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...
Read More
In the news each day, there are reports of price increases (inflation) that average 4%. When a product's price increases 4% or 45%, this often hurts a retailer. Reason: the retailer may not know about this price change till after it has sold the item. Therefore, the retailer sold the item at 45% less than what it should have. If the item is a special order and the retailer does not have it in stock, it may barley make a profit on the order.
Bridge's product sharing service helps ...
Read More
The Wall St. Journal shares that prices are rising on many products and retailers are turning to software to help them cope.
Bridge helps more than 800 stores fight the downsides of inflation. Our Smart Products service allows brands to instantly raise prices for their products on a retailers' Bridge Store--thereby helping the retailer limit loses. In contrast, stores that do not use Bridge are much less likely to raise prices on time and therefore more likely to lose money on an order....
Read More
Let’s imagine a retailer wants to operate an online store. What would the retailer and its customers experience when using Bridge vs other software? We found that a retailer using Bridge can go from having no web store to one with thousands of products in under an hour. And, there’s no charge. Other software doesn’t offer this ability.
To highlight our findings, we put together this comparison graphic showing Bridge Store and Shopify. (We chose Shopify to ...
Read More
Business leader Scott Galloway said this past week on his podcast Pivot that "complexity is a tax on the poor." I'd expand on that and posit that: complexity is a tax on indie businesses.
What if indie businesses could reduce the complexity and costs of running an online business? I believe we can. Bridge is reducing the costs of running an online business for more than a thousand businesses.
How do we reduce the 'tax'? Bridge often helps a retailer set up an online store ...
Read More
In this video I share why retailers don’t add a brand’s products to their websites and therefore fail the brand and themselves in the e-commerce race.
Bridge’s Smart Products marketing service ‘bridges’ the gaps in online distribution. Bridge's service helps brands show 100% of the brand’s products on an infinite number of retailers’ Bridge Stores. The retailer can use Bridge Store as a stand-...
Read More
Navarra’s, a fine jewelry and gift store in Lake Charles, LA, signed up for a Bridge Store on May 5th, 2021. It instantly received an online store and a gift registry for free. Within 2 days, its online store also displayed 10,000+ products. The store was able to offer many products quickly using Bridge’s Smart Products service. The service crowdsources product maintenance and allows each respective brand to effectively manage its items through the platform to free up time for Bridge...
Read More
Pizazz, a bridal and gift shop in Columbus, MS, signed up for a Bridge Store yesterday. It instantly received from Bridge an online store and an online gift registry for free. Within one day, it also offered 23,000+ products online. The store was able to quickly offer so many products using Bridge's Smart Products service. The service crowdsources product maintenance and allows each respective brand to manage its items behind the scenes.
For decades, brands have paid retailers to set up a display in the retailers' stores. Ralph Lauren's Polo, Nautica, Jimmy Choo, and other leading brands have paid department stores to set up displays and manage their brand appearance. This helps the brand and the stores increase sales.
As we all know, retail has gone digital. Thirty percent of retail sales are now online. What if there was a way for brands to sponsor displays like these physical ones but do so online? ...
Read More
When you run an online store, a major cost is adding and updating products. Adding 1,000 products to your website often costs about $750 and requires 50 hours. What if there was a cheaper, quicker way? And what if you could offer better product data at the same time? There is: Smart Products.
The Smart Products service outputs in your Bridge Store all the products from a brand that you sell, with professional pictures, accurate prices, and product dimensions. This service is...
Read More
What if there was a way to cut your labor costs and boost your sales? There is. Your employees work the cash register, stock shelves, clean, and provide customer service. They also: update your website. As you know, these days customers expect a website to offer tens of thousands of products. Amazon has hundreds of millions of products. You have to add products to your site to survive.
You need someone to add products to your website, then update those products. On ...
Read More
When I was speaking with the team this week, I mentioned author Dan Roam’s strategy for convincing people to change their ways. He suggested leading with data (i.e. facts), which leads to a change in one’s thinking and beliefs, which will then change one’s actions—aka they will change their website to use Bridge.
Yet, we can’t "lead" with too many facts, because as the authors of the book Rethink point out, that is like ...
Read More
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 ...
Read More
Reports suggest that 50% of purchases start on Amazon.com, and Amazon wants to keep it this way. Yet, businesses and merchants increasingly want to sell their products via their own DTC (direct to consumer) site, retailers' websites, Facebook, Instagram, and more. Due to this, Shopify, which powers many DTC and retailer websites, is a growing thorn in Amazon's dominance of retail. Shopify reportedly helps power more than 30% of online U.S. retail sales.
We have updated your 'Join Us On Bridge' page. The page now outputs how much time and money a store will save by joining you on Bridge.
In the example shown, we see Juliska's Join Bridge page. The page shares that a store would normally spend $518 to add Juliska's products to its website and pay $130 over the course of a year to maintain those products. Using Bridge and the Smart Products service, the store can save this money completely: syncing ...
Read More
Yiren Lu shares her experience of setting up a Shopify store in the New York Times magazine. Ms. Lu reports the setup process was easy, but her online Shopify store failed because it lacked marketing, aka eyeballs and orders. In her next article, I hope Ms. Lu tries Bridge. Bridge Store helps members fill the marketing component that Shopify is missing. When a store joins Bridge, Bridge instantly points hundreds of links to the store from other Bridge members, which Google sees and ...
Read More
How can you more quickly add products to your website? We have a solution. Bridge's Smart Products can help retailers add thousands of products in minutes at no cost. Brands pay for the service.
How you can save:
Save Time: Retailers spend weeks each year adding products to their websites. Bridge calculates that a retailer often spends 50 hours to add one thousand products to a website. If they were to add, for example, two thousand products, it would take 100 hours. In today's era, a
This drawing shows how the Smart Products service speeds products to a retailer’s website. A brand traditionally has to 'break' its website contents down into pieces (product data and images), and then share this with the store piecemeal via Dropbox or another file-sharing service. Bridge's service helps brands and stores skip these time-consuming and expensive steps.
In the example shown, the retailer Cook's Station wishes to add Joseph Joseph products to its website. Without ...
Read More