Picture this: The holiday rush has ended. The frenetic excitement of another massive shopping season has died down. Now we can all take a minute and breathe a sigh of relief as we look at the our sales numbers for the past few months. You did it… and did it well. Congratulations.

But now is no time to rest on your laurels.

Just because the holidays are over does not mean your profit windfall has to be  over too. Sure, it is most likely going to decrease a bit but by keeping your sales momentum going you can draw the decrease out over the next month or so. (Or you can sit back and watch it dramatically plummet. Your choice!)

Look, I know you are tired, the holiday months can be extremely draining, but we are talking about continuing to make above average sales here – that’s worth putting off your vacation for another month, isn’t it?

Luckily, keeping your sales rolling doesn’t require much extra effort.  It’ll involve some initiative (which we know you’ve got because you run a successful eCommerce store) and the normal amount of work you do for promoting sales and specials for your store. Think of it more as a continuation of your holiday promotions rather than a whole new set of work and ideas.

In this article, I’ll lay out the things I do with my stores and you can take the ideas and apply them to your products and markets.

You might think that it would be hard to persuade people to buy right after they’ve done so much holiday spending.  But quite often people don’t get what they really wanted as holiday gifts… or just not every single thing. Because they’ve been doing so much of it over the past few months, they are used to spending at this point… and now they have the chance to spend on themselves.

That’s where your “after holiday” profits come from. You’re offering discounted gifts for bargain hunters and for people to give to themselves.

Here are some things I do to keep the profits rolling in after the holidays:

Whatever sales you were running to get more out of the holidays will help also you get more out of the post holiday season. I re-frame my promotions so they are centered around the idea of “The Perfect Gift You Didn’t Get” or “Get What You Really Wanted This Christmas” or something to that effect. 

As long as the discount is good (I’d go with at least 10%) you won’t need to do that much convincing to get people to feel entitled to buying themselves a gift.

You will also want to get the word out about your post holiday sales via newsletters.

Again, frame it around ‘The Gift You Really Wanted But Didn’t Get” or appeal to the bargain hunters with something like “Huge After-Christmas Discounts”. One of the headlines I intend to use this year is “The Most Awesome Christmas Gift You Didn’t Get”. That particular newsletter is going to be focused on a single product but it could work for multiple products or even your entire store depending on how you want to frame your offer.

Get on the phone with your vendors.

Again, I know you did it just before the holidays to check stock, now it’s time to do it again. As I’ve said in articles past, getting to know your vendors is a good investment in your business. You don’t have to be buddies with them, but it’s good to be on a first name basis and have them happy to answer when you call. Being able to strategize with your suppliers is a great way to get more out of both of your businesses.

Ask your vendors what products they still have a lot of stock on and promote these products as overstock sales. Have a “Post Holiday Blowout Sale” or , “Holiday Overstock Clearance”, etc. You might be able to get a bigger discount on these products if your vendor is motivated to sell them. Let them know what you plan to do – show how you’re going to promote the products – so they can see how quickly you plan to move them. Remember – they’ll be interested in keeping their sales up too! If you can show them a way to do that they’ll be open to helping you achieve those sales.

Don’t be afraid to propose ideas. A good vendor will take a vested interest in your store because they know the better you do, the better they do. The worse they can do is say no, so if you have an idea put it out there. It may not be accepted “as is” but it will open a dialogue between you and your supplier and give you the chance to work together.

Use your store blogs to capture more interest.

Put up blog posts about your post holiday discounts. These can be very similar to your newsletters. Also post your single product promotions. Be sure to put nice, big pictures of the products you’re discounting and make the coupon code stand out so people don’t have to read the entire post or search your blog for it. The more you can put out there and the easier you make it for people to use, the more your post holiday season will be a success.

Along those lines, use your social networks to get more people into the bargain craze or the “I’m buying it for me” mindset. I use sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote my holiday sales and so I’ll also be using them to promote my post holiday sales. Whatever avenues work for you during the holidays should be approached afterward as well.

