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Dollars & Sense News Posts

Industry Insights, Marketing Trends, and Kvetching by Jason Solarek

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  1. News from Us
  2. News from Members
  3. Events
  4. Press
  5. Dollars & Sense
  6. Profile Stories
  7. Updates
  8. Training Calendar
  9. Training Videos
  10. Jobs
+ Bridge in the News - Bridge in the News

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June 10, 2024 Our 8 Year Journey from Bundled Pricing to A La Carte Pricing Back to Bundles
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Our 8 Year Journey from Bundled Pricing to A La Carte Pricing Back to Bundles
June 10, 2024
We follow pricing for bundles and tiers of services. Over the last decade, we've tried various pricing approaches, as well as ways to visually convey these service offerings. In this post, I share the pricing for our services for retailers since 2017. In some case, we took a step forward and a step back--it wasn't linear progress.  We've drawn inspiration from many sources, including our competitors and Tinder. 

Presenting bundles is not limited to signing up for a service. A ...
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June 8, 2024 Subscription Bundles
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Subscription Bundles
June 8, 2024
Recently, when booking a trip to Florida to see family, I was shown an array of bundles by American Airlines. There was the basic flight, and then:
  • Main Cabin Plus. Included a free checked bag, a more spacious seat, and boarding earlier. 
  • Main Cabin Select. Included an even earlier boarding time and made it easier to change my flight. 
  • First Class. Included the largest, most comfortable seat, priority boarding, two checked bags, and better drinks and food. 

The Wall ...
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May 18, 2024 Health is Wealth: Healthy Websites 🍎
Do website service providers need a digital health label?
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Health is Wealth: Healthy Websites 🍎
Do website service providers need a digital health label?
May 18, 2024
When you pick up a package of Oreos or yogurt at the grocery store, you can see the nutrition (or lack of it!) on the nutrition label on the back. Health advocates are encouraging the FDA to make warnings more obvious on packages—such as by placing information on the front of the package, shares The Wall St. Journal. Advocates have looked abroad for inspiration. In Mexico, you’ll find labels with a black octagon, resembling a stop sign, on the front of Doritos and Nature Valley ...
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May 7, 2024 Check Your Plates 🚗
How online trends in the used car market parallel those in the wedding registry market. Online gift giving predicted to increase at the expense of in-store giving by 40% by 2030.
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Check Your Plates 🚗
How online trends in the used car market parallel those in the wedding registry market. Online gift giving predicted to increase at the expense of in-store giving by 40% by 2030.
May 7, 2024
Jinjoo Lee in The Wall St. Journal shares how the used car market has improved in the last 20 years because much of it is now conducted online.  When car buyers use the web, they are more likely to save money (saving about 2%), and dealers can, in theory, make more with dynamic pricing (about 2%)—thereby giving each party a win. Unlike 20 years ago, when we didn't have smartphones, today 95% of used car purchases start online. While 31% of used car purchases were completely in-person,...
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April 15, 2024 Exponentially Better: The Math Behind Our Shopping Platform 🔢
How a drawing on a bar napkin led to a software platform that processes trillions of calculations
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Exponentially Better: The Math Behind Our Shopping Platform 🔢
How a drawing on a bar napkin led to a software platform that processes trillions of calculations
April 15, 2024
In 2007, while sitting at the pub Moran’s with a beer, I drew a sketch on a napkin that would change our business. I drew a software model that would allow an indie store to instantly show (and sell) thousands of products online—without any labor. (The secret sauce: The respective brand would do the product update work for the merchants.) The immediate goal was to help my two retailers more efficiently load products onto their websites (and save me the boredom of doing it). 

...
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April 13, 2024 Taco Bell-wether 🌮
How Taco Ball is going digital first--and others would be wise to follow
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Taco Bell-wether 🌮
How Taco Ball is going digital first--and others would be wise to follow
April 13, 2024
Fast food is stuffing itself with software. Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is embracing a few strategies we’ve chatted about, including software bundles and membership programs. It’s even investing in AI. Its budget: $21m last year. That’s a lot of lettuce. 

Does the market merit it? Well, 45% of Yum’s sales are digital. Likewise, we’re hearing website sales make up about half of our merchants' sales. Note: We’re not half of every ...
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April 3, 2024 Loss > Gain
What your business can learn from the celebrated economist Daniel Kahneman
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Loss > Gain
What your business can learn from the celebrated economist Daniel Kahneman
April 3, 2024
Daniel Kahneman, the celebrated economist, passed away last month. The Nobel Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner gave us insights into the economics of the mind, such as people fearing loss more than gain, making short sighted decisions, and overly relying on feelings. 

We can often use Mr. Kahneman's insights in our business's daily operations.

