Identifying your business's seasonality

[salcalvo]

What are the optimizations you're making to prepare your business's operations for the holidays – and how are you measuring them with data? 

With the holidays fast approaching, most commerce business are preparing for their busiest, highest-volume, and potentially highest-margin season of the year. Depending on a number of factors – your line of products, your consumer demographics, the frequency your products are typically purchase – optimizing your operations prior to the holiday season can have a significant impact on your bottom line.  

For example: as an apparel business, are you adequately forecasting sales for each SKU and variant before purchasing your inventory for the holiday season? If shipping is a significant cost for you, are you adjusting shipping prices during the holidays while at the same time offering incentives for your thriftier customers? The great news is that all of this can be measured with the data in your Magento's DB already.

Sal Calvo, Senior Analyst - Magento Analytics (http://www.rjmetrics.com)

[akash_agrawal]

Thanks, Sal!

A number of Magento Analytics clients are answering questions like these now, and you can read some of their case studies here. MeUndies, for example, forecasts the sell-through rate of each SKU during the entire calendar year to determine the adequate amount of inventory to have on hand in December.

[Fadiyah Sameh]

Holidays is a great time to go that extra mile in order to woo your customers by giving them what they need, and in the process do some branding for your own store. At the top of my mind is seasonal branding where you can offer special gifts to your customers.

Carry out targeted email campaigns and personalize your marketing Content. Also make sure that your store is optimized for mobile devices.

And it doesnt stop here. You also need to know if you are going in the right direction. For that take the help of google analytics. There are some more hacks like these for the holiday season in our article here. 

[joykristof]

The case study was helpful. Thank you! Can you please some study that relates SMO with the holiday sales. Would really appreciate your help!

Thanks in advance!