The Numbers Don’t Lie... We Just Got Our Wake-Up Call
Posted on Tue, Dec 06, 2011
The numbers are in from Black Friday, Small Store Saturday and Cyber Monday and the results are nothing short of spectacular and amazing. I haven’t said those two words in years. For the past six plus years The National Retail Federation and gurus around the world were predicting either sales increases of 1 or 2 percent or decreases from 1 to 5 percent. Online sales had spectacular increases when it was new but certainly tailed off as it became more difficult to have double digit increases.
Across the country, almost every type of larger retailers experienced significant increases in sales over last year’s Black Friday’s numbers. That doesn’t mean that all small stores didn’t participate in the sales boom. It’s just that many smaller mom and pop merchants were never positively affected by Black Friday’s business. The reason for that is they weren’t promoting to the extent a large store can and they weren’t giving things away the way a large store can. There are lessons to be learned from these sales results.
The first lesson we had to learn is that there are customers out there who are buying. If the merchandise and the pricing represent value, they will buy. More important than the buying, they will go to stores and buy. Carry good quality merchandise and promote, promote, promote.
Now let’s look at the results from Cyber Monday. Twenty five to thirty percent increases were the norm. Cyber Monday is no longer a cute sale name – it’s a real event. It tells us that our customers are shopping in stores while buying online as well. The term “multi-channel retailer” means we are selling our merchandise in multiple ways – online and in the store. Customers are telling us they want it both ways. I laugh when I hear a store owner say “we give great customer service” but they don’t have a website; shame on them.
I was approached within the last month to work on a project to help to franchise a retail business. I asked to see their website and I was told they didn’t have one. My response was to call me when they have a website or call me to help you create a strong website.
We can’t be in business today without having a website that does two things:
- You need a site where customers can buy something from you online. I am not saying that you have to put all of your merchandise online for sale, but what I am saying is for you to offer a few items for sale.
- We need to have websites that our customers want to return to again and again. I call it the returnability quotient. The tools, mechanisms, merchandise offerings, widgets or call it what you like, anything that will make going to your site a regular occurrence as opposed to a single event.
On Friday we even got positive news about the employment numbers. The unemployment dropped a little more than was expected. I say that but in my heart I believe those unemployment numbers are not telling the whole story. What I mean is that there are lots of jobs out there today but we have people who are not skilled to fill these new jobs. No, we don’t have classic manufacturing assembly line union high paying jobs of the past that didn’t require the skills of today’s jobs. Maybe it’s not an unemployment problem but rather a skill training problem.
For now let’s just look at the bottom line. Customers are buying, they are going online, they are buying online, they are going to stores, better merchandise is selling, and we must always have promotional items. If we’re not doing these things, we had better start.
Look at your store as a customer would. Do you have promotional items? Are you promoting your website in your store? Are you promoting your store on your website? The key word today is seamless integration. We differentiate between an in-store sale and an online sale. The customer looks at your store as one entity. Make sure your store and your website give the same feeling.
The wake-up call has been made and it is time to look at what we do and what other successful retailers are doing and it is time to start to adopt and adapt these winning practices before technology and the times make us insignificant. On the positive side, celebrate our successes and appreciate the people who are working for us. They can be your competitive edge and the exciting difference which is the difference.