Network, network, network!

Now I’m going to switch it up a bit and I’m going to go back to what I said earlier about strategizing with your suppliers. When you talk with them you’ll probably come away with a few ideas you didn’t have before. This happens when you talk with other business owners, you get new perspectives. So a great thing to do in the New Year is to join a mastermind or attend local business meet-ups.

For example, I regularly attend local meet-ups in Philadelphia. Just by listening to other business owners talk about what they do or how they handle certain things gives me ideas that I can apply to my stores. No one is an island and no one knows everything. Passing ideas back and forth with other business owners is one of the best ways to expand how you think about your store and sales process.

Just as you might be able to spot an issue or offer a new idea to someone else, they will be able to do the same for you. Having someone outside your business look at what you do can give you fresh perspective that can totally change your approach.

Whether it is a new tool that you find will help you get better rankings, a different line of thought around your Pay Per Click advertising, some constructive criticism about your site design, learning how others create and distribute coupons and sales, etc – joining a business owners group is another good investment in your business.

I’m pushing this because the groups are out and ready to accept new members but a lot of eCommerce store owners think these groups are for Internet Marketers primarily focused on info marketing. Not only is this not true, it wouldn’t really matter if it was because…

You don’t have to work strictly with other eCommerce store owners! I mastermind with a group weekly where I am the only eCommerce person present. Sometimes the best advice or ideas come from people who are not enmeshed in the same things you are. They are not in the same box, let’s say, as you are so they can just throw ideas out there that aren’t constrained because they are not dealing with the same things you are on a daily basis. A broad range of views can help open up your way of thinking, which can lead to new ways of doing business.

So that’s it. Those are my main sales tricks for after the holidays. This is an oft-overlooked opportunity to sustain your holiday sales momentum and these are the basic steps I take to get the most out of my own products post-holiday. You might find some other things to do based on your specific business and product lines and I suggest you do them all and I bet you to continue profiting – even after the holiday rush has ended.

Checklist:
- Continue your holiday sales but re-purpose them for the post- holidays.
- Promote your post holiday sales through your newsletters.
- Talk with your vendors and find out what items they have a lot of stock on.
- Promote the items with a lot of stock as overstock sales.
- Promote your sales with blog posts and on your social networks.
- Join a mastermind or local business meet-up group to continue expanding your ideas.

Related posts:

1. eCommerce After The Holidays
2. Take Advantage of Holidays
3. Increase Your Conversion by 8 For The Holidays

I’m partial to drop shipping, I always try to find a company that will drop ship a particular product. Drop shipping usually fits my business model better than wholesale stocking, for a few key reasons;

1. I have several eCommerce stores that, in total, carry thousands of different products. If I purchased those products wholesale, I’d need a very large and expensive warehouse for all of those boxes to live.

2. With that vast of a product line, inventory management would become a fulltime position along with shipping and receiving.

Keep in mind that the above situation is not true for all eCommerce storeowners. I happen to own many stores with many products per store – not everyone does.

Also, many eCommerce storeowners don’t sell products that occupy the same amount of space as a suit of armor, medieval shield, or wall-sized tapestry – I do. The products you sell may not take up a huge volume of floor space.

The bottom line is, your decision to warehouse inventory or find a drop shipper to do it for you must be based on factors specific to your business situation, like:

1. Do you have the room in your home to store goods?
2. If you don’t, do you have the means to rent a small public storage facility or share warehouse space with a local business?
3. Do you have the operating capital to purchase a quantity or products in bulk from a wholesaler?
4. Are you prepared to deal with yourself or hire someone to do your shipping and handling?

Those are pretty obvious. But what might be surprising to you is that when you purchase bulk wholesale from a company, you may be able to do so at a substantial savings over drop shipping. In fact, when I do purchase goods in volume, I often realize a savings between 10% and 40% over a drop shipped product.

