'Tis the Season to Prepare Your Inventory!

Three Tips for Holiday Retailers

Ecommerce businesses have come to view the holiday season as a crucial element of their recurring revenue.  The good news is that the traditional holiday season is expanding, with Amazon, Walmart, Target and other big retailers holding October sales events and offering deep discounts to entice consumers to start their holiday shopping early. A Shopkick survey of more than 6,000 US. consumers indicated that 38% of consumers start their holiday shopping season before Halloween, and another 44% before Thanksgiving.  A mere 15% of consumers plan to wait until December to begin their holiday shopping. 

The trend toward earlier holiday shopping has necessitated earlier preparation of inventory – in fact, some online retailers began to prepare in June.  If you haven’t already started, don’t panic!  September is your chance to do everything you need to prepare your inventory, and set up your systems to handle fulfillment and returns.  There’s still time to pull everything together and ensure that you optimize your holiday season.

Let Your Data Lead the Way

Seth David of Nerd Enterprises recently sat down with John May of Webgility’s Customer Engagement Team to discuss how ecommerce businesses can keep Calm in the Chaos leading up to the holiday season. 

As an online retailer, your first priority should be to establish your holiday catalog.  One of Seth and John’s first recommendations was to make sure you have a solid understanding of which products are your top performers. Use historical data to see which products bring the most revenue, and to create sales forecasts for the coming season. One of the more popular systems of inventory management is called ABC Analysis – Category A is top sellers, Category B doesn’t sell as much, but you still need to keep it in stock, and Category C is a low performer.

Second, review your storage limits, check your current inventory levels and place orders. Take advantage of this process to make sure that you don’t have any dead stock or out of stock items talking up precious space.  

Next, ship all of your holiday inventory to your 3^rd Party Logistics (3PL) partners, well I advance of their deadlines (more on that below). Allow yourself enough time to review shipping costs and carrier deadlines, and explore shipping promos.  Also, be sure to clearly list your cut-off dates on your ecommerce channels to help manage customer expectations.

Mark Your Calendar Well in Advance

The Cyber Five, (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Sunday and Cyber Monday), have become a huge driver of holiday revenue, accounting for 16.2% of total US holiday retail ecommerce sales in 2023.  In fact, Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day of the year, with revenue figures hitting about $12 billion in the US. 

That said, here are a few key dates to be aware of leading up to the 2024 holiday shopping season:

• October 19.  Fulfill By Amazon (FBA) deadline for Black Friday and Cyber Monday  
• October 31.  Time to order more inventory for Lunar New Year
• November 29.  Black Friday
• November 30.  Small Business Saturday
• December 1.  FBA deadline for holiday inventory
• December 2.  Cyber Monday
• December 15.  Fed Ex Ground deadline
• December 16.  USPS Ground First Class deadline
• December 19.  UPS 3-day Select deadline
• December 20.  USPS Priority Mail/UPS 2^nd Day Air deadlines
• December 22.  FedEx Same Day/UPS Next6 Day deadlines
• December 25-January 2.  Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day and New Year’s

Three Webgility Tips for Success

1. Curate a set of products that will appeal to holiday shoppers and start adding links to suggested products in your email marketing in early October.  In fact, consider offering a discounted brand subscription program with a curated set of products throughout the year, to encourage more predictable revenue.  Automation can help you transfer product listings (and essential details like SKUs, descriptions, and other media) to group products together and ensure that your customers can find you wherever they happen to be shopping.  
2. Consider hosting a pop-up sale and/or Cyber Monday event to drive sales revenue – but before doing so, prepare in advance for the surge in fulfillment, logistics and shipping required to support these events.  Multichannel inventory sync capabilities can keep item counts up to date wherever you sell a given item or bundle. Plus, it can sync one less item than you have available and alert you when you’re running low, so you can avoid running out of stock before the end of the season.
3. Brace yourself for the return cycle.  

According to a recent report from the National Retail Federation (NRF), total returns in the retail industry amounted to $743 billion in 2023, representing 14.5% of sales.  Online returns were even higher, at 17.6% versus 10.2% for brick & mortar businesses. In 2024, return rates will likely rise as high as 20-35% for a few weeks after the holidays into 2024.   Put the operations in place to manage returns, and also utilize them as an opportunity to interact with customers by making it easier to return and buy new merchandise.  

Are you looking for a better way to automate your inventory management across multiple ecommerce channels?  Sign up for free trial of Webgility today.