"Why Are My Sales Slowing Down?"
Sales are brisk one week, and in the dumper the next...what's going on?
If you've been in EBiz for any significant length of time, you've seen this happen. You go for a few weeks with steadily increasing sales, and suddenly you hit a couple of days, or even a week or two, when everyone seems to have forgotten about your web site or Auctions, and nobody's buying.
That's when many people switch into Panic Mode! Is my site down? Do I have new competition? Did my products just go "out of season"?
Well, these are all legitimate questions to ask yourself, and any time your sales take an unexpected dive, you need to look into these things. Make sure your site or auctions are running properly, your merchant account or order system is working, check to see if there's a new kid on the block with better prices, and make sure you're not selling water skis in January.
Most of the time this happens (and if you watch your sales trends, you'll find it happens fairly often) it's none of those things, though.
So, what could it be?
It's the dreaded Customer Attention Redirection Syndrome! Oh, no! All right, I just made that up. It isn't really a Syndrome. It IS what happens, though. Speaking as an experienced online seller in the U.S., I can tell you that I've learned to expect poor sales on many regular occasions throughout the year.
ANYTHING that takes the general public's mind off of spending money is a candidate for a poor sales day, or week, or even month.
Holidays are the obvious ones here. The weeks leading up to the Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, etc., Season is a retail sales explosion. Things are very good in those weeks. However, you're not very likely to make many sales between Christmas Eve and a few days after New Year's Day. During that time, people are not only concentrating on spending time with family and friends, they're also pretty much financially exhausted from all that spending, and physically out of sorts from the over-eating and the open bars at the office parties, and New Year's Eve celebrations! So, always expect a slowdown at that time of year.
Other Holidays do the same thing, but usually for shorter periods. Here in the U.S., everything from Easter to St. Patrick's Day will have an effect on your sales. With Easter, it's usually just a few days surrounding that weekend. With St. Patty's Day, it's usually just the day itself, and then one more day while people recover from their hangovers. The Fourth of July, Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, even Valentine's Day have their effect, to different degrees. On Memorial Day and Labor Day, people are traveling, camping, and so on, taking advantage of the long weekends. Thanksgiving is a big one for travel. When people are traveling, they're not sitting in front of their computers buying things from your EBiz.
Holidays aren't the only culprit, though. April can really be a dumper of a month in the U.S., because it's Income Tax Season here. Yes, sure, lots of people are going to get refunds, but we all know that most of us wait until the last day, April 15th, to file our Taxes. That means that during the first couple of weeks of April, we're frantically getting all our paperwork together, and often paying someone else to prepare our taxes. Before we spend any money buying things for ourselves online, we're waiting to see how much that refund might be, so we know how much money we have to spend. Bad for the retail trade!
The Seasons even have an effect. Spending during the summer months is a bit slower, because people are on vacation and generally playing around outdoors more, and home on their computers less. Spring takes it's toll as well. Just watch what happens to sales when the first big thaw of the Spring Season breaks over the northern part of the country, and everyone crawls out from under their snow banks, blinking at the sun and searching the house for their T-shirts and shorts! Not to mention Spring Break...that takes a dual toll. The people with the real spending money (parents of college-age kids) have spent most of it sending the people with less spending money (their college age kids) on wild rampages across the country, so nobody's spending much then either.
There's even more, folks! The Superbowl is a great way to wreck a weekend for online sales, unless you're selling beer and chicken wings online. The Nightly News doesn't help ether. A bad day on Wall Street, a negative report on the Economy, a jump in the terrorism alert level...all things that can cause little micro-slowdowns in EBiz sales.
So, if you notice that your sales are dropping, don't panic. Do the sensible thing first...check to make sure your site is running right, no major new competition, no real reason for your products to stop selling (like a factory recall!), etc. Chances are, though, that you'll find that the general public is in a major or minor Holiday/vacation-type mode, or that something really negative happened in the news recently.
The regular events of these kinds can be predicted and prepared for. The unexpected ones can't be. As long as your EBiz is functioning the way it should, though, something has probably taken the public's mind off of "discretionary spending" temporarily!
Chris Malta
Founder/CEO
Worldwide Brands, Inc.
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