I need a crystal ball
Hey there everyone, I apologize for my lapse in blogging. I lose sight of the fact that life goes on when my kids are home on winter break.
But lets get to the biz at hand. Does anyone have a crystal ball? For some reason our business has slowed WAY down for the last week. WHY!?.. when all else remains the same, why do we suddenly hit a wall? This is probably the single most frustrating issue in running a business...trying to find a solution to slow sales. I know that part of my problem has to do with not having enough fresh product to show my customers. But I'm flashing a bunch of new sales items at them, and they don't really seem to care.
One thing I haven't done lately is to go check out what my competition is up to. That's probably a big one right there. Every now and again it's important to check in to see what kind of promos they are running, if at all. Can you do something equally as exciting? I love to highlight products that we are cheaper on. For the most part, our competition is very much in line with us on price. We have one competitor who undercuts EVERYONE, and she's not making any money, she just couldn't be. And her site is completely horrible to shop, very amateur, lots of typos, etc. I think she probably moves a lot of the little cheap stuff, but who wants to drop a lot of money on an expensive item at a dumpy store? Don't know why that is, it just is.
Back to my crystal ball...It's these slow weeks that make me want to throw in the towel. Last week was great, this week stinks. I can look at the analytics, and I can look at sales last year, but none of that is giving me my answer.
We went to a large clothing/gift show last weekend, and found some really exciting product. This will most likely jazz things up a bit. Unfortunately, we won't get that in for a few more weeks, so I have to make things interesting until then. I don't dare to get too excited about the new product though. We've found stuff that was really cool (or so we thought) and it bombed when we previewed it. There's nothing more frustrating than that. It's scary to think that after three years in business, you can still be asking questions like, "why am I slow?" I should know by now. And I guess I sort of do. I just don't like the answer. I don't want to hear that we have to get a lot of inventory in because being inventory heavy for a small business is very scary. And making a buying decision on a product that doesn't excite your customers turns a small business owner inside out. I just reread this entry and realized that I've answered myself here. But please feel free to respond, and please keep your crystal... I guess I just need more cash, and a bigger basement...
