I was happy to see Tableware Today magazine share our experiences and lessons regarding the power of free shipping.
You're invited to read the article below:
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THE LAST WORD
FREE SHIPPING PAYS OFF
by JASON SOLAREK
Most indie stores don’t have the technical ability or people power to track pricing and offer discounts like free shipping. Indie stores need this information or they’ll be left behind. This information can make a difference: in ...
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It’s a formidable task, overseeing product development for all of Lenox’s flatware brands, which includes Lenox, Kate Spade, Oneida, Cambridge, Hampton Forge, Reed & Barton, and Gorham. Your tenures at Oneida and Bed Bath & Beyond, as the tabletop buyer, provide a solid foundation for this position.
Prior to Oneida, where I was senior product marketing manager when Lenox acquired us, I was at Bed Bath & Beyond for 12 years, most recently as the tabletop buyer. My whole ...
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How we can celebrate indie stores and promote sales by hosting a Save Local event.
February 23, 2023
When one thinks of shopping locally, some consider it an act of charity. One may pay more and get less selection. That’s not a recipe for success. In contrast, the world’s most successful retailers, Walmart and Amazon, operate on just the opposite principles: low prices and massive selection. When I’m in Walmart's Panama City Beach location, it’s so massive I feel like I’m in the Giants' stadium. Amazon sells 12m items on its website (350m if you count the third-...
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How having the right defaults makes decisions easier for clients and helps them be more successful.
January 27, 2023
When you look at your driver’s license, it lists if you’re an organ donor. Twenty years ago, only 20% of people were donors, but today 80% are—thereby saving millions of lives. Did people become more kind? No, the question on the application was changed from opt-in to opt-out. People signing up for or renewing a license are now by default enlisted in organ donation. Lesson: the right default answer in medical care can save millions of lives. Similarly, the right defaults ...
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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:
When we talk about prices, there are two prices that are important:
The price that we charge clients.
The price our clients charge their customers.
We normally talk about the former, aka how our prices compare with other competitors, like Shopify or wholesale services like Faire.
Of increasing importance to us is what our retailers charge their customers. Walmart recently announced that it was taking brands to account and pressuring them to keep ...
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Your Bridge now makes it easier for you to connect with and sell your brands’ products. We have added a new page to invite brands to sync products. This page significantly reduces the number of steps that your store takes to invite a brand.
There is no charge for a member to send sync invites or sync products with a brand. Product Syncing is free for retailers, sales reps, trade marts, and interior designers. Participating brands pay for the service.
 ...
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Scott Galloway, the NYU business professor and firebrand, pens a weekly, attention-grabbing article about business trends. In last week’s post, he noted the rise of the attention economy. (...Yes, my post is an attention-seeker writing about an attention-seeker writing about attention.) Comparing our current economy to those of the past, Mr. Galloway notes that today’s oil is time. He tracks the growth of digital companies like Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, and TikTok that...
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When I was a kid, my mom instilled in me a lesson to always get paid for my work. When I went to mow a lawn or do my newspaper route, she’d remind me, “Be sure you get paid.” As an adult, these flashbacks are vivid like a scene from Citizen Kane—just swap out the Rosebud sled with my newspaper delivery bike. Today, this lesson still resonates when running Bridge. When calling a store that hasn’t paid its Bridge bill, I’m confident in asking ...
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We've added a new feature to your Bridge account: You can now easily see the retail pricing history of a product.
Before this update, a member would receive an email alert letting it know that a synced product’s retail price had changed. But, this price change history was not shown on the product's Details page.
Now, the Details page shows any recent change as well as past changes. This feature helps retailers and sales reps charge the accurate price. This update ...
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Do you love a great deal on a t-shirt or TV? Sure, we all do. Yet, sometimes when we shop, the lower the price we pay, the less we pay: people. People that make the goods (factory workers) and people that sell the goods (aka indie store owners) are the victims in the discount-pricing rush.
Today’s Times shares that making a bathing suit in Sir Lanka costs about $4 per unit while in Portugal it may cost $16. In NYC, the minimum wage is $15/hour—making production in NYC ...
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When talking about memberships and subscriptions, these two business models are sometimes interchanged but actually are different. They often differ in their pricing, customers, and offerings. A subscription is often not a membership, but a membership often encompasses a subscription. A membership is often an elevated and more powerful subscription that collectivizes and leverages the subscribers.
What They Have In Common
With both models, you often pay a fee and receive a ...
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In today’s Times, we learn that Amazon is raising and lowering the prices of items millions of times a day. We also learn that it has displayed different prices for the same item based on who you are. Imagine going in to a store and the paper towels are $3 for the person next to you but $4 for you.
I can attest to Amazon changing prices multiple times a day because Amazon crawls my retailers’ websites multiple times a day. It’s as if they have spies coming in our...
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Scott Galloway, in his Chart of the Week email, shares that Amazon often ships an order within 45 minutes of receiving it. How long does it take your store?
For indie store to compete, we have to offer competitive pricing and shipping times. Bridge's goal is to help retailers offer the same or lower prices and offer the same or faster shipping.
We have exciting news: Retailers can now place wholesale orders via Bridge for 85 brands. If you are an authorized dealer, you can purchase from premium brands, including:
We work tirelessly to help our customers. A good spot to see this is on our sale site’s pricing page, which lists 60+ features that clients receive—often for free. (Sometimes I think that we’re philanthropists. Twenty-five percent of retail clients pay nothing each month.) Each feature is one that we’ve labored over.
But, ironically, our hard work may get overlooked and under-appreciated if key psychological insights are overlooked by me. In his book ...
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Best of Thymes, an indie store in Iowa, just closed (https://bestofthymes.bridgecatalog.com/news.cfm?id=20645). Hopefully, they’ll continue to operate online and keep using Bridge. Best of Thymes is part of an industry-wide series of closures that is affecting large and small retailers. Due to this, brands are increasing their efforts to go D2C. Brands justify this by saying that there are fewer stores to show their wares. While this is true, surely they are motivated by: 2x the margins. ...
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How much does Bridge cost vs other marketing tools? Let's imagine a printed catalog costs $10 to print and send to a customer. The customer uses it for 10 minutes. It therefore costs $1 per minute.
The Bridge Smart Products service costs a brand $9 per year per retailer. Over that year, a retailer interacts with that Smart Product data for 104 minutes. This number is approximately 2 minutes per week. (Please note: some retailers view Smart Product data at a much higher rate, such ...
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We have exciting news: Retailers can now place wholesale orders via Bridge. If you are an authorized dealer, you can purchase from these participating brands:
Anna Weatherley
Beatriz Ball
Calaisio
Casafina
Costa Nova
Couzon
Herdmar
Kim Seybert
Mario Luca Giusti
Medard de Noblat
Meissen
Pickard China
Pickard Crystal
Pinto Paris
Portus Cale
Royal Crown Derby
Varga
Why is Bridge Wholesale Better?
Speed: Bridge Wholesale reduces the number of steps&