Shop Small Co Promotes Local Gift Buying with a One-Stop-Shop Hub
Partner: Venture for America
The Challenge:
Uplift small business e-commerce sites and equip small business owners with digital first strategies during the pandemic.
The Outcome:
A curated directory site that leverages digital marketing strategies to drive foot-traffic to small businesses during holiday seasons.
Impact:
Shop Small Collective features 328 businesses with 83 being in Columbus that are 30 woman-owned and 11 black-owned businesses.
Press:
Shopsmall.co Launches to Support Small Businesses During the Holiday Season – The Metropreneur
Can’t Stop Columbus Partners with Venture for America to support local businesses – ColumbusCEO
Small Business gift ideas for people hard to shop for – Good Day Columbus
Next-level gifts for last minute holiday shoppers – Good Day Columbus
Purpose
In November 2020, we built shopsmall.co to help people shop small online during the holiday shopping season. On the website you can find a curated directory of our favorite small businesses across 15 US cities along with themed gift lists from Columbus shops.
A survey conducted by Deloitte LLP found that most folks planned to do at least some of their holiday shopping online in 2020 – 95% to be exact. Many small businesses struggled with in-person shopping both due to consumer confidence in safety amid rising COVID-19 case numbers, and because of the local stay at home advisory that was in place.
Residents sought a one-stop-shop to shop small. Shop Small Collective, a volunteer-maintained national database of local retailers at shopsmall.co, allows residents to filter retailers by city, category, and tags like women-owned, Black-owned, sustainably sourced and more.
“So when covid hit it was really hard because I didn’t really have an online store, I had a website but it was not awesome . . . I started trying to quickly build the website app, but it was just a lot of stress all at once”
Societal Impact
We first launched in 10 cities, including Baltimore, Birmingham, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, San Antonio and St. Louis, on Small Business Saturday, November 28, 2020. Columbus’ lineup includes roughly 60 local small businesses offering apparel to jewelry to home goods and more.
We ran multiple campaigns for varying occasions like Valentines Day, Black History Month, Mother’s and Father’s Day, Graduation, and more.
“Navigating safer shopping options and communicating them to our customers this holiday season has been an incredible challenge and we’re so grateful to this directory for helping Columbus friends connect virtually to the small businesses that make up our vibrant community. . .This pandemic year has been tough but Columbus has always shown up for local businesses and we want to see this community continue to grow and thrive.”
Community Insights
In February of 2021, in order to assess the impact of the site and continue iterating upon new features, we engaged several small business owners to gather feedback. We spoke to a wide variety of businesses working across industries, existing in different parts of the city, in different stages of the business lifecycle, and with different motivations for founding their companies.
Business owners expressed a recurring pain point with a lack of experience in digital marketing, but driving web traffic remained their biggest priority. Shop Small Co’s cohesive directory narrowed in on this priority to achieve impact.
“Navigating safer shopping options and communicating them to our customers this holiday season has been an incredible challenge and we’re so grateful to this directory for helping Columbus friends connect virtually to the small businesses that make up our vibrant community,” says Wild Cat Gift & Party Owner Olivera Bratich. “This pandemic year has been tough but Columbus has always shown up for local businesses and we want to see this community continue to grow and thrive.”
We built this digital-first small business support organization to equip small businesses with the skills necessary to thrive in a digital world.
The story behind Shop Small Collective and a demo of shopsmall.co for the COSI Science Festival.