Pay Close Attention to Your Product Trend
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. Knowing your product trend is at the very core of what it means to successfully run a business. If you’re offering consistently high quality products that are in demand to shoppers at the right time, customers will keep coming back. That’s why tracking your product trend is crucial and should never be underestimated. Without further ado, let’s get to it!
When does a specific product increase in popularity and what is its seasonality?
The popularity of some products is dependent on season, weather or other recurring factors such as holidays. It’s easy to get your products ready specifically for these occasions because you know when to get prepared — so don’t procrastinate! According to Deloitte University Press, this year’s total back-to-school spending is expected to reach $27 billion, Halloween sales are expected to exceed $8.4 billion, and Christmas sales will amount to $1 trillion in the US alone. That’s a lot of money on the table.
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. Popularity depends on the size of your product portfolio but it’s also based on your approach to dealing with and analyzing data. Knowing your product popularity and seasonality, according to the product’s popularity, can allow you to plan your campaigns and marketing activities in advance, give discounts and complementary products, or simply grant you the ability to proudly announce something like: “Do you already have our top autumn product? Don’t miss out, order now!”
What to track while planning a campaign?
To increase your profits you need to know which products generate the highest revenue and are worth giving priority promotion. That’s why it’s important to track your revenue daily and have a clear overview of your product’s performance. In order to stay on top, tracking what goods are in demand (relative to others) should also go without saying. Knowing the number and quantity of orders per particular product along with the product revenue allows you to distinguish between products that are of the highest importance (in terms of selling, popularity, etc.) and which products aren’t selling or bringing you down.
Best selling vs. top refunded products
By understanding your top selling products you can ensure adequate inventory and optimize strategies to sell more. 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. 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.
Rush days, peak hours
According to Windsor Circle, all revenue skews towards the beginning of the week, with Mondays and Tuesdays performing best, followed by Wednesdays through Friday, and Saturday and Sunday taking up the rear. According to intelliAd the largest share of traffic (61%) and conversions (77%) is still observed on desktop computers during prime TV time, from 8pm to 11pm. But keep in mind this information is generalized, and can vary greatly from business to business depending on factors such as category of products, demographics, etc.
But if you take anything away from this, it’s that tracking your own orders by days and hours is a good step toward understanding where those dips and peaks occur. 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.
Find it difficult to keep up with all the metrics?
If you have the right data, the ability to identify patterns is well within reach. Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep track of all of this in order to ensure you receive proper and up-to-date feedback about whether your campaign has reached the right people or not. Numbers and metrics are very valuable when it comes to improving your online store and helping you grow. However, anyone who’s been stuck on inventory duty knows how boring and time-consuming it can be.
Consider a suitable solution that is appropriate to the size of your business. With the MonkeyData application you can easily monitor popularity and seasonality, the best and worst selling products, how fast you process your orders on average, your peak hours and rush days and many other cool metrics which can help you boost your sales.
To sum up, we can’t understate the importance of paying close attention to your product trend and implementing a data-driven approach. This entails optimizing your marketing activities and campaigns and making administrative changes when necessary. By now you’ve probably got your own style of campaigning down, so learning how to adapt and improve is the never ending task that drives the eCommerce industry. That said, going back to basics can always be helpful as well, so if you need a quick recap, we’ve included one right here!
