How a local shop quickly opened an online store with a gift registry and saved $955 in costs, all from a flyer in their Casafina shipment.
February 6, 2024
We are pleased to announce The Square Gift Co. has joined the Shop Local community of retailers. The Square Gift Co. is a retail store in Fulton, Mississippi. The store owners, Jessica Howell and Keely McMillen recently placed an order with Casafina. When their shipment arrived, it contained a flyer promoting Shop Local. The flyer helped them more easily market and sell what was in the box online. The Square Gift Co. currently has a Shopify online store but was looking for a Gift Registry ...
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How a local shop quickly opened an online store with a gift registry and saved 3 weeks and $1800+ in costs.
January 31, 2024
We are pleased to announce that Atkinson Floral has joined the Shop Local community of retailers. Atkinson Floral is a florist and gift shop in Atkinson, NE. The store owner, Curie Mincer, has owned and operated the business since 2016. Over the course of time, she has expanded the florist shop gift area and added a gourmet coffee shop. Her passion for her business and her community led her to expand her services to include a gift registry program, which is lacking in their small town. Curie&...
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How Shop Localβs software helps an indie store in Kentucky immediately open an online store and registry service.
January 18, 2024
We are pleased to announce that The Persnickety Pig, a retail store in Cadiz, Kentucky, has chosen the Shop Local software platform to grow its online business.
The Persnickety Pig is home to eclectic gifts, antiquities, gourmet foods, and more. They offer a comprehensive wedding and shower gift registry service that takes the stress out of gift-giving for any special occasion.
By joining Shop Local, the store instantly receives great benefits:
How a local shop quickly opened an online store with a gift registry and saved $18,000+ in costs.
January 12, 2024
We are pleased to announce Serenite Home has joined the Shop Local community of retailers. Serenite Home is a retail store and design studio in Daphne, Alabama. The store owner, Laura Downing, recently relocated her business from California. Her passion for interior design led her to expand her services to include a retail store with home furnishings, gift and tabletop offerings.
Within a very short time, Laura had a live Shop Local Store:
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
It’s a 40th anniversary for the company founded by Colin Riggs (left) and Ned Voelker’s parents, Abigail and Ed Voelker. Over the last four decades, the entire family has created a curated collection of handmade tableware and giftware for the nation’s independent store retailers.
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Congratulations on a milestone 40th year in business. Are you surprised Abigails has endured? Ned Voelker: We are surprised. It’s a tribute to Ed and Abbie ...
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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.
Small businesses are getting hacked via Facebook ads, shares Today’s The Wall St. Journal. The ads purport to offer Google’s AI engine Bard, but instead steal the business’s social media account access.
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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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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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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NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 06, 2023 – Shop Local, an e-commerce platform, reported that it's helping indie stores rank on page one of Google in 64% of states for wedding gift purchases. The findings are based on a recent study that Shop Local conducted regarding wedding registry purchasing.
Study Findings:
For 32 state searches, Shop Local Stores appeared on page one of Google. This represents 64% of all states. When just calculating the states in which Shop Local has
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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We’ve been tracking brands that try to bypass stores, from Nike to some tabletop brands that will go unnamed. While Nike has backtracked from cutting out stores, Levi’s continues on the path shares this weekend’s The Wall St. Journal.
The last fifteen years have been marked by brands investing in their websites, sucking up customers via Facebook and Google ads, and bypassing their stores.
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How big data, filters, and search engines can help us create a better experience for our members.
May 26, 2023
Apple announced last month that it's launching a new classical music app. What’s novel about the Apple Music Classical app is how it lets music fans more easily search thousands of variations of the same song. For example, let’s say you want to find a Johann Sebastian Bach song. Over the past 300 years, many musicians have done ‘covers’ of his works, and there are variations by conductor, music, year, etc., thereby producing thousands of variations. Existing software ...
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How integrating a messaging service into our e-commerce platform can help us acquire new customers.
January 31, 2023
It takes a lot of people to build a bridge, but just two to tango. This applies to the analog world as well as the digital one. In the digital space, I'm using tango to refer to messaging between two people. I believe messaging is a service we can add to our offering to diversify how our company Shop Local grows.
Different Networks Require a Different Number of Users in a Group
Andrew Chen in The Cold Start Problem states that a key difference among network models is the required minimum ...
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Our retailers recently told us that customers are calling and asking about non-existent brides, and brides are asking about non-existent registry gift lists (e.g. wedding registry lists, baby lists).
We investigated the issues and below is what we found.
What is Happening:
We found that many of these purchases are coming from registrants that open a ‘universal registry’ on websites such as Zola or MyRegistry. These universal registry services allow the registrant to add ...
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Our retailers recently told us that they were confused by strange registry orders. The stores are receiving gift registry orders on their sites but the retailer does not have a registry for the gift recipient at its store. Customers are calling and asking about non-existent brides, and brides are asking about non-existent registry gift lists (e.g. wedding registry lists, baby lists).
We investigated the issues and below is what we found.
What is Happening:
We found that many of...
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