The holiday season is the perfect time for Retailers as customers dive deep into buying and all kind of products are flying off the shelves faster than ever but once it is over, managing returns and overstock can be full of stress.
How to handle post-Christmas activity and embrace profitable strategies? We analyze some easy tactics to avoid after holiday retail stress.
It may seem that holiday season doesn´t come as surprise to any Retailer as Christmas shopping fever is one of the most important milestones in Retail calendar. In that crucial period that starts on Thanksgiving retail can account for up to 40% of annual sales or even more wit e-commerce sales hitting each year a record higher.
As customers dive deep into seasonal shopping, retailers do their best to meet consumers demand for best deals across all channels and all kind off products are literally flying off the shelves faster than ever.
It will either come as a surprise that holidays shopping brings as well more returns and overstock inventory to be managed that any other season does. How to best handle tis challenging post-Christmas activity and manage overstock in profitable way?
Discount and sales
Discounting is widely known as bread & butter of Retail industry when it comes to clear up the overstock inventories.
As top pricing strategy for retailers across all sectors it has to be considered as well as one of essential tactics when speaking about Christmas items. The question is how to optimize discount strategy attracting and engaging the customers in the quickest time possible without killing the profits.
It is important to plan well the promotions defining objectives and tailoring offers accordingly to shoppers segments and store locations.
Here, in this point, previous sales data analysis may be helpful to distribute wisely the stock among different locations. Data combined with brand´s sales team input always help.
On the other hand retailers shall test different discounting tactics: one fits all has never been a panacea in retail strategy. Some stores will succeed playing from 10 to 30% discounts, others may perform better by running conditional promotions (buy one to get % off, spend x amount to save %, etc) or even going into cross-selling or upselling tactics.
Product rotation
Stock rotation is a popular strategy used in retail and as far as it entails pushing older products it still may be applied in post-holiday season though we recommend to use some data analysis.
The objective is to optimize the process so the products may be rotated not only to more conspicuous areas in one store but also among stores in different geographic areas.
In this case, data analysis can provide retailers useful information regarding customers preferences and demand in different areas of their brick-and-mortar stores net indicating were to best sell some of Christmas items from seasonal collections.
Flash sales vendors and marketplaces partnering
An additional solution to handle overstock inventory is to partner with flash sales players or online marketplaces that place products on secondary market at deep discounts. This kind of vendors are highly specialized in massive destocking of any kind of products and usually gather a targeted community of customers looking for online bargains.
Betting on this third party vendor’s strategy let Retailers get rid of Christmas overstock in quite quick and easy way saving each store of the brand the trouble of organizing its own sales. And in the meantime focus on new full price collections to be introduced and promote to their own offline and online channels.
To sum up, there are some smart strategies to follow in order to avoid post-Christmas stress when facing overstock inventory management. Still, the best is yet to come. In retail both the time and customer demand are two of the most important elements to manage.
On time data based forecasting and planning can help you to squeeze all Christmas sales opportunities for next hectic season holiday. Stay tuned to dive deeper with us into stock inventory management.
