2021 Year In Review

“How did it get so late so soon. It’s night before it’s afternoon. December before it’s June. My goodness, how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” – Dr. Seuss

It seems like this year really sprinted by, faster than we could have imagined. Every year, I find it enjoyable and invigorating to write a year in review for Punchmark and the platform, and look back on the ground we have covered in these past 12 months. Read the 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 reviews.

Where 2020 was the year of doing our best to catch the e-commerce wave as it truly began to form, 2021 was the year of scalability and infrastructure for our team.

Many of our clients still remember the days when Punchmark was just two friends working in a single room. While that is STILL the story, there are 17 other people in that room, bringing our numbers to 19 at the end of the year (with two more to join in January). As anybody who has grown a company from passion-project to a business can attest, building scalable infrastructure for every aspect of the business is absolutely pertinent.

This year we overhauled much of how we build and operate. Our Development Team switched from KanBan to Agile with weekly deployments. Which means our platform patches and features will be released Tuesday late at night when there's the least traffic on websites. This has cut down on released bugs, which in turn allows us to spend more time on new development.

There is now a Knowledge Base article written for every SiteManager and PageBuilder interface, and overviews on Digital Marketing and the Vendor Program, so that our clients can take their education into their own hands and expand their understanding of these important topics.

We had our most ambitious project release, The Plumb Club’s TPC-365 virtual showrooms, in collaboration with Boss Logics. We attended a record number of jewelry shows, and even won an award. 2021 really was one for the record books.

 

By the Numbers (Client E-Commerce)

E-commerce growth on the SiteManager platform is a chicken/egg situation. What came first? The improvements to the e-commerce platform and speed improvements, or the focus on e-commerce from our clients, or the comfortability in luxury online shopping by the customers? We believe they have all taken place co-dependently to create a record breaking year.

Accurate as of 12.16.2021

What these numbers show is that more jewelers are viewing online sales as a substantial part of their business and beginning to home in on how best to present their products digitally.

Cyber Week and Black Friday shopping started the earliest we have ever seen, with a sharp increase in sales starting around Halloween and continuing through the end of the year.

 

NUMBER OF ACTIVE CLIENTS WITH ONLINE FINANCING & FRAUD PROTECTION PARTNERS:

The easiest way to boost your average transaction size as well as conversion rate is by offering one or more financing options on your website. If you plan on making online sales a serious part of your 2022 business goals, we also recommend ClearSale's fraud protection services.

 

Highest Performing Client Stats:

Here are last year's numbers to compare: 2020 Numbers and 2019 Numbers

We measure our clients with the most sales and greatest transaction numbers in a similar way an athlete measures their VO2 max. It’s good to know what our platform is capable of in the right conditions.

We are very aware that these numbers are not plausible for every business for a variety of reasons (average item price, location, overhead, marketing spend, etc), but we try to publish these numbers to give some perspective on what can be achieved. If you haven't enabled ecommerce on your website, we strongly encourage you to do so in 2022. Schedule a call with your Account Manager today!

 

Releases & Developments

Knowledge Base - We finished the initial build for the Knowledge Base and have been adding more FAQs and Guides each month. Our goal is to add a little bit every month until we feel it can be read like a true glossary for everything Punchmark related.

Punchmark Community - We have leaned on the Community of over 300 active members more and more this year, using it for communication, casual interactions, and ideation. It's been a blast, and we hope to see you on there soon!

TL;DR - Too Long; Didn't Read. After we ended S3 of Livestreams, we have transitioned to a monthly 1-3 minute long video that recaps everything new at Punchmark. It's a lot of fun and is hosted by the legendary Gasper Gray.

SiteManager My Store Tab - This collection of 6 SiteManager pages gave control of the inner page messaging back to clients and allowed for editing a variety of common pages via a admin style page instead of using PageBuilder or asking Punchmark to do it for you. 

My Punchmark Account - Clients can now view their plan, upgrade services, view and pay invoices, edit company information, update payment methods, and manage website administrators. We have big plans for this account administration system, and this is only the beginning.

General Features & Integrations - Our development team made improvements to the diamond search comparison feature, created Rolex Hybrid pages for authorized Rolex dealers, added PayBright and Flexity integrations, enhanced our Google Analytics integrations, made updates for Lab Grown vs Natural Diamonds, enhanced the flow of Navigation submenus, created Item-not-found messages, updated wishlist share emails to be more interactive, improved the E-Commerce Sales Dashboard, and added support for international phone numbers.

Single Item Variations - In addition to being able to create variations of products across several SKUs, retailers can now add variations for any freeform attribute that doesn't require a standard product field like metal type, carat weight, or length, but you can also add arbitrary attributes such as color, option, or even initial letter.

Quality Assurance - Beginning in October, we implemented a professional third-party QA team to improve our quality assurance process across all platform features, giving us an outside perspective to maximize on user experience and reduce bugs in our platform.

Platform Optimizations - Our development team significantly improved page speed by implementing methods advised by Google and Lightspeed, such as deferring third party scripts, widening the use of our CDN for more caching across images and scripts, and converting some clients to use HTTP2. We also rebuilt several features to utilize React.js, optimized database calls, improved product filter maps speed, and increased the speed of the back-end Manage Jewelry page by 30-40%.

Enhanced Communication - In January, we transitioned our email notification system to utilize Amazon's SES system, increasing email deliverability for important notifications like retailer website order notifications, customer order confirmations and order shipping notifications.

Internal Processes - This year we made significant changes to our CRM system and enhanced our HubSpot integration with our own system, improving the workflow of client tickets and overall communication, and connecting client accounts directly to their appropriate account managers. 

Security Updates - We performed quality checks to ensure that our platform is PCI-DSS compliant, giving our clients the peace of mind that their sensitive customer data is secure.

 

Punchmark Internal

 

By the Numbers

 

Our focus on education last year materialized in livestreams about our platform and how to use it to keep a business afloat during covid. This was great as in-store traffic was way down, allowing them to attend livestreams in the middle of the day.

As traffic picked up in the middle of the year, and we had completed a walkthrough on almost every interface, the Knowledge Base became our tool for interface explanation. We are now focusing our efforts on expanding the KB and producing our educational podcast, In the Loupe.

Staffing

Punchmark was lucky to have the need to hire more team members. This year we hired 6 new members which brings our company to the largest it has ever been!