It’s Never Too Early to Plan for the Holidays - Proactive Steps to Maximize Q4 Sales.

The holiday season is a stressful time for both small and big retailers, as inventory planning, logistics, and promotions often bring unpredictable challenges. By recapping your sales now and utilizing time-tested inventory planning tools and methods created by our team, you can help your product-based business avoid inventory issues and maximize sales in Q4.

The Importance of Sales Recapping

When running a product-based business where trends shift quickly, staying ahead of the game is vital. Understanding why your sales are happening the way they are is key to strategic decision-making. Sales recapping, the process of comparing your current sales performance against your forecasted or planned sales performance, can be transformative for your business.

Why It’s Important to Recap Your Sales Now:

Sales recapping enables you to detect patterns or trends by slicing your data into various segments, informing your forecast, refining assortments, and adjusting promotional strategies. It also helps you identify time-based trends, optimize inventory purchasing, and keep your key performance indicators (KPIs) in check.

By analyzing your sales data, you can understand which items are your strongest sellers and project potential sales for any given item in your assortment. Recapping also allows you to understand customer price sensitivity and the effectiveness of different types of sales promotions. This process helps you stay informed about what’s working or not, enabling you to react sooner rather than later to changes in your business environment.

Avoiding Common Holiday Inventory Challenges

The holiday season can be unpredictable, especially if it’s your first time experiencing it as a business owner. From increased site traffic to overwhelmed shipping carriers, there are many opportunities for things to go awry. However, the Boon team, with decades of retail sales planning experience, can help you get ahead of the most common challenges and set you up for a profitable holiday season.

Challenge #1: Not Having a Handle on Inventory

Striking the right balance in your inventory is crucial, especially during the holiday season. Whether it’s underestimating customer demand or over-ordering seasonal decor, finding the sweet spot with your inventory is essential.

• Solution: Get ahead of your numbers by conducting a close sales read for your fall assortment items and tracking daily sales. Measure velocity of holiday sales and promotions you're considering now, so you can accurately forecast necessary inventory later. This way, you’ll be better prepared to implement the most effective promotions during the holiday season. If you’re unsure where to start, working with a partner like Boon can help you build a baseline of what to expect.

Challenge #2: Misalignment with Your Operations Team

Insufficient attention to your operations team and/or warehouse can result in delayed deliveries, unexpected out-of-stock items, and poor customer experiences during the holiday rush.

• Solution: Schedule regular check-ins with your warehouse, operations, and shipping teams to share order and unit projections. Clear communication with customers about shipping timelines is also vital to prevent canceled orders.

Challenge #3: Marketing Works a Little Too Well

One of the worst feelings as a business owner is seeing your marketing efforts pay off, only to realize you don’t have the inventory to fulfill customer sales. Additionally, now is a strategic time to test different marketing methods and special offers so that you can choose the optimal sales and inventory volume driving promotion at holiday time.

• Solution: Ensure your marketing team is in lockstep with your inventory planner. You can't sell items you don't have instock, so marketing and inventory planning parts of your team need to be on the same page. Frequent communication will help you drive attention to where inventory is available and adjust promotional strategies as needed.

We've got a number of marketing partners we recommend working with to assess your strategy for Q4. TAG Marketing Services is even doing a blog series about Black Friday preparations. Follow and read for more tips!

Challenge #4: Leaving Additive Revenue on the Table

Retailers often fail to capitalize on upselling opportunities, leading to missed revenue potential.

• Solution: Prioritize cross-selling and upselling by planning your strategy from both a promotional point of view and your customers’ needs. Monitor your average basket size and adjust your cross-selling strategy accordingly. Think about your sales before, during AND after your holiday season peak. Strategizing items that could easily pair with and enhance their experience with your featured peak season assortment. This can be a way to nurture a relationship with with your customers long term and maintain a portion of your sales velocity even when it’s not holiday time.

Getting Ahead of It All

Creating a robust and frequent recap process while the selling season is happening can help you plan better for the future. Mistakes are likely to be made, but the key to retail planning success is learning from them. Boon can help overburdened retailers with specialized expertise in sales and inventory planning, strategic planning tactics, in-season reporting and analytics, and contingency planning.

Introducing: Your Sales Recap Solution

By mitigating excess inventory now, you’ll better position your business to maximize sales during the peak holiday season. Start recapping today to set your business up for success this holiday season.

We built an easy-to-use, downloadable tool that makes the recap process quick and easy. Our Sales Recap Tool is designed to help retailers review and analyze sales by any timeframe. Built to work with the leading e-commerce platform Shopify it’s easily customizable to your storefront’s needs and doesn’t require separate software.

The tool allows you to see your top- and low-performing items, slice your business into categories, and discover trends to get ahead of Q4 and beyond.