Attention:   RETAILERS

We're giving away SIX copies of Jingle Bells Christmas Sells!  

Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and fill in your details in the Keep In Touch box - bottom right hand corner. Winners notified on Monday!

Christmas never seems to be far away when you work in retail.  No sooner has last year's festivities been wrapped up and the Christmas Sale is done and dusted, than thoughts start turning to the next round of Christmas fun.  But, in the flurry of activity, crucial steps can often be overlooked as pressure mounts and retailers grow accustomed to the monotony of year in, year out in-store preparations.
It is one of the most important trading periods of the retail year.  The impact it has on sales will vary with each retail sector but whichever sector you belong to, it is critical that you maximise the sales potential of this peak festive season.

Let's look at window displays, hot spots and standing out from the crowd.

Creating a dominant window display with significant impact from a distance  should be the aim of every retailer.  It is important not to over-complicate your layout.  Make sure there is one strong simple message coming through.  Change your window displays regularly throughout your festive campaign to keep it updated and looking inviting.

Hot Spots
Careful selection of product for hot spots will ensure the highest number of customers are passing your your most important product lines.  Products in these locations need to be clearly ticketing and rotated to ensure they remain full and renewed throughout the festive promotion.

Here are some things to consider with your Online Store for Christmas.  

Are you offering Christmas specials? 

You can put up special Christmas only products that have special pre-Christmas offers.  Gift buyers come in many different types and good quality novelty items sell well at Christmas.

Add Christmas Keywords  
Make sure that you add the Christmas keywords to your meta-keywords with plenty of time to get crawled by the search engines before Christmas. Also make sure that you add Christmas Gift category names and description text to match up with your keywords.  But remember timing is important.  How often does Google crawl your website homepage?  For most online shops it might be every 5-10 days so to get your changed messages out there -  it is not instantly available.  Now might be a good time to set up some web analytics.

Christmas is the peak retail period of the year and preparation should have already started.  If it hasn't - START NOW!
There are two guarantees:  Christmas will happen and people will still spend up on gifts and food for the holiday season.

Let's start by looking at your online store:
You have issues to cover but the key issue is time.  The date for Christmas doesn't change so by December 24th your Christmas business is done. So plan backwards:

• How long does it take you to pick, pack and ship?  That will determine the last date for selling online and delivering by Christmas.  Remember, there may be backlogs in delivery so check with your shipping company.
• What are the peak number of orders that you can handle each day and still get the deliveries out?
• How much stock will you need on hand?
• What content changes do you need for your online shop?
• Do you have photos and new stock information from suppliers?
• What about pre-Christmas promotions and sales?
• What about Christmas gifts and gift wrapping materials?