If you’re in a very competitively priced market, having those extra margins may mean the difference between competing effectively, or not competing at all.

However, I want to share with you a concept that I believe can make a huge difference in your ability to grow your business. That concept is called “Effective Time Management”. What I’m talking about is not being able to schedule your business work time effectively – even though that’s important, it’s not what this is about.

I’m talking about being able to make a judgment between low value work and high value work. Here is what I mean…

The most effective use of your time online, or in any business environment for that matter, is growing your business’s sales volume. That means getting more traffic, turning that traffic into customers, and turning those customers into repeat buyers.

You turn your traffic into customers by having an effective sales presentation on your site, offering incentives to buy, and merchandising products in a unique way. You turn customers into repeat buyers by following up with them, communicating information that they are interested in, and offering a pleasant buying experience. And you spend time refining and enhancing all of the above by testing different methods.

I’d like to think that I have some experience in these areas, and it’s been that experience that all other considerations for your business, other than the above, are secondary. Sure, you need to manage your books, your Internet connection, your vendors, your credit card merchant, and your cash flow, etc. But what makes a business successful is the amount of sales volume that it generates.

And that’s what I’m talking about. low value work is the sort of work that doesn’t do anything to increase your sales volume. While it might be necessary in order to operate your business, it doesn’t do anything to grow it.

High value work, by my definition in eCommerce, consists of the following procedures:

1) Site Conversion testing and tweaking
2) Search Engine Optimization
3) Paid Advertising
4) Customer Follow-Up
5) Unique Product Offerings in the form of packages or special value purchases.

Hey, I’m a business owner. I realize that you have to do both. But your priority should always be growing your sales volume. That’s why I drop ship.

I know that is a long-winded explanation for the reason I drop ship. But consider this – when I get an order from one of the stores, all I have to do to fill that order is take the incoming email that I got from my shopping cart, and turn that into an order for our drop shipper.

That means having 2 windows open and copying information from my email into the order form on my vendor’s website. Total time to complete? 60 seconds.

Sure, as a drop shipper, I make less money per sale than I would if I were an inventory stocking eCommerce storeowner, but I spend far less time completing the transaction of the sale. No picking, sorting, packing, labeling, or shipping. In a sense, all I’m really doing it turning around an email. And that’s why I try to drop ship whenever I can.

Having said that, there are times when I can’t find a drop shipper for a product that I want to sell. When that happens, I here’s what I do:

I find a source for that product and ask the wholesaler for some samples. I then create the product listing, drive some traffic to it with some paid ads, and measure the results. I figure out exactly how much money it cost me to generate a sale for that product, then figure out if I can make a profit selling it like that.

If I can, I’ll purchase a minimum quantity from the wholesaler, ship it all to a fulfillment center or ask the manufacturer to warehouse it for me (they will sometimes do this), and start optimizing those product pages for the free search engines while I’m driving traffic to that page with paid ads.

See what I’m doing here? I’m taking a very small financial risk to determine if that product sells at a profit for my company. I’m using paid traffic to determine if I can sell that product. Testing the water before I dive in. Only after I’m able to judge that product’s effectiveness by testing will I make a financial commitment to it and buy a quantity of it from the wholesaler. Then, in order to keep the sales fulfillment cycle short and easy, I send that inventory to a fulfillment center that picks it, packs it, and ships it for me.

The best of both worlds. The key to this method is testing testing testing!

I need to find out if I can make a profit selling that product by using the most expensive method of online advertising available (at least when you compare it to free search engine Traffic) – paid ads. If I can generate a profit from a sale from this traffic, then I’m pretty confident that my profit margins can only improve once I start to optimize that product page for the natural search.

In my opinion, this is the lowest risk method of determining a product’s potential for your store, short of finding a drop shipper right off the bat.

Related posts:

1. eCommerce Drop Shipping
2. Need Versus Want – Product Perception