Season's Profits: How to Maximize the Next Holiday Season

Whether you’re an established online retailer or an aspiring online retailer, you know that Christmas time is a goldmine. Many brick and mortar retailers say that Christmas time makes their whole year. In the US, the season of Thanksgiving to Christmas will make or break a retailer’s entire fiscal year.

How do you, as an online retailer, maximize the potential of this time of year so you can earn money and get new customers? A lot of people are competing for online customers so in order to set yourself apart in the crowd and get a decent amount of sales you’ll need to strategize. Strategizing early is a great way to plan effectively.

Store retailers plan for months in advance. The minute Christmas is over; they’re planning for next Christmas. They’re thinking about what they’re going to sell and how they’ll be considered the “go to” source for that hot product. If you’re planning for Christmas sales, you should ideally be ready with plans and strategies by July. If you see the hottest trends in retail products and the latest ‘must-have’ gadgets, these products weren’t invented yesterday. Their success took months of planning, building buzz and strategizing.

Online Retail Strategies

How do you strategize for maximum sales in a busy season such as the end of the year holiday rush? How will you increase your sales each year? Here are some ideas for you:

Start Early

As mentioned, it’s a good idea to start in July to plan for this year’s holiday rush. It takes time to get indexed in search engines and to plan for site design, product sourcing and more. If you want to target specific holiday-related keywords, you’ll have much better luck at it if you give yourself time to get indexed and climb the charts in terms of search engine rankings.

Lower your pricing

People want good deals for the holidays and if you lower your pricing you’ll have more of a chance of making sales. Do this by establishing relationships with wholesalers instead of middlemen. There are a lot of ways to find wholesalers including through dropship membership programs.

Whether you’re dealing with eBay sales or sales on your very own website, you need to: have the products people want, get people to your site and have a reason people should buy from you.

Go for organic SEO results

While a certain amount of sales come from banner ads and sponsored or Pay Per Click advertisements, a lot of people look for organic results. When they’re ready to buy the latest MP3 player for their son or daughter for Christmas or Hannukah they’ll look for reviews and they’ll look for the top results for best MP3. If you’re selling these gadgets and ranking on page 1 for google results for the term ‘Best MP3” you’ll get lots of visitors. Learning to write effective sales copy, optimize your website, source the best products and source the products people want will propel you toward success.

Find Out What’s Hot

Learn about sourcing and uncovering trends before they happen. If you find out what the hot ticket items will be next year now, you can poise yourself to be someone people buy it from!

How do you source the hottest products?

Luckily there are a lot of free and low cost resources and memberships available to help you. Whether you’re dropshipping or buying products to sell either on your own site, through eBay or through a blog, there’s a wealth of online sourcing and strategizing information available. So, if you’re starting well in advance you can definitely look forward to increasing your chances of being profitable for the next holiday season!