Preparing For Your Yearly Holiday Sales Spike

We know that Halloween isn’t even here yet. And yes, we’re aware that October 31^st is a very special day. But, for retailers all across Canada, it can be argued that November 1^st is an equally important day. Why, you ask? Well, it’s the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season! Traditionally, each year, the day after Halloween is the day that Christmas decorations adorn shopping malls. It’s all in anticipation of much heavier foot traffic.

How are you preparing for your yearly holiday sales spike? As we highlighted in a blog last week, your online store is bound to receive heavier traffic in the weeks to come. So, it only stands to reason that, in addition to preparing your site, you get your brick and mortar location ready for the increase in action!  

Analyze data from last year.

Which products should you order in larger quantities from your suppliers? Which items should you place in lesser-visited areas of your store? Should you create bundle packages to help move some of your slower-moving items with some of your popular choices? The answers to these questions lie in the studying of your sales numbers from the holiday shopping season last year.

“For retailers to gain a solid foundation for their holiday preparations, it is necessary to analyze the previous year’s data to see how that season played out,” insists Ron Dod on Visiture.com, “If available, it may even be wise for merchants to get an overview of the past two years’ worth of revenue and traffic information to try and pin down some important trends.”

Revamp your website’s design.

Add holiday imagery to your website. It will be a surefire sign to all visitors that your company is ready to meet their holiday needs – both online and offline. A point we omitted from last week’s blog is that web design has a huge influence on buying trends.

“I’m not suggesting you need to do a full website redesign,” says Nikolett Lorincz on OptiMonk.com, “You can tailor your website for the Holiday Season with just a few small changes. Adding a countdown timer to the header is a great way to increase urgency. Changing your banners in the headers that promote your Black Friday or Christmas sales is also a good practice and easy to implement.”

Get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

As is the case each and every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest days on the holiday shopping season calendar. This year, those crazy days fall on Friday, November 29^th and Monday, December 2^nd respectively. To reiterate points made in last week’s blog, it’s vital that you prepare your online store for increased traffic. As well, set up your store to ensure that no customers leave unhappy when the big day arrives.

Dod believes that one of the best ways to ready your physical store for Black Friday is to train your staff to upsell and cross-sell. “The holidays are the perfect time for this as shoppers are ready to spend, and the fewer stores they need to visit, the better for them,” he writes.

And, finally, you’ll definitely want to prepare your store to accept all forms of payment! At Canadian POS, we believe there’s no better way to do that than with the revolutionary Poynt Smart Terminal. For more information, call us at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.