Babcock Gifts, a gift shop in Tennessee, doesn’t have to worry about updating Juliska products online because it uses the Smart Products service.
Don’t worry about updating products online
Smart Products is a free service for retailers that is paid for by partner brands. We pool products from participating brands that you sell and output them in your Bridge account. There is no limit to the number of brands and products you can share.
More easily sell products. Save yourself weeks in front of a computer and thousands of dollars in labor. Skip Dropbox and Excel. Increase your online selection and boost your sales. More than 862 indie stores in the United States and Canada use the service to sell 62,547 products from 122 premium brands.
How Does the Service Work For Retailers?
1
We Give Your
Business
A Free Account
e.g.: yourstore.bridgecatalog.com
2
Sync Products With Your Brands
You send sync requests to brands that share products via Bridge using the Smart Products service. Your account can be pre-populated with up to 62,547 products from 122 Smart Brands.
3
Attract Customers & Sell More
People nearby and from afar will see your synced products online in your Bridge Store when they search for your business or the products you synced. Sell these synced products to customers using your free Bridge Store and Bridge Registry service. In addition, you can use the service as an image and product library. You can export this data and then import it to a third-party website or POS.
Contents
- What Is the Smart Products Service?
- Which Brands Are Smart Product Partners?
- Adding Smart Products to Your Retail Business
- Sell 18% More by Using the Smart Products Service
- Help Your Gift Registry Business with Smart Products
-
Update a Brand's Products On Your Website
- Eliminate Unnecessary Steps
- Smart Products vs Excel
- Smart Products vs Dropbox
- Offer Greater Selection
- Save Time & Money
- Retailers That Use the Smart Products Service
- Reviews
- Pricing
- Recently Updated Products
- FAQ About Smart Products
What Is the Smart Products Service?
Benefits:
- Greater selection: Show more products on your website.
- Better shopping experience: Show products with professional pictures, dimensions, and descriptions.
- Save money: Reduce your employee costs and your time in front of a computer.
- Accurate pricing: Avoid pricing errors.
- Increase your Google ranking.
- Help your store compete against Amazon.
- Sell 18% more: Read the study showing how stores sell more
How Does the Service Work Behind the Scenes?
Brands load their products to their Bridge account. From there, the products are synced in real-time to other approved Bridge accounts such as those belonging to retailers, interior designers, sales reps, and trade organizations. The service streamlines how products are shared between industry partners.
Video: How a Retailer Uses the Service
This video shares how the gift shop Sassafras in Mississippi joined Bridge and benefitted.
- Nancy Bullard, the owner, heard about the service from her sales rep and signed up online.
- In just a few minutes, Nancy used Bridge to create an online store and gift registry filled with 12k products for free.
- Nancy saved thousands of dollars and months of work. Shortly after signing up, Nancy received her first order.
Nancy had this to say about her Bridge experience:
"I’m surprised at how fast we received orders after signing up for Bridge Store. In less than a day, I could offer my bridal registry customers thousands of products online. I receive a new order every other day. It's easier than I thought it would be! Customers send us reviews saying how easy it is for them. We win. They win. Win-win. And, great retailer support from coaches!"
