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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Great news: You can save 20% off your annual service.
This is like receiving almost 2 and a half months of service for free.
This 20% discount is double our normal 10% and has never been offered before.
This offer is only good till December 13, 2023.
I imagine you wish to take more vacations in 2024 (Paris or Patagonia?), see family and friends more often, or eat at that (expensive) new restaurant. When you pay for Shop Local's service for the year, you'll have more money to do ...
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How we can acquire new prospects by leveraging our existing network of customers.
June 2, 2023
In Andrew Chen’s book The Cold Start Problem, he breaks the network effect into three parts: engagement, acquisition, and economize. At Shop Local, we rely on the network effect and its three parts. I feel that we’re succeeding in terms of engagement but need improvement in acquisition.
Engagement
We use the 64,000 products in our Syncing service to engage 1,200 our retail clients. We email them new intros, price updates, archived items for these synced products. Once they ...
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How to view key wholesale information for your brands to save time and avoid errors when processing orders.
February 23, 2023
Your Bridge Shop Local Store has a new feature: you can now more easily access a brand's wholesale information. This wholesale information helps your store more quickly and accurately process an order.
Your brand's Collection page now displays this information:
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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How to let customers know that your store will call them to receive payment for their order.
January 17, 2023
Some Bridge merchants do not accept credit cards online. The merchant calls the customer (after they placed the order) to collect the customer's credit card information. For merchants that do not accept cards online, your Bridge has an updated feature that makes it easier for customers to expect a call from the store. A customer will now see a banner with a green telephone icon on the final checkout page. The banner displays this message:
In the book The Cold Start Problem, Andrew Chen says that the 'network effect’ is really three effects:
The acquisition effect
The engagement effect
The monetization effect
In the beginning, a business seeking to build a network has to concentrate on acquiring users, even if they are non-paying. Companies often give away the service, especially software companies, and we can see that with Facebook, Slack, TikTok, and many others. Bridge didn’t do ...
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We've added a new feature to your Bridge account: you can now easily create invoices to send to other members via Bridge.
Creating invoices on Bridge allows you to send invoices to retailers, brands, and other members that you are connected with through your Bridge site. You can populate an invoice with due date, recipient, item description, details, rate, quantity, and your invoice payment terms.
Once an invoice has been created, you can send it by email, download as a PDF, ...
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Bridge has updated how a store records a purchase for a registry list. This method uses the best practice for creating a digital copy of an order. Stores need to add a purchase to a gift list for a variety of reasons, including:
A customer purchased a gift in-store.
A customer purchased a gift via telephone.
A customer purchased online via Bridge, and then called the store to add to the purchase.
A customer purchased a gift via another online outlet (
Some people like to sit on the sofa and eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I roll my eyes at this because I’m very different: I like to read the Wall St. Journal’s Christopher Mims …while eating an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s on the sofa. This past weekend, Mr. Mims suggested companies may be reassessing where they source products, some even considering more domestic production. The motivation for this started a few years ago with the U.S.-China trade war, ...
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There are approximately 40 online e-commerce providers. These software providers help other businesses sell online by offering them the ability to run an online store. These providers include Bridge as well as Shopify, Magento, Big Commerce, BigCartel, Square, and Weebly. Does Bridge offer a different (better?) experience than these other platforms? We believe the answer is yes. We also think our 960 retail clients agree: 99.7% of our retailers retain our service each month.
Jim Collins, in his book BE 2.0, explains how purpose and mission are important to companies. To help explain this, he uses the metaphor of crossing a mountain range and seeing a star on the horizon. Your purpose is to reach the spot on the horizon below the star. The current mission is climbing up the mountain you’re on. The next mission is climbing up the next mountain and so forth in order to get closer to the spot on the horizon. You will have many missions, and may never ...
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Last February e-commerce company Shopify Inc. replaced the “Ottawa, Canada” dateline that began its press releases and earnings reports with a strange new one: “Internet, Everywhere.” The geographical shift came at the insistence of Shopify’s founder and chief executive officer, Tobi Lütke, who tends to view such matters through the prism of cold, hard logic. In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, he’d made the early, seemingly rash decision to...
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Macy's said it has partnered with DoorDash for same-day delivery through nearly 500 Macy’s stores nationwide, with no minimum order required, according to an emailed press release.
Macy's and payments company Klarna on Tuesday announced a five-year partnership that will allow Macy's customers to pay in four interest-free installments.
We have improved your ordering system. Your orders page now has a standalone payment status drop down. This new feature helps you more easily update the order's payment status and keep it separate from the order's status (aka: if the order has been shipped, etc.). Previously, the payment and order status were combined in one drop down.
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Just a note to our customers! We are open for business. If you would like curbside, please call us: 979-543-5772 or 9779-543-1950 and we will accommodate for you. You can place your order and once we get the "order", we will call you for payment. Clothing is not set up as of yet- online.
We do have assorted items on sale throughout the store--from clothing to frames, shoes, etc.....
Stay safe, wash your hands, and get those masks out!
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I visited the New York’s Post website--to get my fill of New York gossip--and I was shown a massive advertisement from a leading tabletop brand. (I have covered the brand's logo with yellow rectangles for the privacy of the brand.) Before visiting the Post's site, I had visited this brand's website. The ads appear because the brand has hired some advertising platform to track me around the web, show me ads, and direct me back to its DTC (direct to consumer) site.
New E-mail Scam Targeting Invoices and ACH Payments
There is a new scam where hackers take over a brandβs email account and request payment via ACH. This financial scam recently happened to a brand that we know. Please note: Bridge has not been a victim of this scam. We are warning businesses to ensure it does not happen to our friends.
Here is how the scam works:
1. A hacker takes control of an employeeβs email account such as their Microsoft email user ID and password. This is likely done via a...
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April 9, 2018
April 9, 2018
In the book The Four, the author Scott Galloway praises companies that reduce the 'friction' of completing an action. For example, Uber makes ordering a taxi easier. In the case of Amazon (which I often rail against), he noted it makes online shopping easier.
Which leads to the questions: what is Bridge making easier? What 'friction' is it removing for users?
Bridge reduces the pain points for a retail business in these areas: + Adding products to its website. + Adding news to its website. + ...
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