Are you ready for the holiday rush? Even though it’s only October, you might want to start preparing for it soon!
If you own a small business, your sales are likely down from this same time in 2019. COVID-19 shutdowns affected every industry—even businesses that are primarily digital felt the impact. This is one reason why countless businesses have been pivoting online, minimizing their physical footprint while also taking advantage of the potential boost in online sales.
This trend is likely to continue into the holiday season. Rather than deal with crowded stores and malls during November and December, consumers will likely be doing most of their shopping online. You need to have your budget and inventory planning prepared for the holidays well ahead of time to make sure you aren’t slammed by the rush.
Here are a few ideas to ensure that your business’ holiday season is full of cheer and high sales numbers!
Start Working on a Budget
Along with big holiday sales comes big holiday business expenses.
Usually, businesses rely on their previous year’s holiday budget to help guide their budget planning process. However, as things are VERY different this year, piggybacking entirely on 2019’s numbers isn’t a viable plan.
Consider that online sales are likely going to make up the bulk of purchases this holiday season. With that in mind, you need to make sure your e-commerce platform of choice can handle those additional sales without crashing. The last thing you want is your online store to crash on Black Friday! If you believe that you’re going to need extra bandwidth, take care of that right now while everyone else is still focused on Halloween.
If you still have a physical location open, then you might need to hire some extra help for the season. Keep in mind that you will need to train them in all of your COVID-19-related policies, along with your regular employee training programs.
If you’re already overwhelmed just thinking about holiday planning, you could always outsource your holiday budget planning to us. We’d be happy to go through everything and help you generate an airtight budget that will keep things comfortably humming along this holiday season!
Holiday Marketing
There’s lots of competition for shoppers during the holiday season, so you should have a well-designed digital (or physical) marketing blitz planned. If you do any holiday-related marketing, make sure that you have those expenses already budgeted.
Your holiday marketing could be entirely focused on the online space, using digital channels like Facebook, Google, and email campaigns to connect with your customers and share your holiday offerings. If you live in a smaller market, you might also want to take advantage of more traditional offerings like radio ads or even newspapers.
Be sure to look at your previous ROI on holiday marketing to find out where you can best spend your marketing dollars. This year especially, you want to make sure you’re making every cent count!
Make Sure You Have Enough Inventory
While the shipping industry has somewhat recovered from the logistics disaster of COVID-19, shipped items can still take a while to get from point A to point B. If you’re relying on shipping services to order inventory and upping your stock, you should be ordering what you need ASAP to make sure you’re not going to be in short-stocked come November.
Go through your current inventory list and then update your holiday list. It might be tricky to gauge how the pandemic will impact seasonal sales, but you can likely rely on your previous year’s numbers as a baseline, then adjust them from there as best you can.
Inventory Management is Key
So, your budget is in order, and your inventory has arrived! Now it’s time to get everything organized for the holidays.
If you have a single channel to sell your items (like an e-commerce solution on your website), this task shouldn’t be too difficult. You simply need to make sure that you have an accurate count of your inventory across the board. If you rely on multiple channels to sell your items, like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, then this might take you a little longer, as you’ll need to maintain listings and monitor these platforms for messages and questions. Don’t forget to include any fees for sales that are taken by these platforms!
The holidays can be a stressful time for anyone, and especially for small business owners. If you want to relieve some of that pressure, The Number Worlds would be happy to help you with all of your holiday-related budgeting. Not only that, but by taking advantage of our services now, it will be much easier to take care of things during the upcoming 2021 tax season. To learn more, please contact The Number Works today. Let’s get your holiday season under control now so you can enjoy the end of the year!