Advent season spells tremendous workload for retailers. Just when everyone seems to be enjoying themselves and having a great time, they are rushed off their feet and, often, completely stressed out. Below is an overview of most frequent holiday season bottlenecks and insights on how to eliminate them.
Running out of top selling products
There are estimates that as much as 40% of yearly sales are done during the holiday season, but the entire sales plan could go wrong if you run out of top sellers. Even if you do order them straight away, you can miss the precious window of opportunity and fail to sell as much as you can. To avoid that, leverage the data from previous years and find out which products are likely to be on top of user requests. Make sure there’s ample supply of these products at your warehouses. Some redundancy won’t hurt — high sales will eventually make up for extra procurements.
Failing to generate customer frenzy
As disappointing as running out of top sellers may be, failing to generate high customer demand is even more frustrating. Knowing you have lost your customers to competitors at the peak of the holiday season can not only spoil your Christmas mood but also indicate major financial shortages your store is likely to face during the upcoming months. Unsurprisingly, this highly unpleasant bottleneck is also easily avoided by leveraging user data from current and previous years. Knowing your customers may help you predict their behavior and prepare personalized offers for them. Customer data analysis can help you be aware of who your new customers are as well as who are your most loyal and high volume clients. Also, there are people, who only shop during the holiday season, so make sure you target them. Most people tend to stick to tried and true stores during Christmas shopping. Most likely, they’ll be more than happy you’re meeting them halfway and will respond by making purchases.
Product delivery issues
Most of the time, it’s really not your fault. USPS (United States Postal Service) may fail to handle the innumerable holiday season deliveries or your other shippers may spread themselves too thin, but if this results in shipping delays during holiday season, this is bad news for your brand. If the package gets lost, which, unfortunately, happens quite often, the situation is even worse. There’s really not much you can do to influence how shippers handle deliveries, but you can increase customer trust by offering tracking options for their packages. To be fully prepared, it’s best to have a working relationship with shippers, who use tracking technologies, which can be easily integrated with your system. USPS, for instance, has developed Missing Mail service for both e-stores and clients to help track delayed and lost shipments, and other shippers are following suit. But even if the delivery runs smoothly, customers, in general, feel more confident, if they can track where their package is at any time.
Weather conditions are also beyond your control, even though snow and blizzards are frequent reasons for delivery delays. You can, however, prepare in advance, by allowing larger delivery time spans for areas hit by bad weather and by serving them first if you react instantly and have all the weather-related data at hand.
To make these tips work, you have to use advanced business intelligence tools and capture, categorize and analyze big volumes of data. The truth is — if you’re not doing this now, you will most likely have to consider using at least some of these tools. A report, published by IBM Institute For Business Value states 62% of retailers (compared with 63% of respondents across different industries) are using big data analytics and feel they are thus creating a competitive advantage for their businesses. The report also states that big data “also represents a cultural shift in the way retailers connect with consumers in a meaningful way. This bottom-line impact of big data is what makes it a business imperative and why retailers around the world are leveraging it to transform their processes, their organizations and, soon, the entire industry. Big data is especially promising and differentiating for retailers.” At VARTEQ we offer affordable working tools to help small and medium retailers build custom BI solutions for their business-specific problems.
Website availability issues
Surely, BI tools will not help you overcome all the setbacks you are likely to face during the advent season. One of the most critical and potentially disrupting of them is website downtime.
On Christmas Eve you can afford zero downtime, so availability issues are bad news. Not only are you losing new clients, but your most loyal customers may also turn to your competitors, not to mention that this is generally bad for your brand and your search rankings. This may happen when you run out of infrastructure capacities during peak workloads and increased number of website visits. Ideally, ensuring non-disruptive performance of your website should be one of your top priorities before the start of the holiday season. Reconsider your choice of hosting provider, leverage cloud capacities to make sure they scale in line with your website traffic in advance and always have an emergency backup plan.