The sale season is upon us. Flipkart officially opened the doors for the festive season through its Big Billion Day Sale. Other online marketplaces are offering promotional discounts as well. We are all at the brink of the annual diwali price-cuts and bashes. We already posted this handy guide to manage your online retail business during the festive season. This article though, is about the next step in an e-commerce entrepreneur’s year. After the boom comes a lull. Within a month, the festive season will take a break till Christmas, and the market will comparatively slow down. Here we talk about how to manage your online retail business after the sales boom is over. There are a few essential steps you will have to take to ensure that your business remains profitable. Here are 5 things you can do to make sure of it.

Things You Can do During a Sales Lull

1. Reassess inventory

First thing to do after a major sales wave is to reassess your inventory. Go through the list of items sold and items still on the shelves. By using an inventory management system like Browntape, you will have access to all your sales data from different sales channels in one handy portal. After a heavy sale season, the inventory tends to be lighter. The end of a sale season does not mean that all transactions would be over. It is time to refurbish the shelves and to continue the flow of operations through the momentum gathered during the season.

2. Catch the latecomers

There will always be latecomers in the market, customers who have missed out on making the most out of the sale season, scouring for good deals. Look at your sales charts and pinpoint the most popular sold items. It won’t hurt to keep a couple of schemes on these items going.

3. Analyze your sales

Sale season provides you with tons of analyzable data that you wouldn’t generally get your hands on. Now is the time to analyze this data to find out how your strategies have fared on the market. Here is how you will know about your most and least popular products, geographic and demographic distribution of your customers and your profits and losses. Browntape provides you with an analysis dashboard to help you with this process.

4. Get customer feedback and address grievances

This is a very important step for an online retailer. Customer feedback is the best way of knowing how well you fared during the sale season. The more satisfied customers you have, the better chances of you becoming successful in your online retail business. Give them the courtesy to asses you and the chance to voice their grievances. A good example is Flipkart’s apology letter to its customers after the negative response to the Big Billion Day Sale Browntape’s automated email system is a handy tool for this purpose.

5. Prepare for the next boom

Of course, you deserve a holiday for the immense work you have put in to make this sale season successful, but there is more work to do after that. By mid november, the Christmas shopping frenzy will begin, and you will have to be ready for it. After all, you snooze, you lose.

This was our short guide on handling your e-commerce business after the sales boom is over. For more information or queries, get in touch with us at Browntape!