Volume 24 Issue 1 January 2019
INSIDE: Design Room Fresher Valentines Page 3
Joy of Marketing Jumpstart Your Yelp Reviews in 2019 Page 5
Make This Year Even Better Lessons from Last Year Page 6
Floral Insider Anti-customer Policies Page 7
TIME FOR REVIEW
Assessing Your Holiday with POS Reports When the holiday rush is behind you, take a day or two to go over your sales reports and discuss your success and lessons learned with your staff. Your POS is a magnificent source of data that can steer you to better sales and more profits. You don’t need to know all the reports it generates, just a few main ones. How did your shop fare overall in sales this holiday season compared to last year? Are sales up from last year? If so, why? What products improved and which ones declined in sales? You can take an educated guess, but you will be better served if you run some reports from your point-of-sale (POS) system. Whether you use Dove®, RTI or a different program, pulling reports should give you a crystal clear picture of your holiday sales and merchandising successes. Hot and Cold Sales Of course, what you primarily want to know from your various POS reports is what were your bestsellers and where did you make the most money. The quantity of sold products can give you a good baseline for study, but it won’t tell you the whole story. Take a look at your top sellers in each category to see if there are any surprises. You will usually have a good idea of what sold like hotcakes and what clung to your shelves and refused to move. However, every so often, you will be surprised by a product that you hadn’t realized was so popular with customers. Finding those products can give you a clearer picture of customer preferences and alert you as to what to buy more of for the next holiday. Go beyond the total sales and number of items sold to see where you earned above and below average margins. What are the profit margins on your bestsellers? For example, you might have sold 225 reindeer candles, making them one of your most popular items, while you only sold 35 brass reindeer candle holders. However, when you look at your profit margin, you actually made more money on 35 candle holders than on Continues on page 2