This video walks through how an indie store can offer a successful wedding registry service.
An indie store on average sells $78,000 in wedding gifts. (Some of our retailers sell $1m+!) We can help your store get a share of the billion dollar registry market.
Webinar includes:
This video walks through an overview of the Shop Local Wholesale service and how it works for retailers and brands.
60+ premium brands, including Beatriz Ball, Costa Nova, and Vista Alegre, use the Wholesale Ordering service to receive orders from 1,500+ of America's leading stores. Brands are selling $3.5m and retailers are saving 7 minutes per order using the service.
Webinar includes:
I predict that 70% of wedding gifts will be given online by 2030. (Already, 50% of wedding gifts are given online today.) I call this future online growth the 'wedding registry wave,' and my company's mission is to help indie stores capture this wave.
Specifically, our company helps indie merchants up their online game by improving their website operations. We're giving them e-commerce and wedding registry software that is modern, easy to use, and pre-populated with gifts from leading
...The Wall St. Journal shares this weekend that Walmart has automated 50% of its fulfillment process, bringing down fulfillment costs by 40%. This 40% in savings will thereafter be used as a pricing advantage against indie stores (and retailers of any size).
Walmart, like Amazon, is spending billions of dollars to accomplish this. The goal is to spend $1b today to save $1m tomorrow on labor and sell $1m more tomorrow. Long term, these numbers snowball and are in Walmartβs favor.
Last
Fayetteville Main Street, a non profit that advocates for indie businesses in Fayetteville, TN, recently posted a giveaway on Facebook, inviting followers to write a note for small businesses. Inspired by this, we decided to write our own Valentine's Day note to our indie stores on Shop Local.
..........................
We π Indie Stores
To: an indie store | Date: 02/14/25
You are the heart of your community. You give customers and registrants a meaningful experience and remind them that supporting
...Weβre helping our indie stores get new wedding registries. Weβre sending SMS text messages to past customers and registrants encouraging them to promote the retailerβs wedding registry service.
Details:
1. Weβre sending this text message to customers that bought off a registry list in 2024:
β¦.
Hi [gift giver's first name],
Thank you for buying a beautiful wedding gift for [registrant name] & [co-registrant name]. They loved it.
π Valentineβs Day is coming up. If you need something
...Great news: We've made a free poster for your indie store for Valentine's Day. This poster will help you get more wedding registries. February is the second most popular month (after January) for brides to open a wedding registry. Now is your month!
This poster can also be printed smaller and be a flyer. You can place this in an upright display.
You can customize the template by placing your website address and QR code on it.
Please find the poster template attached. You can get your unique QR code
...Last week, I wrote about the desire for Big Retail (i.e. Amazon, Walmart, and other large retailers) to automate all parts of their supply chain. This weekendβs The Wall St. Journal shares that Amazon will spend about $105b on AI this year. (Alphabet will spend $75b and Meta $65b.)
AI is an automation tool. Indie stores will be expected to offer many of these tools because Big Retail does. But, as the article notes, these tools are very expensive and indie stores donβt have the
...Austin Kleon, the author and creativity guru, offers these four posters for free. This inspired me to wonder if Shop Local couid offer free posters to our 1,470 indie stores. Indie stores need marketing materials, yet often lack the resources to create them.
The posters could even be printed small as flyers and put in upright displays.
We already offer free marketing materials to members. We offer two flyers: a review flyer and a wedding registry flyer. If they wish,  
The Wall St. Journal shares that many goods arriving directly at our door from China come thanks to the Yiwu wholesale mall. Watch the WSJ video:
View PostYour Shop Local Store has a new feature: A registrant can now add their monogram or engraving information to an item's listing on their registry.
Previously, registrants could not add monogram details directly to the item's listing on the registry. Instead, they had to leave a comment on the item or add a note at the top of their registry. With this new feature, items eligible for monogramming or engraving will now display a "Monogramming or Engraving: + Add" link, making it easier
...The Wall St. Journal editorial board shared yesterday that inspecting an international package going through customs costs us taxpayers about $5. In 2016, President Obama raised the duty-free limit from $200 to $800 so our customs agents could inspect fewer packages. I feel this change was a gift to the customs agentsβbut bad for citizens and indie shops.
Hereβs why:
First, it allowed a lot more shipments with drugs to enter the U.S. A 2021 study found 24,000 instances of drugs in
The New York Times gives an update on the executive branch suspending the de minimis rules for China shipments and adding a 10% tariff on Chinese goods.
Excerpt:
βLower-value parcels from China, which previously were tariff-free, now face not only the 10 percent tariff but also the many complex tariffs on every category of goods that these shipments previously skirted entirely.β
I believe these new rules will help our indie stores and many others. I think goods are being shipped
Congratulations to the following members for being the top gift registry performers in January 2025:
Top-3 Retailers
π₯ Friend & Company in New Orleans, LA
π₯ P.S. The Letter in Fort Worth, TX
π₯ Babcock Gifts in Memphis, TN
Top-3 Retail Movers
π₯ Little Brown House in Amarillo, TX / +878%
π₯ Glass Bazaar in Knoxville, TN / +560%
π₯ The Kitchen Table in Hattiesburg, MS / +451%
By gift registry sales / % change in January 2025 online revenue vs. prev. month
Top-3 Wedding
While at Best Buy to buy a Philips Hue light strip, I did some quick research on how product makers and digital service providers explain their benefits and pricing.
See Best Buys membership program here:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/best-buy-membership/best-buy-membership-total/pcmcat1629315977983.c?id=pcmcat1629315977983
Youβre Invited π
Offer a Successful Gift Registry Business Webinar
Join us for a webinar to learn how to prepare for your 2025 gift registries and catch the registry wave.
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