Featured News See You in Dallas in June 2024
Wednesday, June 19, 2024 - Friday, June 21, 2024
Location: Dallas Market Center
We'll be at the Dallas show Wednesday, June 19 – Friday, June 21, 2024. We'd love to meet with you and hear about your business.
Are you a brand or sales rep that uses Shop Local?
If so, we put together the following materials for sales reps and brands. Please share these materials with your retailers. Please print these for use during the show:
A flyer showing featured Brand Syncing partners. We have 114 partner brands. You'll likely see your brand on this sheet.&
Do website service providers need a digital health label?
12:46 PM • Yesterday
When you pick up a package of Oreos or yogurt at the grocery store, you can see the nutrition (or lack of!) on the nutrition label on the back. Health advocates are encouraging the FDA to make warnings more obvious on packages—such as by placing information on the front of the package, shares The Wall St. Journal. Advocates have looked abroad for inspiration. In Mexico, you’ll find labels with a black octagon, resembling a stop sign, on the front of Doritos and Nature Valley granola ...
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Scott Galloway, author and business savant, recently wrote an ode to collaboration that I liked:
"Humans ... evolved hiding in the trees while stronger, faster, and more sharply clawed creatures roamed the savanna. So we developed a robust neurological system for identifying threats, gauging their severity, and responding quickly, often before we’re conscious of the threat level. But fight-or-flight wasn’t enough to shepherd us out of the forests. First we had to develop our ...
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How online trends in the used car market parallel those in the wedding registry market. Online gift giving predicted to increase at the expense of in-store giving by 40% by 2030.
How online trends in the used car market parallel those in the wedding registry market. Online gift giving predicted to increase at the expense of in-store giving by 40% by 2030.
May 7, 2024
Jinjoo Lee in The Wall St. Journal shares how the used car market has improved in the last 20 years because much of it is now conducted online. When car buyers use the web, they are more likely to save money (saving about 2%), and dealers can, in theory, make more with dynamic pricing (about 2%)—thereby giving each party a win. Unlike 20 years ago, when we didn't have smartphones, today 95% of used car purchases start online. While 31% of used car purchases were completely in-person,...
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Since we support brick-and-mortar retailers, we found Nike’s u-turn regarding retailers to be welcome. They initially planned to cut off 30% of stores but have since returned to them.
In October of 2001, I walked into William-Wayne & Co. in New York City with no appointment. I asked for the owner, was introduced to the co-owner, and suggested he build a website. The two owners, William and Wayne, agreed to discuss it further with me and we scheduled a meeting. Nine months later, William-wayne.com was born.
We’ve updated the website since then, but the fundamentals have stayed the same.
It all started with William & Wayne &...
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Starting the day with a business book helps the mind awaken and perform during the day.
April 21, 2024
I start each workday looking at notes I took when I read $100m Offers by Alex Hormozi. I read the notes, then assess how I can put them into action on our platform. I may add additional notes on top of the existing notes. I may grab a cafe napkin and doodle a feature on it.
These notes have directly benefited our platform: We have used them to launch new features, more clearly explain our services, and overall ensure we're performing our duties for clients.
When we compared our registry service to other registry software, we found 17 unique ways that our registry service helps gift givers, registrants, & merchants. Many other registry services don’t offer these 17 features below.
6 Ways Our Service Helps Gift Givers in Ways That Other Services Do Not
Gift Giver’s Experience (E.g. Friend or family member giving a gift)
The gift giver can easily find the registrant’s gift list because the service helps merchants rank
Carol Schroeder recently shared how local shops help our communities and their environment. I liked the excerpt below from her post:
”Returns are one example of something local shopkeepers do better than Amazon and other giant web retailers. The e-commerce return rate is estimated to be two to three times that of brick & mortar stores – averaging a shocking 20%-30%. According to The Guardian, a returns platform “recently calculated that only 50% of ...
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How a drawing on a bar napkin led to a software platform that processes trillions of calculations
April 15, 2024
In 2007, while sitting at the pub Moran’s with a beer, I drew a sketch on a napkin that would change our business. I drew a software model that would allow an indie store to instantly show (and sell) thousands of products online—without any labor. (The secret sauce: The respective brand would do the product update work for the merchants.) The immediate goal was to help my two retailers more efficiently load products onto their websites (and save me the boredom of doing it).
The Wall St. Journal shares how Amazon takes other companies’ ideas on a mass scale, such as from Trader Joe’s. The article is an excerpt from “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power,” a new book by Dana Mattioli.
How Taco Ball is going digital first--and others would be wise to follow
April 13, 2024
Fast food is stuffing itself with software. Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is embracing a few strategies we’ve chatted about, including software bundles and membership programs. It’s even investing in AI. Its budget: $21m last year. That’s a lot of lettuce.
Does the market merit it? Well, 45% of Yum’s sales are digital. Likewise, we’re hearing website sales make up about half of our merchants' sales. Note: We’re not half of every ...
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Sixty percent of Macy’s value lies not in its stores, brands, or IP, but in the dirt below it: its real estate. That’s not a good bellwether for its existence as is.
How a store owner can replace labor-wasting website maintenance with a free car
April 5, 2024
The new 2024 Model 3 Tesla is here and a store owner can get it for free. All they have to do: replace their labor-wasting website maintenance with our Syncing service. A store owner saves more than $400 (the average cost of a Tesla lease) each month and make their customers happier.
What your business can learn from the celebrated economist Daniel Kahneman
April 3, 2024
Daniel Kahneman, the celebrated economist, passed away last month. The Nobel Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner gave us insights into the economics of the mind, such as people fearing loss more than gain, making short sighted decisions, and overly relying on feelings.
We can often use Mr. Kahneman's insights in our business's daily operations.
21 ways Gift Reggie is making it difficult for gift givers, registrants, and merchants
April 3, 2024
Our registry service handles 80,000 gift and wedding registries. We often come across other registry software and can see how it's affecting the merchant that is using it.
While eating breakfast and browsing the web via my phone, I recently came across RFD, a merchant in Albany, NY, that uses Gift Reggie (an app that is added to a Shopify Store).
I observed 21 problems while reviewing the merchant's registry service. I initially wrote the issues down on a paper tablecloth...
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