There’s nothing quite like a sale to drive up revenue in your online student store! However, you might be hesitating to run one, because you’re not sure how to set it up and run it.
You’re in luck! Here’s what you need to know about how to run a sale on your online student store!
1. Choose Your Dates
One of the reason why people love sales – and rush to buy when things are on sale – is because time is limited. You don’t want to have a sale that’s always on, and you don’t want to have sales too often, or the scarcity factor will diminish.
It’s a good idea to plan your sale well in advance, and time it carefully. Make sure it coincides with the time when most families are getting paychecks, so they have money to spend, and keep it running for about a week, so there’s time for everyone to make their purchases.
2. Decide How Much You’re Going to Cut Prices
Sometimes, sales are for a flat rate for everything on your online student store. Sometimes, they’re for a certain percentage off some items, and another percentage off others. Or sometimes, the percentage changes based on how much people are buying. So you might give parents a 10% discount if they spend $50, 20% for $80 and so on. It’s entirely up to you, but value based discounts like these do tend to make people spend more at sales.
3. Choose Your Method
Sometimes, when you run a sale, you simply decrease the prices of the items on your online student store by a percentage upfront. Usually, this will show as a discounted price right on the item, so people can see the dollar value they’re saving.
Another option is to use coupons, which are usually based on a particular code, and can be applied when store users checkout. If you are going to offer automatic discounts based on the amount spent per sale, you can set it up that way. Or you can display the codes somewhere on the store or send them to families by email.
4. Before or After Tax?
Many school stores don’t charge sales tax, but yours might, and if you do, you need to decide if the discounts and coupons you create for your online school store apply before or after taxes.
5. Pickup or Delivery?
Finally, you need to decide how you’re going to handle the distribution of items for your online school store sale.
If you have a lot of items in stock, and you’re having a sale to get rid of old inventory, you might want to package the items and deliver them to classes as soon as possible. However, if you’re buying items after they’ve been purchased, you might want to arrange to alert families when their orders are ready, and where to collect them.
Either of these options can work well, or you can choose any other option you like. Just make sure that everyone knows where and how they will be getting the items they bought!
