What You Lose When the Algorithm Changes
A line jumped out at me over the weekend, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since: “The leaders renting their memory from someone else’s app will lose their institutional knowledge the moment they close the tab.”
That isn’t a tech sentence. That’s a retail sentence.
Every store has a memory. The customer names you’ve collected over the years. The photos of the displays that sold out. The buyers who always come back the second week of March. The way you sound in a follow-up email when someone has gone quiet for two seasons. The certainty that Janet’s husband will walk in the day before Mother’s Day, like he does every year, and that you’ll know exactly what to put in his hands. That memory is what makes your store more valuable a decade in than it was on opening day. It’s the part that compounds.
And most stores don’t keep theirs at home. They keep it on someone else’s server, inside someone else’s tool, behind someone else’s login. Useful, until they raise the rent. Or change the algorithm. Or sunset the integration. Or get bought.
When the platform changes its algorithm, you don’t lose your store. You lose your memory.
If you have a half-hour this week between helping customers and receiving orders, here’s a single thing worth doing: pick the one platform that holds the most of your store’s memory — your email list, your customer notes, your photo archive, your reorder history — and export a copy to somewhere you control. A spreadsheet on your laptop. A folder on a hard drive. A backup that doesn’t require someone else’s password.
You don’t have to leave the platform. You just have to stop being the only person without a copy.
xoxo,
❤️ AmyFay
What’s happening in the world. What it means for your store.
Monday through Thursday, from AmyFay Chandler. More in Friday Retail Tidbits, every Friday morning.