Risk Assessment
Jason Zweig’s The Wall St. Journal profile on him shares an insight about calculating risk.  ...
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March 10, 2024 Drive Local: Join Shop Local and Get a Free Tesla 🚗
How Store Owners Can Trade Wasted Labor Costs For a New Tesla Car
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Drive Local: Join Shop Local and Get a Free Tesla 🚗
How Store Owners Can Trade Wasted Labor Costs For a New Tesla Car
March 10, 2024
No one likes to pay for gas—just ask Tesla drivers. Chris Kornelis, a reporter for The Wall St. Journal, shares this week how he switched to a Tesla to save $100 a month ($1,200 a year!) on gas. 

This story is important to us because if someone will pick a car to save $1,200 a year, we should be able to find what they need to save in order to pick Shop Local’s Online Store. Let’s learn from Chris and his Tesla choice.

Making Replacement Savings Easy to See
The new ...
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December 20, 2023 Check, Please 📝
How a checklist can be used as a valuable tool for existing clients or prospects.
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Check, Please 📝
How a checklist can be used as a valuable tool for existing clients or prospects.
December 20, 2023
This past Thanksgiving, Austin Kleon, the author of "Steal Like an Artist" and other inspirational books, shared a free gratitude journal via his weekly email newsletter. (Please view that clever, hand-drawn journal here: 
https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/a-gratitude-zine) A part of this journal is making a list of what one is grateful for. (He also has an ad lib for gratitude!) I can imagine him having a gratitude checklist. A checklist is a very efficient tool to deliver...
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October 11, 2023 Loyalty Programs
How restaurants, hotels, and tableware brands are using loyalty programs--and what indie stores can learn from this.
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Loyalty Programs
How restaurants, hotels, and tableware brands are using loyalty programs--and what indie stores can learn from this.
October 11, 2023
Perk-y
I recently read about a new loyalty program and wondered what we could learn from it. The founder of Eater and Resy, Ben Leventhal, has started Blackbird, a loyalty program service designed for indie restaurants, reports The New York Times (Read the article). Using the Blackbird app, a diner receives a perk for eating at a restaurant. The retailer sets tiers for which the user qualifies for the perk. For example, a restaurant, Nat’s on Bank in New York City, gives tier 1 customers ...
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October 4, 2023 A Date With Calendars 📆
How online calendars can help retailers manage and save time.
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A Date With Calendars 📆
How online calendars can help retailers manage and save time.
October 4, 2023
One of the main problems that businesses have is efficient use of time. A retailer (or brand or sales rep) seeks on a daily basis to manage their time and optimize results. (I was reminded of this while reading a The Wall St. Journal article about time management for the family.) Businesses use a variety of tools to manage and save time, including email, texting, and Zoom. 

Shop Local helps businesses in their quest to save time. We offer businesses a variety of services to help ...
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September 25, 2023 Simplicity ⚪️
What universal standards can teach us about simplicity regarding e-commerce platforms.
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Simplicity ⚪️
What universal standards can teach us about simplicity regarding e-commerce platforms.
September 25, 2023
When Apple launched its new iPhones this month, one of its most noteworthy updates was replacing its Lightning charging cable with a USB-C. This was not a voluntary move or extension of Steve Jobs’s love of simplicity. Apple changed it because the European Union required them to, according to Ben Cohen in The Wall St. Journal. Now, just about every mobile phone in the world (forget just little ol’ Europe) will have one charging solution (USB-C).

While this may seem logical, it ...
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September 19, 2023 Standards Matter
What the retail industry can learn from Google and Amazon teaming up on technology standards.
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Standards Matter
What the retail industry can learn from Google and Amazon teaming up on technology standards.
September 19, 2023
Google, Amazon, and an array of home appliance companies are teaming up to make it easier for you to dim your home’s lights and lock your front doors. They are adopting a standard called Matter that allows devices to communicate and work together, shares The Wall St. Journal. This allows a giant like Amazon, creator of Alexa devices and Ring doorbells, and Tuo, a small home device tech creator, to use the same platform yet keep their internal, proprietary code base. This standard is like a...
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September 10, 2023 Zero Sum Networks ⚔️
How competitive techniques can help lure clients and grow a network.
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Zero Sum Networks ⚔️
How competitive techniques can help lure clients and grow a network.
September 10, 2023
Andrew Chen shares in 'The Cold Start Problem' that many times, networks are competing in a zero-sum game. One network gets a customer to join their network and thereby not participate in another. For example, when a driver used Lyft instead of Uber, Uber, which Chen helped, lost. And it lost in two regards: Uber lost the revenue from the lost ride, and Lyft gained the revenue. Chen’s team was tasked with getting drivers to use all their time driving for Uber and thereby unraveling Lyft&...
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September 7, 2023 Love Those Margins 💖
How premium plan tiers help businesses sell more and increase margins.
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Love Those Margins 💖
How premium plan tiers help businesses sell more and increase margins.
September 7, 2023
Dating apps are launching higher-priced premium tiers, according to last week’s The Wall St. Journal. Hinge offers a new $50/month plan, and Tinder is launching a $500/month plan. The League already offers a $1,000 plan. These pricey plans take the sting out of Bumble’s $60/month plan.

