Planning For The Holidays
Less than 80 Days until Christmas with Halloween and Thanksgiving coming in between. So now is the time to start managing your Holiday Markdowns.
It’s hard to imagine not getting full price on that brand new merchandise that you’re just unpacking and putting on your shelves. But eventually you’re going to discover that some of it isn’t selling like you thought it would and you have to mark it down. It’s just part of doing business.
You can minimize markdowns but you can’t eliminate them completely. If you’ve made a poor assortment choice (and everyone does at one time or another), turn that excess merchandise into quick cash and reinvest it in a better selection that you can sell at full margin.
Holding on to bad merchandise in the hope that it will eventually sell at full price just doesn’t work. Bite the bullet and mark those “Dogs” down.
Don’t wait to take your markdowns – especially if the items are seasonal. The sooner you do it, the more likely it is that you’ll have to take a smaller percent off.
And now for the plug! If you had been using a retail product like CounterPoint Point of Sale software, you could have run a Sales Analysis report that would have shown what was selling and what wasn’t – how fast it was selling and what was giving you the best profit margin. What a big step in aligning your merchandise with what your customers want!
Enough said.
Talk to you soon ~Norma