#4 Hot & Cold Products
Mamma mia, here we go again! The Out of the Jungle: Product series is back with another instalment, and this time we’re looking at your trending products as well as unpopular stock. As usual, the article includes both how-to manuals and topnotch strategies to help you boost your business.
The popularity of some products is dependent on season, weather, and other recurring factors such as holidays. It’s easy to get your products ready specifically for these occasions because you know exactly what to expect and when to get prepared. Let’s put these ‘easy’ cases aside — do you still know your product’s popularity? To some entrepreneurs it’s crystal clear, but for others it can be a complete mystery.
Hot Products
As we mentioned previously, to increase your profits you need to know which products generate the highest revenue and are worth giving priority promotion. Once a product gets “hotter”, it can alert you to when you need to prepare your stock and have your staff ready so that you don’t end up keeping your customers waiting. It’s also great for planning your marketing activities precisely. Leverage the data points your analytics provides to make smarter purchasing decisions and decrease stock overflow.
Let’s say you planned a PPC campaign promoting certain products and want to find out whether it was worth the money. Similarly, maybe you suddenly run out of stock for a specific product. At this point, rather than narrowly focusing on only your most popular products, it’s also worth checking on products that are rapidly growing in demand according to increasing quantity sold. This strategy will not only allow you to ensure adequate inventory but will also give you the necessary incentives to always be prepared with the best offer for your customers at the right time, and let you stay one step ahead.
| Tips & Tricks |
If you have a very popular product, chances are your customers are willing to share why they love it so much. This opens up a great opportunity to engage with them in a variety of ways, for example via social media or customer surveys and polls.
- Gain additional exposure of hot products through your customers
- Use their language when adjusting descriptions of all your products
- Change your product design and marketing accordingly
- Reorder popular items more frequently
Did you know? Businesses can lose nearly half of intended purchases when customers encounter stock-outs.
Cold Products
A good strategy for maximizing sales is to recommend your best selling products alongside another specific product that isn’t doing well. This works well to encourage your customers to buy outside their comfort zone and also gives you the opportunity unload stock that hasn’t been as popular.
| Tips & Tricks |
Start with some decent projections of how much supply you’ll need (based on what you’ve sold in the past) and when you’ll need it. Only that way you can avoid too much unpopular inventory which can be extremely difficult to move later (and may result in having to mark it down, selling to discounters, or shipping it to liquidators).
Try to figure out why your cold products aren’t doing as well. There can be a number of reasons, ranging from pricing (too high / low), positioning, or even the presentation of the product. So again, consider talking to your customers via a poll or a survey to find out.
- Change the pricing (for example, try comparison pricing)
- Offer volume discounts
- Create discounted product bundles containing both popular and unpopular items
- Add missing details to product descriptions (videos, images, text)
- Reposition cold product in your listing
- Spread the word via social media
- Convey product scarcity (use words such as limited, one-time, exclusive, etc.)
Did you know? 99% of the time people don’t want to buy what you’re selling is because of the emotions attached to the purchase.
Having your stock full of items nobody wants and neglecting to promote the products that are in demand can all hurt your online store and weaken effectiveness as a business. This means that knowing your product trend is at the very heart of what it means to successfully run an online store.
Dips and peaks in sales are a nearly unavoidable part of running a business. But if you’re ignoring the reasons for why they happen, you’re missing out on opportunities to leverage their effects. By understanding your top and worst selling products you can optimize strategies to sell more.
We hope you liked this post! Feel free to share your tips and tricks with us in the comment section below. And as always, stay tuned! The next volume of the Out of the Jungle: Product series, Part #5 Products Sold Together, is coming in a month. :-)
