ShopLocal Blog

Ran across a fairly recent NAA study (performed by Scarborough Research in 2008 and MORI Research in 2009)  and given all the not so great news that came out this week around newspaper circulation,  thought a counter point of view would be worth while to explore. 75% of all U.S. adults read a newspaper in [...]

Meijer yesterday unleashed a real great addition to their weekly ad site called Full Screen browsing.  Just like a YouTube video when maximized that takes over every inch of a user’s monitor, now when browsing the circular a user can see the largest possible circular page images. It also reduces all of the noise that [...]

Thank you Mr. Smith.  Not exactly sure who you are, but we know you are a real and very helpful person in terms of aiding the ShopLocal team recently around site accessibility tuning and testing for the Publix SmartCircular site.  We could not have gotten where we are without your gracious help. Within the recently [...]

Within the Deal$ area of the search engine Ask.com, a new beta area called ‘Local Only’ is appearing that is currently nearly exclusively powered by the localized what’s on sale content that  ShopLocal houses in it’s many SmartCircular sites. Lots of SmartCircular retailer clients are showing up within the search results of this Ask.com beta [...]

Over at the Sears weekly ad site, a circular personalization trial has been running over the past week or so.  A small percentage of site visitors are given the opportunity to be part of a test group that can “personalize” their weekly ad experience to a limited degree based upon some user inputted category preferences. [...]

Kaboodle has launched a nice weekly giveaway to help promote the new weekly shopping list feature on it’s site.  This makes sense as in the web – to – store shopping model, getting users to add things to their online shopping list is one of the most valuable behaviors to encourage, as it is a [...]

The ShopLocal Retail Index was up 29 percent for the month of September compared to the same period last year. The Index registered at 242 (benchmarked at 100 for January 2006). With a background of positive news on inflation and consumer sentiment, consumers are starting to show some willingness to open their purse strings. Retail [...]

All things deals, sales and coupons are red hot and the smart folks over at Gannett Digital has been listening to this ever growing consumer demand.  So a combined team from ShopLocal, Planet Discover and Gannett Digital has been working together over the last few months to create a streamlined and consolidated “deals” experience for [...]

I’m not a big one to get all excited about stats.  I guess I know too much about how they can be manipulated by smart people.  However a recent pair of honest stats came through my inbox a few weeks ago and it sort of hit me. For the a 12 month rolling period across [...]

A few days ago,the ShopLocal team relaunched a large multichannel retailer’s HTML version of their SmartCircular site to include a number of specific search engine optimization (SEO) enhancements.  The goal of course was to get as much free organic search traffic to this site by making it as attractive as possible to the search bots [...]