15 Dec Fun, Christmas shopping season

So we are nearing the pointy end of the Christmas shopping season. It can feel a bit consumeristic at this time of year, but to my mind, work empowers people, and Christmas stimulates many different industries. As the Lemon Jelly song says ‘Jobs depend on sales, sales depend on customer service, and customer service depends on you and me.’ Also, what would life be without this Christmas ritual? Every week would be the same!

How is your business faring? Did your planning pay off? I hope so!

It is the most important time for retail and ecommerce, because more than half of a business’ revenue can come between the months of October and January.

Ecommerce – the long game

If you aren’t doing quite as well, as you hoped, give it time. It seems to me that ecommerce is a long game. The longer you are established online and the more you endeavour to innovate every year, the healthier your bottom line, each year.

Amazon launched on Black Friday weekend, and although this may be scaring many ecommerce retailers, the prediction is that it will actually rise the tide on smaller retailers and compete with some of the larger retailers, such as Myer or David Jones.

As always, as a smaller specialty retailer you have products that people can’t find anywhere else, and therefore there is likely to be a demand for your products.

Innovation is important in any industry

Are you looking at your analytics data and comparing it to last year to see how you have improved?

It is important to start the year with some ideas about how you are going to innovate this year. It is actually a very simple equation – based on your average order size, how many sessions do you need, multiplied by your conversion rate to get to your goal revenue?

I would suggest that you play to your strengths. If you are getting a decent amount of organic Google search traffic, then how can you leverage this to get more?

What are your strengths, basically?

I will look forward to sharing more with you next year. I can’t wait to see you succeed. 2018!! Woo hoo 🙂