The Christmas Rush

Has it started yet?

[andy_boyd]

I have a site which sells giftware, a lot of which is suitable for Christmas gifts. My past figures show that I should have been getting between 5 and 10 sales per day on this site since mid October. This has not materialized at all!

Is anybody else experiencing similar sales?

[mansterfred]

OK, So now it is the 9th. How is everyone doing? We are running up about 15%.

[hannamyluv]

Yep, up 18% here. Love the holidays...

[RedWolf]

I haven't had time to run the figures. I've been to busy making product, packing, and updating my site by marking sold items and adding new ones. I do jewelry with a lot of one of a kind pieces, so even after I make a piece I need to photo it and prepare specific page copy for it. I've been up to 2am or 3am every night working, not that I'm complaining too much :) I do kinda envy all you people who can just place an order to your supplier and have them send stuff out. I guess I'm in the suppliers shoes, because I just sent a very large overnight orderto restock a gallery.

In my spare minutes, I'm thinking just off hand that I am up around 20% for November and have already reached last Decembers sales figures so far this month. Not sure about the year though. I'm thinking that the holidays will save me this year. We were dawn much of the year until October. Sales for 2002 were almost exactly the same total as 2001. It will be interesting to run my reports on net income, because I am spending more on advertising (PPC mostly) than I did last year. So far the advertising is more than profitable, but i would like to see just how big of percentage it adds to the bottom line.

[Essex_boy]

Errrm well after bragging about how well I was doing a few weeks earlier its stopped dead. happened on Saturday getting one poxy order a day now.

Sulk.

[RedWolf]

Ok, I'm not so upset that it seems like i'm working like crazy now. i really should watch the financials a bit more closely. I just ran some reports for Nov and Dec so far. In November we did double the gross sales of 2002. So far in December we have done 75% of last years sales. The nice thing is that most of the sales last year were in the later part of the month. Just comparing the first nine days of December, we have done 2.8 times the sales. No if I could just keep these figures up all year, I would have no problem dropping the day job. As it is, i am getting to invest most of the profits back into the business so hopefully in a few years I can do it.

[minnapple]

My clients are scrambling to fullfill orders.
I have been custom programming options to do bulk "out of stock" entry and changing shipping times etc . . .

Gooood times for my clients.

m i n n a p p l e

[ILLstyle]

So far this DEC we have already sold what we did last year!

[GarryBoyd]

My shelves are full of stock no one seems to want, and the stock they do want is somewhere between here and my supplier in Germany. I aint promising anybody anything, as I've been caught this way before.
But still, the ecommerce stuff definitely works, and has added a useful extra to my business.

[Ledfish]

We are up slightly for from the same time last month, but down from last year. However we can't be sure it isn't a site problem. the search engine wars have me chasing my tail it seems like.

[Sunshyn]

We're just a little over last year's December for this date. Most of my time at this point is always spent making products as ordered, but at least I've learned to pre-assemble parts of most of our widgets so I've still got time to do all the rest there is to running a business.

We're still up at least 30% for the year mostly because we gained a non-niche market for some small, made to order widgets. Products trends, which can never really be counted on, but particularly helpful during our always slow Spring and Summer.

[superscript]

Going back a month - how was November? It was pretty poor here in the UK for my electronics goods. We really need a good December.

[Essex_boy]

Im in the UK, sell games etc, November blinding December nothing really. Shops arent that busy either

[Essex_boy]

Scratch my last post, Im now seling tons of small items like watches for about $14 a pop, the bigger orders $100 - $150 a go have stopped.

Visitor numbers are up by about 50%.

Any one else?

[Miop]

My sales have been a bit erratic (low side) all week but today big sales £50+. (I thought people would be worried it was too late...)
Not many small sales.
I started up on Adsense, and then worried that I was diverting customers away from my site, but it has picked up again today.

[Essex_boy]

I thnk we are worrying too much, lets see what happens at the end of December.

[travmed]

I'm down from last year but that is probably due to a domain name switch I'm guessing. I used the old domain to start a new business which is actually doing very well. So, it' all evens out.

