Use Your Off Season - How To Get Ready For The Shopping Season ?

It’s ‘holiday’ season for most of the retailers; no long queue outside the store, no yelling customer over the phone for replacement, no capitalized email for delayed delivery – there is a lull everywhere these days. It’s the off-season – the same fanatic buyers simply not interested to buy anything these days! So, what do you plan to do these days? Watch soccer? Watch Wimbledon? Go fishing? Or do you have something else to do that would give you robust PROFITS during the coming shopping season? Well, it’s time to think seriously about your business!

The off-season gives you the time to assess your business capabilities and plan for the shopping season. In fact, most of the successful online retailers analyze, plan and act during this period; thus, just before the shopping starts, they launch something completely NEW and end up achieving ‘record-sales’ by the time the shopping season is over. Forget those game-changing marketing ideas of online giants, even a few simple and yet organized steps can do wonders for your business.

• Automate the online store: If you are using POS software like Microsoft Retail Management System (RMS Microsoft), it’s time that you integrate it with your online store. Integrating your Dynamics RMS or the POS software system with the online retail store will save more than 50% of your data-entry and order-processing time.

• Revamp the design: Do you compare the design of your website with your competitors? Does it look pale? Or is your competitor has a new design-element or a catchy animation that has the potentiality to woo more customers? Check out now! But please note two things – 1) You SHOULD never copy someone else’s design to build your online store and 2) Just for the sake of beautification never cut-down on navigational ease. Your online retail store should look unique, aesthetically designed and yet it should offer the complete freedom to find out the products comfortably.

• Work on your categories: Your product categories are like the departments or the ‘floors’ in your retail store and the sub-categories are like shelves or racks. So, arrange your categories as neatly as possible. If you are planning to add new products, add the categories and sub-categories. Experts say that the top selling categories or products should come first so that the customer’s eyes zeroes on those the moment he arrives at your online shopping cart.
  

• Recheck the pricing: Last year’s pricing structure may not work this year. Note down your best and worst performing products. Find out what others charging for the same product. Remember, a product that performed well last year may not necessarily do well in the next year. So, keep your pricing competitive.

• Plan your search-engine marketing activities: Search engine marketing is a long process and if you start it now, you will get the results right at the beginning of the holiday season.

• Rewrite the product description: Researchers say that the 70% of the reasons behind shopping cart abandonment are inadequate or incomplete product information and product details written in “sales language”. Your customers were not born yesterday; they know what they want to buy. So, find out the products whose descriptions are incomplete or unnecessarily exaggerated and make the changes.

These are not everything that you should do during this off-season. Explore new business possibilities, ask your shopping cart vendor to help you and even more, if you don’t get a suitable answer, it’s high-time that you change your online shopping cart provider and go for a reliable before the shopping season begins.

Grow Your Online Retail Business - Tips For Acheiving More Sellings!

Bill Clinton once commented - “the single most important factor in your retail business is – your customers”. Whether online or offline, your customers are the main driving factor behind the success or failure of your business. You must always remain on your toes to serve your customers with whatever best possible thing you can manage.

Now, if you are using Microsoft RMS(Retail Management System), you are actually a few steps ahead of your competitors in wooing customers. Microsoft RMS gives some unique features to manage and control discounts and other sales offers that keep you stay in touch with your customers at all time. Let see how a few simple tricks can do wonders for your online retail business!

• Putting items on sale

Being a retailer, you must make both your retail and the web store a ‘happening place’ for your shoppers. There should be one or the other promotional activity running on your online web store. A group of your customers should always be looking for the next sales day or promotion activity. You can name a sale-campaign as “customer appreciation day“, “Value Return week”, “Stock clearance sales”, “Weekender Specials” and what not?

Now, in all cases, you can set the sale prices in your Microsoft RMS in advance. Before you specify the sales prices of your products, you can specify start and end dates or the campaign or make it a weekly schedule (put some items on sale on Saturdays and Sundays) in your Shopping Store with Retail Management System.

When a customer buys an item on sale, Microsoft Dynamics RMS will automatically take the sale price. When the campaign ends, Microsoft RMS will convert the sale price to the regular price.

You can set sales-schedule in your store from the store operations manager in Microsoft Dynamics RMS. If you are using Microsoft RMS as Shopping Cart Software, you can take this complete sales-schedule to your online store and avail these offers to your online shoppers.

• Provide a gift with a purchase

In your Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), you can assign a promotional or gift item (called a “tag along” item) with every item in the database. Thus, when a shopper buys a particular item, Microsoft RMS will automatically include the gift item in the sale. Even more, you can also specify the quantity of the gift item you want to provide with the purchase.

Before you give a gift for a purchase, you will need to specify an item as gift and place it as a “tag along” item to the item you wish. For example, let us consider that you want to give a skating board to the customer who purchases an item that priced at more than $300.00; you will need to assign the skating board as tag along item to each item whose price is more than $300.00.

If you have a RMS Microsoft - Shopping Cart Software like 24SevenCart that integrates with the Retail Management System, these gift details can be synchronize with the web store for your online customers.

• Setting up discount schedules

Microsoft RMS offers two wonderful types of discounting mechanisms; the mix and match - where a customer gets a discount when he/she buys a certain quantity of similar items. The second one is “Buy X, Get Y for Z”, in which the customer gets a certain number of items free or at a discount when he buys a certain quantity of those items at the normal price. In both the options, when a discount is set for an item, the item's price is automatically reduced as that item is added to a sales transaction (or to the shopping cart in case of the Shopping Cart Software for Microsoft Dynamics RMS) and discount conditions are met.