4 Questions To Ask Yourself About Your Store’s Holiday Pricing

The holiday shopping season is here! Have you priced your items correctly? Maybe you’re really not sure. That’s ok. Your Bepoz point-of-sale (POS) system has you covered! It’s a wealth of information, and it does a pretty good job of forecasting your future sales. Ask yourself these 4 questions to keep your sales on track this holiday.

What is your best seller?

Use your POS to identify your best selling item. You can do the same thing to help you determine your worst selling item. Discounting your slowing-moving inventory can help you move it fast. You can also try bundling those items. Perhaps, you put together three of those items and sell them at a discount. A third way to move merchandise is to give away less popular items as free gifts when a certain amount of money is spent. That $200 pair of jeans doesn’t seem so pricy when a turtleneck sweater is thrown in there for free.

Are you tracking hourly, daily, and weekly sales?

It makes sense to run a sales report at the end of the day or periodically throughout the day, but why not view hourly sales? Leveraging this data can be the difference between a bump and slump in sales.

For example, if you own a coffee shop, you may notice that most of your coffee sales are between 6 and 9am, with a gradual slow down to maybe even a slump by 5pm. Why not run a happy hour promotion from 4pm-6pm including discounted lattes or a cookie with purchase? You margins per cup may decrease, but at least you are making money!

What strategies do you have ready to implement should sales start to dip?

Take the time to analyze your POS data and strategize a few potential pricing challenges that your store might encounter. Then make sure your employees know about them and can implement them if you are not there.

For example, let’s say the boutique around the corner is bringing in a musical act on the weekends to entice shoppers to come inside. This slows down your traffic. Could you implement free snacks or add another enticing promotion? What about emailing your loyal customers to let them know about your weekend specials?

Keep these strategies readily available for all store managers and draw up a few guidelines for how and when these pricing strategies should be implemented.

Do you know how you’ll practice inventory control?

It’s good to sell out of popular items, but you don’t want to continuously turn customers away because you’re out of stock. They might never come back. Prevent this but taking a look in your POS at the quantity of the product that you usually sell, as well as any comparable sales you’ve run in the past. If you sold a similar item last year and it sold out, it’s safe to plan on having on hand the number of items you sold, plus more.

If you haven’t asked yourself any of these questions yet, you might want to consider investigating. Remember, let your POS do the work to keep you on track to a successful holiday sales season!