Visit the Sassafras Bridge Store: https://sassafras.bridgecatalog.com
| Abbiamo Tutto | 283 | |
| Abigails | 697 | |
| Agraria | 95 | |
| Anna Weatherley | 555 | |
| Annieglass | 260 | |
| Arte Italica | 534 | |
| Arthur Court | 707 | |
| Arzberg | 491 | |
| NEW | Baccarat | 103 |
| Badash | 309 | |
| Beatriz Ball | 819 | |
| Bodrum | 662 | |
| Bordallo Pinheiro | 640 | |
| NEW | Bredemeijer | 115 |
| Calaisio | 122 | |
| Capdeco | 484 | |
| Capucine De Wulf Jewelry | 123 | |
| Carmel Ceramica | 186 | |
| Casa Alegre | 126 | |
| Casafina | 1,007 | |
| Chelsea Clock | 84 | |
| Costa Nova | 933 | |
| Couzon | 371 | |
| Cunill | 962 | |
| Dartington Crystal | TBA | |
| Daum | TBA | |
| Deruta Of Italy | 417 | |
| Deshoulieres | 947 | |
| Duralex | TBA | |
| Empire Silver | 113 | |
| Erbario Toscano | 160 | |
| Ercuis | 1,723 | |
| NEW | Fissler | 81 |
| Fitz and Floyd | 17 | |
| NEW | GEFU | 245 |
| Gien | 2,361 | |
| Ginori 1735 | 837 | |
| NEW | Golden Rabbit | 678 |
| Gorham | 266 | |
| Grainger McKoy | 85 | |
| Halcyon Days | 269 | |
| Haviland | 1,425 | |
| Herdmar | 67 | |
| Herend | 4,888 | |
| International Silver | 151 | |
| Intrada Italy | 131 | |
| Jars | 244 | |
| John Beswick | TBA | |
| Jollity & Co | 349 | |
| Joseph Joseph | 308 | |
| Julia Knight | 640 | |
| Juliska | 853 | |
| Kate Spade | 627 | |
| Kirk Stieff | 133 | |
| Kosta Boda | 127 | |
| Lenox | 1,328 | |
| MacKenzie-Childs | 1,138 | |
| Mario Luca Giusti | 461 | |
| Mariposa | 789 | |
| Mary Jurek | 205 | |
| Medard de Noblat | 223 |
| Meissen | 159 | |
| NEW | Messermeister | 433 |
| Michael Aram | 1,099 | |
| Mikasa | 185 | |
| Mottahedeh | 810 | |
| Nambé | 537 | |
| Olivia Riegel | 322 | |
| Orrefors | 176 | |
| Pampa Bay | 329 | |
| Pickard China | 2,771 | |
| Pickard Crystal | 83 | |
| Pimpernel | 196 | |
| Pinto Paris | 348 | |
| Portmeirion | 345 | |
| Portus Cale | 113 | |
| Raynaud | 2,690 | |
| Reed & Barton | 200 | |
| NEW | Relish | 70 |
| Revol | 515 | |
| Robert Haviland & C. Parlon | 416 | |
| Rochard Limoges | 701 | |
| Rosenthal | 1,584 | |
| Royal Crown Derby | 1,277 | |
| Royal Limoges | 1,296 | |
| Royal Worcester | 54 | |
| Salisbury | 657 | |
| Sambonet | 1,900 | |
| Shelby Dillon Studio | 248 | |
| Silvero | 57 | |
| Skyros Designs | 964 | |
| Sophie Conran | TBA | |
| Spode | 324 | |
| Teakhaus by Proteak | 58 | |
| Thomas by Rosenthal | 373 | |
| Towle | 306 | |
| Tuttle | 50 | |
| Vagabond House | 458 | |
| Varga | 1,300 | |
| Versace by Rosenthal | 1,151 | |
| VIETRI | 2,278 | |
| Vista Alegre | 1,715 | |
| Viva by Vietri | 380 | |
| Wallace | 266 | |
| Wilton Armetale | 95 | |
| WOLF | 259 | |
| NEW | Woodard & Charles | 45 |
Please note: a retailer must be an authorized dealer to sync products
How Will Your Retail Shop Use Smart Products?
Solution A
Solution B
Solution C
You can use Smart Products in two primary ways:
To Populate An Online Store & Gift Registry
Use Smart Products to grow your online business. Output your Smart Products in your free Bridge Store. You can use this store to sell the Smart Products to your customers. The store includes gift registry software.
As An Image & Product Library
Use the Smart Products service as an image and product library. You can see comprehensive product data from many brands in one spot vs having to visit many different brand websites. You can use this database as a 'one-stop shop' to get all the current product prices, pictures, dimensions, stock, and descriptions. You can download this data.
