We have had terrific success with our post Christmas sale, achieving excellent revenue and terrific GP thanks to buying for the event. We have been open for business every day except for Christmas Day.
Being in a major shopping centre with 250 stores, we benefit from the traffic spike of sales shoppers trawling for deals. Take Monday and Tuesday this week, while many suburban newsagencies were closed, we were open and did terrific business. It was well worth it.
the sale traffic is a benefit of being in a centre. However, it is competitive. Anything less than half price and people walk on by. A bookshop near us pitched their sale as 25% off and the shop was empty each time I checked.
Starting today we are pulling the sale back as we have new seasons for 2017 to kick in. That and the fact that we have little sale stock left.
The big category for us as been boxed Christmas cards. We have done well over $10,000 in the last week. At a terrific GP. It grows each year and never hurst boxed Christmas card sales in the next year.
Mark, while I understand the January Xmas card shopper is entirely different to the December Xmas card shopper, I can’t really see how you could claim that discount cards in January dont harm December sales. Very hard to quantify, especially if you do it every year so you dont have the December sales figures for not discounting in January.
Your probably right I just cant see how you could have the data to be certain.
Steve I am speaking from my experience of doing them since 2005. My in-season sales have climbed ahead of the channel trend year on year. While I suspect cards bought after Christmas will hurt sales somewhere, I am not seeing it. I am looking at it in purely a selfish way.
If you have repeat shoppers, then discounts affect sales. We know from comments that many customers delay purchase because they anticipate buying in the post Christmas sale. For this reason we have deliberately not discounted some items especially those where we can return to suppliers. It’s different in the malls, price is everything, which is why loyalty schemes are declining.
Holding stock that cannot be returned is losing money.
We remove the returnable product and discount those that can’t be returned. If I had higher traffic flow I’d definitely do it more savagely. Working well this year in addition to our sale items that like Mark, some where purchased specifically for the sale and still making over 100%.
Mark I have read as much as I can in a day. I have purchased a small town newsagency and I take over on Feb 27th I cant wait. Would love some contact with new owners, experienced owners etc Many thanks for all the reading matter I have read.
The customer who buys after Christmas will still buy after Christmas but from somewhere else. These are valuable sales as they often do buy other products with full or close to full margin while they take advantage of the sale items.