[superscript]

January is much busier for me than December usually. I guess it depends on your product lines. Someone suggested having 2 seasonal businesses - one for winter / x-mas and the other for summer / holidays.

[Compworld]

Its starting to slow down here.

CompWorld

[KevinC]

picking up everyday - and if sales are like last year we will actually peak on the 21st or 22nd.

But we are one of the few in our industry to guarentee xmas delivery if ordered by Dec. 22nd. Its a lot of work for the guys doing the shipping - but sure pays off in sales.

[andy_boyd]

Things here across 3 sites never really peaked as such, rather we are seeing steady sales daily which is very different to previous years. For example, this time last year I would be sitting twiddling my thumbs, now I have a pile of new orders waiting to go out.

It's very different this year.

[Sunshyn]

The number of orders coming in have slowed down some, but we're not making any money off of them. This week, only 1 out of every 7 orders have actually gone through. Most problems are things like card numbers and billing information being typed in wrong. We're suddenly spending so much time on customer and bank phone calls that we don't have time for the valid customer orders. I just cut off the alternative shipping address option just so we could get rid of one of the bigger processing time drains.

Does everyone else experience an overwhelming majority of irate customers during this season? We inevitably get blamed for most customer errors this close to Christmas. The latest was someone with an invalid card number who, when he finally contacted us to cancel the order, had to make a point about how his "card works elsewhere" - even though the one he gave us was missing a digit! He'd ignored the warning that he hadn't entered a valid card number during the order process as well as our first message to him about it. I've gotten 3 similar messages just today, even those which don't cancel. :-/

[Essex_boy]

Another thing about Xmas people always ask why I have so many parcels, when you tell 'em youve an ecomm site they look at you as if your from outer space or have some foul and fatal disorder.

Anyone else noticed that?

[andy_boyd]

Yeah, any time I turn up at the post office with an armful of boxes to go to America, UK, Australia etc people will literally just stand there and gawk at me. I think that for the vast majority the concept of selling to a market online has not sunk in, they just can't perceive it which has it's benefits!

[Sunshyn]

Essex_boy, some of the more negative reactions might be because of the old public perception of the internet as being just someplace to get porn. I've actually had someone reply with "The internet? You mean that thing with all the sex?". I've noticed the perception changing as internet connections become more and more commonplace but still get a few.

[Essex_boy]

Oh good im glad its not just me then!

[Sunshyn]

We had a big increase of orders again late on Friday. I'm confused because all but one opted for standard shipping (USPS priority in our case). Even ignoring the notices we have up about allowing a couple days per item for orders to be handcrafted, isn't this a little late for holiday orders?

[Essex_boy]

Yeah people are dum so it wouldnt surprise me if they didnt see it.

Visitor numbers are staying even sales are not coming through.

Anyone else?

[uksports]

No, visitors are now 30-40% down as things wind down and sales have slowed to a trickle as it is now only courier services that can get parcels to customers in time for Xmas - and as we normally offer free shipping, our customers are not used to paying for it!

Otherwise, it has been utter madness since the last week of November and I'm along way up on last year - having said that, can't get the final figure until all the returns are back (7th January is the cutoff) so I'll know more then, but definitely 100%+ up on last year

[andy_boyd]

Thursday and Friday we were still getting orders from customers wanting Christmas delivery, which is nigh on impossible when we are based in Ireland and the customer is in California.

A quick call to Fedex revealed it would *only* cost £52 to ship a 1kg package on Monday to arrive on Wednesday! ;-) Needless to say, the customer didn't go for that one.

But yeah, we were still getting sales steadily until last night when it seems to have dried up, even our regular wedding stuff isn't moving. I'd say that Joe Bloggs is now too concerned about getting himself sorted for Christmas Day, rather than ordering gifts and such.

So if this really is the end for Christmas, when can we expect things to pick up again? Usually the first couple of weeks in January are alright as we get a lot of engaged couples ordering, but after that it goes dead. What kinda trends do you see for post-Christmas sales?

[Essex_boy]

Interesting to hear that things have gone quiet I was in Colchester town centre today, able to park easily and very few shoppers.

which is odd for the time of year.

January is going to be quiet, credit card bills etc coming in should start to pick in Feb.

Thats my bet anyway.