Survey base: 42 brick-and-mortar Bridge retailers
Read the Smart Products survey »
How Does the Smart Products Service Help Your Gift Registry Business?
Managing a gift registry takes a lot of time and money. This time consists of adding prices and pictures for registry products. Bridge's Smart Product service saves retailers this time by doing this work for them. Our service helps 862+ retailers manage 62,547 products from 122 brands. The retailers do not have to take pictures or look up prices for these products.
- You'll save time and money in your management products on registries.
- More registrants will register at your store because of the greater online selection.
- Registrants will add more items to their registries.
- Your registry sales will increase.
Retailers often go through the following steps when adding a product to their website:
- Realize they need a product on their website.
- Google the product.
- From the Google results, identify the correct product.
- Download the product's picture.
- Upload the picture to their own website.
- Add the price.
- Add supporting information (dimensions, description, etc.).
- Review the results and consider the process complete.
Bridge's Smart Products service helps retailers skip all these steps for up to 62,547 products from 122 brands. All the products from a brand are online instantly. No thought needed. Bridge saves hundreds of retailers thousands of hours on website maintenance.
Our Industry is Drowning in Excel Files
Most retailers get buried under Excel files and Dropbox links. Retailers are expected to add and update thousands of products. What if there was an instant way to update these products to your website? Smart Products let you bypass Dropbox and Excel.
Retailers that use Smart Products never have to worry about Excel files and Dropbox links. They get price changes and new introductions from partner brands instantly.
|
|
| Brand Sends You an Excel File | You Sync with Brand's Smart Products |
|
Slow. Often requires manual processing and uploading to a website.
|
Fast. Products appear in your Bridge account instantly.
|
|
Expensive. Costs your business thousands of dollars to maintain products.
|
Free. Sync with an unlimited number of Smart Products for free.
|
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Requires computer-savvy staff.
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Doesn't require more staffing. Maintenance-free product management.
|
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Not accurate. Maintaining thousands of products is impossible.
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Accurate. Prices and product content are accurate because Smart Brands maintain their respective items.
|
Dropbox Is Good for Sharing Family Photos...Not Running a Retail Business
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| Brand Sends You a Dropbox Link | You Sync with Brand's Smart Products |
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Slow. Requires constant downloading of Excel files and images and then uploading this data to your website.
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Fast. In seconds all product data from the brand is 'live' in your Bridge account.
|
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Not easy. Brands often send files to multiple emails and accounts, thereby creating a mess of files in different locations.
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Easy. Use one Bridge account to access content from 122 brands.
|
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Not intuitive. Files don't appear in context. Dropbox files are not organized like a website or product catalog.
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Intuitive. Products appear next to relevant files. For example, Juliska products appear next to Juliska files.
|
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Not complete. Stores often show just a fraction of what the brand offers online. Reason: the stores have to manually download content from Dropbox and add it to their sites.
|
Complete. Stores can display 100% of a brand's products online.
|
Comparison
In order to see how Smart Products help a retailer, let's compare two stores that sell the tableware line Juliska. Juliska is a Smart Brand partner.
Juliska offers 800 SKUs. Using the Smart Products program, Juliska shares these 800 products with its retailers instantly. If a store were to add these items manually without Bridge, it would pay someone $100s and require a week or more of time. With Bridge, it costs the store $0 and the items are online in minutes.
- Shows 96 Juliska products (missing 712 products; shows 12% of line).
- Does not show Juliska's logo.
- No Juliska lifestyle images.
- Products are not grouped by collection.
- Products have incomplete information and often just one product photograph.
- Misses most branding opportunities.
- Shows 100% of Juliska s product line (shows all 808 products).
- Shows Juliska logo.
- Shows Juliska lifestyle images and slides.
- Shows all 73 Juliska collections.
- Shows pictures for all products.
- Maximizes branding opportunities.
Bridge requires less time and money than Dropbox and Excel.
