEO, at the Rosse showroom in Atlanta.
Shop Local, an e-commerce platform managed by Bridge, helps the best independent retailers across the United States and Canada sell online. Our service provides retailers and their brands with tools to collaborate, compete online, and prosper financially.
Our goal is to help indie stores offer a great shopping experience with the best products, competitive prices, and quick delivery.
We believe local stores are essential to the retail industry and our communities.
Overview
Our History
Bridge was started to solve a pain point experienced by its founder. In 2007, Jason Solarek was running a small design agency that created and updated retail websites. When adding products to clients' websites, he found Excel and Dropbox frustrating to use and felt like they weren’t built to share retail products easily.
While thinking about his clients' businesses over a beer at Moran's pub in New York City, he noticed that Karen, who owned a retail shop in New York, was adding the same products to her website as Sallie, who owned a store in Missouri. Upon further consideration, he realized that many of his clients were adding the same items to their websites, week after week, thereby duplicating each other's work. Drawing the process on a bar napkin, he sensed an opportunity to help his clients save time and money. Solarek asked the retailers to team up with their popular brands and share the product data. Solarek asked the brands to input and maintain the data. With retailers and brands on board, Solarek set up a system by which the product data 'flowed downstream' to the retailers' websites.
Today, Bridge helps thousands of businesses in the retail industry share products, news, and market-sensitive data. In 2025, merchants will use our Shop Local e-commerce platform to sell tens of millions of dollars in goods. Helping them accomplish this is the Syncing service, which enables them to easily display up to 73,642 products from 113 home goods brands.
Why Do We Help Indie Businesses?
Rochester circa 1905
Shopping local is proven to help support our schools, families, and communities. Specifically, shopping local helps produce local jobs and generate local tax revenue. Due to this, Bridge supports shopping local and enjoys developing community empowering software.
Jason Solarek, Bridge's Founder and CEO, grew up in Rochester, NY—a city that has seen its ups and downs and can benefit from local businesses growing. Using Rochester as inspiration, we seek to help towns and cities of all sizes grow and 'own' their futures vs. letting a distant tech behemoth undermine their community.
4 Reasons Shop Local Is Unique
Without Shop Local, an indie store often has to pay four different providers. With Shop Local, they have one company ensuring the services work together seamlessly. This reduces errors and costs.
Shop Local’s platform offers members hundreds of unique features, including these four key differences:
- We're the only service to offer merchants (e.g. retailers, gift shops, etc.) an online store with a wedding registry service built in.
- We're the only service to offer merchants an online store with wholesale ordering built in.
- We're the only service to offer merchants an online store with product syncing built in.
- We’re the only service provider dedicated to supporting brick-and-mortar, Main Street indie shops.
Thank You For Supporting Local Shops
We'd like to thank you for supporting indie stores.
What you may not know is that supporting a local store makes an impact. By supporting our 1,495 stores, you help a local community.
- Shopping locally supports our roads, schools, and other community needs.
- Supporting brick-and-mortar stores keep a bustling shopping district alive. Vacant stores can snowball; no one wants to see more empty storefronts.
- Big online players sometimes ship goods with questionable authenticity and origin. In contrast, you can trust our indie stores.
My team and I are building an online shopping experience where local stores offer just as much selection as big, online players. We help 1,495 of America's best indie stores offer the best items with great prices and quick delivery.
Please keep supporting local indie shops that make your community: your community.
P.S. ~ You're invited to learn more about me and my motivation for Shop Local here.
Thank you.
Shop local,
Founder & CEO
Shop Local
E-commerce & Gift Registry Platform
Powered by Bridge
T: 1-212-254-9655
339 East 9th St.
New York, NY 10003
Press Room: Bridge & Shop Local in the News
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We Power Your Business...Who Powers Shop Local?
Shop Local uses the best software providers in the industry. We'd like to thank our providers and partners, including:
Cloudflare helps your account load more quickly and helps fend off bad actors (security).
Pingdom monitors your website’s uptime and helps identify ways to make pages load more quickly.
Vivio stores and serves the files that make up your account, helps pages load quickly, helps stop bad actors, and provides many other key services.
By working with the best providers, we ensure that you, your customers, and our members have the optimal experience. We pool the resources, costs, and management of these companies and deliver their best services to you.
