November 28, 2023

Retail Tips to Get You Ready for the Holidays

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Small Business Tips

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For many retailers, the holiday season is their busiest time—and that means all hands on deck! This year, we’re here to help with easy-to-implement tips and tricks you can use to prepare your store for the influx of customers. With some advance planning, you’ll be positioned to take advantage of the increased traffic to expand your business and multiply your profits!

1. Determine Your Store’s Optimal Holiday Hours

If your POS has robust reporting capabilities, you can retrieve invaluable insights from your sales reports to help you prep for the coming holiday season. For example, if you typically close at 6:00 in the evening, but a majority of your sales occur after 5:30 PM, consider extending your hours for the holidays to accommodate more shoppers. Knowing which days and times it makes sense to stay open longer can lift your sales significantly—either by accommodating your regular customers’ preferences to shop later or by attracting new customers who couldn’t visit your store when it closed earlier.

Since retail data is still course correcting after the pandemic, we recommend looking back over the past several years (including 2019, to get a pre-COVID baseline) to get an idea of when your store experienced its busiest times and biggest sales during previous holiday seasons.

Learn more about the reporting features Exatouch® offers to help you make informed decisions.

2. Hire the Right Number of Seasonal Employees

With more customers filling up your store, you’ll need extra employees to answer questions and ring up sales. View staffing reports from prior holidays to help reduce your chances of labor shortages. Did you have enough team members on your busiest sales days? Or, were you overstaffed on slower days? Make the most of your resources by understanding the times you need to staff up and when you can get by with a leaner team. You may need to onboard fewer seasonal employees than you think, which is a significant benefit in a tight labor market.

3. Offer Gift Cards

As one of the most popular items on holiday wish lists year after year, gift cards are the perfect way to grow your profits. A program like eGiftSolutions® has free and fast options that enable small businesses like yours to offer gift cards just like the big box retailers! Did you know that many customers spend more than the value of their gift cards when they shop? And that customers typically spend more on a gift card than they would on a traditional gift? Capture that revenue for your store by offering gift cards—and be sure to use effective gift card marketing strategies to get the most value.

Learn more about how gift cards drive holiday consumer behavior.

4. Manage Inventory Efficiently

Inventory is an all-important consideration when it comes to increasing holiday sales—and the sooner you plan ahead, the better positioned you’ll be to cope with any supply chain issues. While you want to have enough product on hand to minimize out-of-stock items, which can translate to lost sales and unhappy shoppers, you don’t want excess inventory you can’t sell piling up and eating into your profits. With a POS system like Exatouch®, you can differentiate best-selling items from ones that aren’t moving to make informed purchasing decisions. This smart POS even enables you to manage purchase orders and vendors while reconciling deliveries quickly.

5. Update Your Customers

While it’s always important to stay connected with your customers and keep them informed of what’s happening at your store, throughout the winter holidays, it’s critical. Schedules are busy, and you want to catch early-bird shoppers before they spend their holiday dollars elsewhere. Use the customer database in Exatouch POS to email or text your shoppers, whether you’re promoting special seasonal discounts, extending your hours for the holidays, or have new inventory in stock.

See how easy it is to enter customers and build a database in Exatouch. →

Take a few minutes to implement some of these smart retail strategies for maximizing sales and driving revenue at your store this holiday season. With the right tools in place, including an advanced point of sale like Exatouch, you’ll be set up for success this winter and all year long!

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