Save Your Business Money
Average Cost to Add 1,000 Products to a Website
Smart Products reduce your employee costs.
How?
Let's imagine your store pays an employee $15/per hour to add items to your website. Let's imagine this person can add up to 20 items per hour. Using this math, they are adding an item every 3 minutes. These 3 minutes entail:
- Retrieving an image from the brand
- Formatting the image for your website
- Getting a price from the brand
- Entering the product name, price, picture, description, and dimensions to your website
Therefore, the average cost per item on your site is: $.75 per item ($15 divided by 20).
What if there was an easier way? The Smart Products service offers this solution. The Smart Products service is free for your business and offers your business up-to-date pictures, prices, and dimensions.
$.75 per product
$.00
In the above cost calculation, we estimate that adding an item manually costs about $.75. Notably, this cost does not include additional employee costs such as:
- Time to manage employees
- Employee benefits
- Vacations
- Sick days
- Workspace
- Computers
- Software
- Security
As such, the cost for an employee to add an item is more than $.75.
Save Time
and Speed Products to Customers
Average Time Required to Add 1,000 Products to a Website
Smart Products enable you to instantly show new items and hide discontinued products. Instead of waiting weeks to add new introduction products, you have the items on your website in minutes.
The World's Top Independent Stores Use Smart Products
862+ retailers use Smart Products including:
- Tableware and gift shops
- Florists
- Jewelry stores
- Furniture stores
- Hardware stores
- Bedding & linen shops
- Restaurant & hotel gift shops
- Tableware and gift shops
- Florists
- Jewelry stores
- Furniture stores
- Hardware stores
- Bedding & linen shops
- Restaurant & hotel gift shops
What Are Retailers Saying About the Smart Products Service?
"In today’s e-commerce world, updating products online is almost impossible. Bridge allows us to operate a website with current prices and current products. When we switched to Bridge Store, we cut our website maintenance costs by 86%. Instead of being forced to manage 35,000 products online all by myself, I only had to manage 5,000 products—Bridge helps me with 30,000 products. That’s big savings for an indie shop like me. And, Bridge helped me increase the number of products we offer online by 40%. We went from offering 35,000 products to offering 56,000. It's fair to say that Amazon.com hates Bridge"
~ Kenny Cohen, Owner • Contemporary Concepts • Pittsburgh, PA
"I do about 20% more business a year. Smart Products save me so much time when looking up pricing or showing a customer pictures. It is so nice to have this all done for me. It gives me more time to sell than working constantly on my website."
~ Mary Beth Wood, Owner • The Crystal Plate • Gainesville, GA
"If I have to add items to my website myself, it is one of the last tasks I get around to doing. It's much easier with Smart Products. With Smart Products, the items are already synced and in our website. We're much more likely to sell items due to Bridge."
~ Terri Gray, Owner • Ivy Cottage • Mobile, AL
Bridge Store + Smart Products
Bridge Store is the official partner of Smart Products. Bridge Store is the easiest way to use the Smart Products service to sell to the general public and gift registry customers. While a business may use Smart Products service with any third-party software, Bridge Store is the quickest, easiest, and most cost efficient.
The Smart Products service is free for retailers. Retailers can sync with an unlimited number of Smart Brands and there is no charge. (Brands pay to participate in the Smart Brands program.)
FAQ for Smart Products Service
To sync products with a Smart Products brand, you will first sync with the brand. For example, if you want to sync with Waterford, you will send Waterford a sync request. (Syncing allows all of Waterford's items to appear in your Bridge Store without any work needed by you.)
Learn more about the Bridge export feature.
More information about how Bridge works:
Please visit the Bridge Support Portal.
Page tags: automated product updates, self-updating products, image library, image vault, file sharing, image repository, supply chain management, datafeed, social commerce, SoComm, product sharing, optimizing product content, collaboration, team, efficiency, data management, product information management, PIM, Digital Asset Management, DAM, product syncing service