We watch trends to share them with our members and help them capture orders. Forbes shares 35 helpful e-commerce statistics and we picked out a few highlights for you below:
Key Statistics:
20.1% of retail purchases are expected to take place online in 2024.
By 2027, 23% of retail purchases are expected to take place online.
E-commerce sales are expected to grow 8.8% in 2024.
52% of online shoppers report shopping internationally.
I saw this Instagram post from official Mark Levine and thought, “How much are the Amazon lobbyists paying our officials?” NYC continually over taxes our indie businesses and fines them—but we’ll build six marinas for Amazon? (Mark said three marinas, but it’s actually six marinas.) The main culprits behind this: Mayor Adams and the Economic Development Corporation (EDC). Amazon is one of the richest companies in the world. Jeff Bezos, the founder,...
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How Amazon privatizes public spaces for its own profit
February 14, 2024
This is a daily sight on 8th St. in the East Village of New York City, a spot historically chockablock with indie, brick-and-mortar shops. This is an Amazon truck and freelancers who have taken over the street (it’s a no standing zone) and sidewalk as their own. This is one way Amazon sells things for less: it turns public streets and sidewalks into its “warehouses” and “stores.” Imagine you’re a local business with a roof and rent. You can’t compete ...
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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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Amazon and third-party delivery services have setup a “warehouse” outside the Astor Place USPS office. This is not a truck parking for five minutes. This a day-long, everyday occurrence. I’ve seen this same scene on a daily basis all around the city for the last three years.
This hurts local retailers. While the local businesses pay extra taxes to operate a store in southern Manhattan, it costs Amazon much less to park a delivery truck (permanently?), put ...
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I see this situation all over the city. Amazon shipping companies are “warehousing” our public space. They put up cones and are permanently setup and conducting business. They use public space for private commercial use.
They’re like a pop-up store in a public parking spot. But unlike a physical store that is in a private building and pays commercial storefront taxes, these trucks don’t pay those retailer taxes. (Each year businesses in lower ...
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Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: You can now make a product tax-exempt.
With this update, your store can decide whether or not to charge tax on a product. This is handy, for example, when selling most food online in New York State, where such purchases are tax-empt.
Please follow these steps to access this feature:
Log in to your Shop Local account.
Browse to the product you wish to make tax-exempt.
On the product's Details page, click "Edit product&
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).
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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How pre-populating information saves clients time and speeds them along a process.
June 30, 2023
Each April, I scramble to send my tax information to my accountant so I can file my taxes before April 15. Since my friends confide that they do the same, there are likely millions of people like us racing to prepare our taxes. What if there was a way to avoid this painful rush—and even the cost of it? The WSJ shares that Japan, New Zealand, and much of Europe get such relief. The countries prepare tax returns for their citizens using existing data, and the citizen just needs to review it,...
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What we can learn about a company through its mission statement.
June 30, 2023
This past week, I read a mission statement from The Knot's corporate website (https://www.theknotww.com/). The statement included a paragraph and five principles. The paragraph describes what the parent company does. The statement says:
"We help couples around the world navigate and enjoy life’s biggest moments together. As a global company, our industry-leading websites, top-ranked mobile apps, and trusted resources provide the most sought-after information, connections, and ...
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Work With the Nation's Leading Brands and Indie Shops to Support Main Street
Shop Local is a fast-growing e-commerce and gift registry platform providing services to leading independent retailers and premium brands. Based in New York, NY, Shop Local is seeking candidates to support the existing software and build out new services that will change the retail industry.
Shop Local has an opening for an entry level web developer to update the existing code base and write new applications. We are...
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Ronald Reagan said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Reaganomics usually refers to tax cuts and trickle down economics, yet I propose that we take the Gipper’s quote and ask: How can simplicity contribute to a business's success?
When we share what leading companies do, we can often skip an explanation and sum it up in a brief sentence. Examples:
Today’s Gen Z gift registrants want to do everything online, often on their iPhone 14. They want to start a registry, add products, remove products, edit quantities, and view purchases. They don't want to call the store to do this.
In the adoption of digital tools, another trend is also at play: female shoppers are busier than before. Today, more women graduate from college than men. Women are increasingly doctors, CEOs, and world leaders. (Italy just welcomed its ...
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FedEx is raising shipping rates 6.9%, which provides an opportunity for stores to get shoppers in the physical store. Store owners can encourage customers to skip the expensive ‘shipping tax’ and just pick their purchase up in store.
In the early 2000s, the board game Cranium became a hit. The game combined elements of Scrabble and Pictionary with the goal of helping more people enjoy playing a game. Richard Tait, who created Cranium and sold it to Hasbro in 2008 for $77.5m, passed away in July. Like Mr. Tait, I had been a paperboy, but he went beyond what I ever offered: he came up with a new service that sold breakfast sandwiches along his newspaper route. He increased profits and made customers happier. ...
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An East Village Artist’s Death Prompts a Reflection on the State of Indie Retailers Today
…….
While thumbing through the Times, I noticed a smiling young woman’s picture in the obituaries. In the black and white photograph, she's standing on a fire escape with a historic building and a bridge in the distance. I was initially attracted to Ronni Solbert’s 1959 picture, yet I was even more drawn in by what I noticed next to her photo: a children&...
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The EU has passed a law that will affect Amazon and other big tech companies. The law will likely make it harder for Amazon to promote its own private label products on its website at the expense of others.
While this is welcome news to many, this is a small victory as Amazon’s ambitions are grand as well as its ability to outpace laws. For the first 25 years of the Internet, Amazon, founded in 1994, rode on the rails of the government being too slow to enforce online tax ...
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If someone has an American flag flying on their porch and Amazon boxes often at their doorstep, maybe they should take the flag down and put up a Chinese flag. Amazon appears to be profiting by cutting out much our domestic retail community and instead helping Chinese businesses. And don’t expect Amazon to pay much in local taxes either.
This past weekend’s WSJ shares how third-party sellers, many of them from China, have flooded Amazon with spurious listings, leaving ...
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