How to navigate around your site quickly using breadcrumbs in order to save time.
December 8, 2023
Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: We've added breadcrumb navigation to a brand's Home (Collections) page and a product's Details page. The trail of links (or "breadcrumbs") at the top of these pages shows the site's structure and identifies the hierarchy.
Benefits of Breadcrumbs:
Helps shoppers identify their current location on your website.
Helps shoppers find what they're looking for more easily.
Encourages shoppers to navigate from the current page to different
I have a friend who recently took a job with a respected women’s clothing retailer after 13 years of retirement. My friend, Leslie, a former school teacher, wanted to be of use and knew that retail was a great opportunity for seniors. She was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed her first week. She loved that the manager asked her to try on clothes she liked and then suggested outfits that would look good on her. Leslie even purchased a few of those suggestions, couture she never would have ...
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Part of my job is to review registry software. I ensure it works well for retailers, registrants, and gift-givers (family and friends). I also assess whether it offers good value (price vs. results).
When looking for registry software, some retailers consider MyRegistry.com for their registry service. I reviewed a retailer's site using MyRegistry.com and assessed how a customer would make a registry purchase. For privacy purposes, I blurred the store's name in the screenshots shown.
How to quickly view and navigate between all products in a collection.
November 28, 2023
Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: We've made it easier to view and browse through products in a collection. A product's Details page now displays thumbnail images for all products in the collection.
Previously, one could only click the "Next" button to navigate to the next product in the collection. If one wanted to view all products in a collection, one had to browse to a brand's Home (Collections) page. With this update, one can quickly view all products in a collection and...
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How to quickly view all active registries by registry type.
October 26, 2023
Your Shop Local Store has two new features to help you keep track of your registries: On the Registry Reporting page, you can now view your active registries by event type. On the Registry Lists page, you can view the current registries by registry type for a specific year.
With these two updates, your store can easily identify the number of active registries by event type.
In the examples shown, we see the Registry Reporting page for a store.
TikTok and Amazon are battling in the retail space. TikTok wants to be a retailer, and Amazon wants to be more of an influencer platform. These two share the same goal: get users to share a product link, recommend the product, and get a cut of the sale, shares The Wall St. Journal.
This article and these companies speak to the power of affiliate marketing. One of Amazon’s long-standing secret growth weapons has been affiliate commissions, and influencers are a well-known ...
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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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How to determine which collections are top sellers.
October 10, 2023
Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: we've made it easier to quickly identify best-selling collections.
A new green "Best Seller" banner indicates which collections are top sellers.
In the example shown, we see the Results page for a Beatriz Ball collection listed on The Ivy House's site. At the top of the page, we see the green "Best Seller" banner, signifying that the Vento collection is a top seller.
“Let them eat cake” is the most famous quote attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution. As the story goes, it was the queen’s response upon being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread. Because cake is more expensive than bread, the anecdote has been cited as an example of Marie-Antoinette’s obliviousness to the conditions and daily lives of ordinary people. But did she ever actually utter those words? Probably not. ...
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How to view popular gifts to add them to a registry.
October 4, 2023
Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: We've made it easier for gift registrants to view and add gifts to their wedding registry. There is now a new "Add Gifts" page that showcases popular gifts that a registrant may wish to add to their registry.
The Add Gifts page is tailored to the registry type. For example, the Add Gifts page for a wedding registry displays the following content:
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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How to set interior designer pricing for your brands.
September 28, 2023
FOR BRANDS AND DISTRIBUTORS
Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: Interior designers can now view interior designer pricing for your brands and make purchases. If an interior designer is approved by your business, they can log in to your account and buy items at the wholesale designer price set by your business.
In the example shown, we see an interior designer logged in to BIA Cordon Bleu's account. The interior designer can place wholesale orders at the designer pricing set by ...
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Babcock Gifts celebrates its 50th birthday in 2024. The bridal registry and gift shop opened in 1972 as a partnership that included interior design. In 1974, with the exit of one partner, the store focused on antiques, gifts, and bridal registry. Over the next 42 years, there would be growth into two stores before downsizing to one. In 2016, ownership changed and the store moved one block down, where it continues to be a destination for bridal registry and gift-giving. With the constant doom and...
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Brands may consider using Shopify for their online operations. It’s important to note that brands can’t do many things with Shopify. A key Shopify problem for a brand is that the brand has to have separate “stores” for retail and wholesale customers. The reason is that Shopify doesn’t know what to charge the customer because it doesn’t know if it’s a general public shopper (that pays retail) or a retailer (that pays the wholesale price). &...
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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).
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&
We recently conducted a study to review Google search results for wedding registry purchasing. In the results for 32 states in which we have clients, Shop Local stores ranked on page 1 of Google ahead of national chains and other registry services, which often have larger customer bases and bigger website budgets.
When conducting the search for "wedding registry [state name]", many Shop Local stores beat MyRegistry.com and Shopify apps, like Gift Reggie.
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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