Posts Tagged ‘businesses’

The RTownShopper Way

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

A phrase we live by at RTownShopper.com is “Everything in moderation.” It seems to hold true for the businesses we work with as well as the consumers that shop on our site. At RTownShopper.com, “Everything in moderation” serves a dual purpose:

  1. To give you, (our customers) more discount gift certificates to choose from.
  2. To allow the businesses who participate on our site the opportunity to moderate the extreme discounts used to garner new customers.

When researching other discount certificate sites, we found that featuring one discount certificate a day created many problems for the business as well as the consumer. Imagine yourself as the owner of a nail salon and you employ 2 other estheticians. To drum up some business, you decide to sign up with a company that features your services, a manicure/pedicure on their site for $30 – normally priced at $60. Your company is the only feature for 24 hours.  Within 24 hours, 2,000 people buy a discount gift certificate to your salon. That same day, one of your two employees has to cancel her afternoon appointments just to answer the phone. Nine hundred people call phone-illustration-ringing-off-the-hookthat afternoon, many complaining that the line was busy for hours. You now find yourself overbooked and understaffed with half of your profit from the 2,000 certificates sold going to the service you used to promote this discount.

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Over the next few weeks, customers complain because the service they receive is lacking. Your employees are overbooked and rushed which leads to an unfavorable costumer experience. Within a month, you have collected most of the discount gift certificates and business is starting to slow down. One of your employees comes across your Yelp.com reviews and there are over 150 from the past month, most of them unfavorable because of the rushed services your employees had to provide.

At RTownShopper.com, we want to give businesses more than just 15 minutes of fame. Most small businesses do not have the capacity to handle a major increase of customers in a short period of time. If that is the case, it will reflect negatively on your business and sour the experience for the customer. We want your customers to be happy and that’s why we offer many different discount gift certificates everyday on our site!

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Going Local Is The Way To Go

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Shopping at your town’s locally owned stores is something that just isn’t done by many people today, at least not on a regular basis. We, as Americans, like to go to our huge chain stores, where we can find everything we need, with one stop shopping and what appears to be lower prices. But what is this really doing for our community, and how are we really helping out our locally owned businesses?

Local businesses are crucial to the survival of our economy. On average, local businesses give back to their community 80% of each dollar, fueling growth and connectivity. They also employ about half of all our nation’s workers. Not only that, local businesses give more to the national economy than the big chain stores do, simply by way of the “trickle down effect.” When we shop locally, most of that money comes back to the community, which then trickles up to the national providers. Therefore, if we want our local and national environment to thrive, shopping locally is the way to go.

There is a program out there, called the 3/50 project, (check it out at www.the350project.net) that is all about supporting our local businesses. Plain and simple, it says that if we start spending more money at our own brick and mortar stores, good things will happen.  RTownShopper does it’s own part to support the local mom and pop shops we all love. RTownShopper deals in what they call discount gift certificates. The local business gives these to RTownShopper to sell. This in itself is what the local business is charged for being on RTownShopper’s site. They work with the age old system of barter. No actual money ever exchanges hands between RTownShopper and the local business. When RTownShopper sells these gift certificates, which are at least 50% cheaper than average coupons, this  brings in new clients, as well as revenue, to the store. RTownShopper also lets you print these gift certificates, instead of mailing them, which adds the incentive of efficiency to shopping local. Check out RTownShopper’s site to learn more about them.

So the next time you are looking for a good restaurants, retail stores, or hotels remember to support your community, and to always check out www.rtownshopper.com, because going local is the best way to go.

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