Holiday Season Store Sites

[Andy]

So who is capitalizing on the gift buying season?

Update: I did a post on my blog about this subject http://www.adscube.com/make-money/holiday-season-profits called Holiday Season Profits

[Menard]

I'm actually a bit late on getting this done, but I just registered the domain WinterCharm.com to use for Haddix Distributing.

Being that his business is largely from April to September, I thought it would be a good idea to market some of the products he carries during the off-season.

During this time of year, even though we are not in a mountain region, there are a few ski slopes and other winter activities within just a few hours drive. Normally he does not distibute to these businesses as his has traditionally been a person to person business and the travel required to get that business is a barrier. Hopefully this can pick up some off-season business to help with a floundering regular season (increasing gas prices have crippled many parts of the travel and tourism industry).

I'm working on a template for it today. I'm going to use my webmaster barn template as a basis for it; using a frosted evergreen pic for the background and kind of a log cabin look to the page.

I should have done this back in August when I first thought of it, though I was wrestling with a domain name for it. The idea of Winter Charm came to me just yesterday.

We'll see how things look from here.

[Andy]

Consider showing prices for merchandise like everybody else does. Without easy access to pricing information you will get no business.

[Menard]

Consider showing prices for merchandise like everybody else does. Without easy access to pricing information you will get no business.

Do keep in mind that the first site is a wholesale site. I've been meaning to add a retail shop to it, but have not yet.

Though this site will be wholesale and retail, I am only going to list the retail prices as the shops to which he sells know the wholesale margin.

Though I have considered using a shopping cart script, I am not going to at this time; at least not in the traditional manner.

What I am going to try is a request form. The customer (mostly they will be wholesale customers) will fill out an inquiry form (or they can just contact them via phone, fax, or email) for any item/items in which they are interested and how many. This does not obligate them to the order, it just lets the company know how many of what items the customer wants and they can confirm if that is in stock, or available from a remote warehouse, and contact them with that information and complete the sale at that point.

The reason I am doing it this way is that I have no way of maintaining a database of stock outside of his own database. There are some items I can sell on the site and have a pretty good chance that they will be in stock or available. There are a whole lot more items with which I cannot do that, nor can I forecast when one of his regular customers may order one of those items and deplete the stock (of course, during the Winter, that won't happen often).

We'll see how screwed up that idea is or not.

[Andy]

OK, listing Recommended Retail Price is a start. Minimum order quantities would be another useful bit of data plus suggested order quantities e.g. 100, 1000, 10,000

[Menard]

OK, listing Recommended Retail Price is a start. Minimum order quantities would be another useful bit of data plus suggested order quantities e.g. 100, 1000, 10,000

That's a good idea. Depending on the form I use, I could either just put that into a table or have some buttons with different order quantities that would input it into the appropriate field, though they can still just type it in if they prefer.

[donecweb]

In catalogs they list like...
1 to 10 price 1 each
11 to 100 price 2 each

and so forth laid out in a table.

[Andy]

Good tip Don. Terminology to consider using is price breaks and quantity discounts. Wholesale buyers will probably want to establish a relationship with you and do deals. But Menard, as a salesman, I guess you know this from your professional experience. Put yourself in the shoes of you landing on your site after a search. What makes you want to do business and what makes you click away?