Why are companies offering such plans? Because even if Tinder only gets 10% of users, that's millions. Plus, the profit and margins are likely higher for customers using these plans. A normal ...
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September 3, 2023 Jugaad’a Do What Jugaad’a Do 🚀
How limited resources can motivate teams to accomplish goals and breed solutions.
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Jugaad’a Do What Jugaad’a Do 🚀
How limited resources can motivate teams to accomplish goals and breed solutions.
September 3, 2023
India last month joined three other countries in the exclusive club that has put a craft on the moon. What’s unique about India’s accomplishment is that it did this at a fraction of what the U.S. spends on space exploration, shares Ben Cohen in The Wall St. Journal. While the U.S.’s NASA program has a $24b budget, India’s ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) budget is just $1.3b. India, which started its space program in 1963, is able to do more with less because of ...
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August 7, 2023 Cross Promotions: Seeing Green
How partnerships can be used as a marketing tool to elevate a company's brand and reputation by associating with quality partners.
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Cross Promotions: Seeing Green
How partnerships can be used as a marketing tool to elevate a company's brand and reputation by associating with quality partners.
August 7, 2023
I’m at Sweetgreen, a salad-focused restaurant, and I spotted this sticker on the preparation window.  Sweetgreen is promoting Sullivan Street Bakery. Why would it dare do that? I believe it’s because it benefits Sweetgreen: people use a brand’s name to quickly deduce information, such as quality and value. People know that Sullivan Street Bakery is good. And, even if they don’t know it, they know that a bakery provided it and that it’s not from some stale loaf....
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August 1, 2023 Hollywood Gets “Amazoned” 🤖
How technology hurts the entertainment industry just like Amazon hurts the retail industry.
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Hollywood Gets “Amazoned” 🤖
How technology hurts the entertainment industry just like Amazon hurts the retail industry.
August 1, 2023
Over the last three decades, Hollywood and many that rely on the entertainment industry have embraced ordering goods over Amazon.com.  Recap: Amazon is a technology company that often cuts costs by replacing humans with code and robots and bypasses local red tape like, um, taxes and labor rules.  Hollywood writers, producers, and ticket goers embraced a technology company that made their lives easier but often at the cost of others (aka retail workers). 

Today, technology is ...
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July 22, 2023 Pass the Apps 🍡
What Threads can teach us about leveraging our existing network when launching a new service.
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Pass the Apps 🍡
What Threads can teach us about leveraging our existing network when launching a new service.
July 22, 2023
Threads, a new Twitter-like service from Meta, the owner of Instagram, launched this month and almost immediately attracted 40m active daily users. The service’s growth has since stalled and now has just over 10m daily users, but that is still commendable. The Wall Street Journal shared that this impressive launch was largely possible because Meta used its built-in network of one billion Instagram users. This user base helped it overcome the “cold start” problem of acquiring ...
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July 18, 2023 To Kill a Mockingbird
How a company's sales and growth can be affected by the message it conveys to customers.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
How a company's sales and growth can be affected by the message it conveys to customers.
July 18, 2023
Allbirds stock is down 95% since its November 2021 initial public offering. People may say the company launched the wrong products (did you buy one of their puffer jackets?) or tried to grow too quickly.  I believe there is a larger reason: you can’t scale a company by leading with an environmental message—which is Allbirds’s pitch. Consumers rank saving the planet as one of their least pressing concerns when making a purchase. The leading factors consumers look for when ...
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Press: Shop Local & Bridge in the News
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Florida Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Florida Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
April 2024

Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Tennessee Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Tennessee Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
April 2024

Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Louisiana Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Louisiana Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
April 2024

Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Delaware Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Delaware Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
April 2024

Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Pennsylvania Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants in Pennsylvania Get Google Sales Leads 🔍
March 2024

Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants Get Sales Leads in Mississippi
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants Get Sales Leads in Mississippi
March 2024

Shop Local Merchants Are 60% of Google Page 1 Results in South Carolina
Shop Local Merchants Are 60% of Google Page 1 Results in South Carolina
March 2024

Shop Local Merchants Are 50% of Google Page 1 Results in Georgia
Shop Local Merchants Are 50% of Google Page 1 Results in Georgia
March 2024

Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants Get More Sales Leads than Big-Box Stores Using Google
Shop Local Helps Indie Merchants Get More Sales Leads than Big-Box Stores Using Google
February 2024

Shop Local Retailers Rank on Page 1 of Google in 60% of States
Shop Local Retailers Rank on Page 1 of Google in 60% of States
February 2024

Shop Local Merchants Rank 700% Higher than MyRegistry.com and Shopify Merchants
Shop Local Merchants Rank 700% Higher than MyRegistry.com and Shopify Merchants
September 2023

Shop Local Helps Indie Stores Rank on Page 1 of Google in 64% of States
Shop Local Helps Indie Stores Rank on Page 1 of Google in 64% of States
September 2023

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