Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: You can now see key statistics for your business in 2024 on the new Success Summary page.

What statistics are shared?
For retailers, the 2024 Success Summary page shares:

• Online retail sales
• Retail sales ranking among all online retailers
• Number of shopping bags created
• Number of retail orders received
• Average online retail order amount
• Number of new customers gained
• Top online spending customer
• Day with the most online sales
• Most popular

In February, brands raised their prices on 4,735 products, producing an average price increase of 7%. If a retailer didn’t make these changes, these price increases would cost their store 7%.

Thankfully, indie stores using Shop Local have the updated price for these 4,735 products. They don’t lose 7%. The stores receive the updated prices instantly via our Syncing service.

About the Syncing Service
Syncing is a service for retailers that reduces labor costs for website

Congratulations to the following members for being the top gift registry performers in February 2025:

Top-3 Retailers
🥇 P.S. The Letter in Fort Worth, TX 
🥈 Friend & Company in New Orleans, LA
🥉 Pieces of Eight in Lafayette, LA

Top-3 Retail Movers
🥇 Glassworks and Feathers and Cheeks in Pittsburgh, PA / +816%
🥈 Galleria Riverside in Columbus, GA / +706%
🥉 Fincher's in Greenwood, MS / +573%

By gift registry sales / % change in February 2025 online revenue

We track the benefits of automation, and this human error caught my eye. An employee at Citigroup incorrectly typed in a refund amount, and it nearly cost the bank $81 trillion. The bank spotted this error and stopped it. The bank replied that it's adding more automation to its processes to avoid such mistakes.

While the stakes aren't as high for our indie stores, each day we see our 1,500 indie retailers manually entering product data into their POS and online stores.

The Wall St. Journal recently shared how Skechers has become a major shoe player by marching to its own drumbeat. 

Started in 1992, Skechers is the third largest seller of shoes in the world. But the company's history goes back even further: the founder's first company, LA Gear, which flamed out, was started in the 1980s.

Skechers grew by focusing on comfy and affordable shoes and didn't sign expensive promotion deals with active athletes. (It does partner with ex-

Each month, our Leaderboard reports the best performers from among 1,500 indie stores, 3,000 brands, and 300,000 products with no man hours. Leaderboard results are automatically tallied and published on the first of each month; it’s as if I have an omnipotent robot that does this work for me. Automation like this is crucial to running a successful business. 

Amazon, Walmart, and other retail giants spend massively on automation because this will decide the winners.

We are pleased to announce that J Dabbs Designs has joined Shop Local to grow its online registry business after being referred by sales rep Sonny Melder. Founded by owner Jenny Dabbs, J Dabbs Designs offers interior design services, gifts, bridal registry, large scale furnishings, and more. 

The store instantly received great benefits:

• Customers and registrants can shop 6k+ products online.
• The store avoids 9 weeks and $6,034 on 

The problem an indie store faces is it needs to juggle many software services, including these four:

• The software that runs their online store.
• The software that runs their online gift registry.
• The software that gets them product data. (They get the products’ pictures and prices from this service.)
• The software to placeholder wholesale orders. 
   

The above requires four different companies. Reasons? 

• No company makes an online store and wedding registry software

The WSJ shares that customers are disappointed with in-store shopping after being spoiled by the massive selection online. 

One can infer from the article’s chart that for every one item in a store, there are 10 online—but indie stores have only one for every three. Therefore, indies often have 70% less selection online.

There’s good news for indie stores: Shop Local’s Syncing service fixes this deficit. The Wall St. Journal would find that our stores may have 20x or

Your Shop Local Store has a new feature: A registrant can now add their monogram or engraving information to an item's listing on their registry. 
 

Previously, registrants could not add monogram details directly to the item's listing on the registry. Instead, they had to leave a comment on the item or add a note at the top of their registry. With this new feature, items eligible for monogramming or engraving will now display a "Monogramming or Engraving: + Add"

Congratulations to the following members for being the top gift registry performers in January 2025:

Top-3 Retailers
🥇 Friend & Company in New Orleans, LA   
🥈 P.S. The Letter in Fort Worth, TX
🥉 Babcock Gifts in Memphis, TN

Top-3 Retail Movers
🥇 Little Brown House in Amarillo, TX / +878%
🥈 Glass Bazaar in Knoxville, TN / +560%
🥉 The Kitchen Table in Hattiesburg, MS / +451%

By gift registry sales / % change in January 2025 online revenue vs.

• Customers and registrants can shop 7.4k+ products online.
• The store avoids 11 weeks 

• A brand displays our ShopLocal.org logo so that retailers reading the magazine know they can easily sell the products shown.
• When a brand offers our Syncing service, a retailer can instantly display the brand's entire product catalog online.
• The retailer's customers can buy the products and add them to gift registries. 
• The

• Product information, pricing, pictures, and more (including website listings). (Inventory.)
• Stock.
• Marketing offers.

• Merchant must be new to Shop Local.
• Merchant must have a brick-and-mortar store location.
• Merchant must Sync with two Syncing Brands.
• Merchant must have the Online Store and Registry active. 
• Merchant must log in to their account.

• This feature allows you to control which products appear on retailers' sites.
• If you want a product to be listed on your Shop Local Store but not appear on retailers' sites, you can turn off Syncing for that product.
• When a