Scaling up your home and garden sales for growth across marketplaces and web stores
Plan your seasons
Planning around seasonality is a constant requirement for home and garden sales. You need to order product months in advance of the season, as well as plan for shortages, shipping delays, customs, and markets with high seasons during your low seasons. Then there’s reserving precious warehouse space and figuring out the stackable and non-stackable items, the slow and fast movers.
Bundle your offerings
Bundles come naturally to home & garden. Tents with sleeping bags, sleeping bags with mattresses, duvet covers with bed sheets…it’s important to offer your products as singles, but always bear in mind the different buyer journeys to get to your listings. Be sure you have bundles in place to cater to all buyer profiles, and reward those who purchase more, because you want them to win when you win.
Optimise your staffing
One-person lift/drop, two-person life/drop; the larger and more cumbersome your stock, the more the demands on your supply logistics, warehousing and delivery. Use technology to automate the simple, repetitive and manual processes of your business. Free up your staff to focus on where they can add value, like the real heavy lifting. Good software should free up a minimum of two members of your staff for home and garden sales.
Be flexible on delivery
Shipping rates and service levels are critical to home and garden sales. With volume-based rate packages, oversized shipments, spikes in rates for remote locations and weight brackets impacting profitability, it's critical you have dynamic shipping rules and multichannel fulfilment options with real-time connections in place. Over time, it can save you not only energy and money, but also prevent negative buyer experiences.
Study your home and garden sales analytics
You can’t make these kinds of informed decisions on planning, bundling, staffing and shipping without having a really good handle on the data flowing through your business. Analyse all the parts of your business if you can. Make sure you put in the required time and effort to get your reports the way you want them, so you’re analysing the right information and you can get the insight quickly and easily.
Winning in online home and garden sales
Home and garden, home improvement, outdoors; regardless of what category you call home, home and garden sales growth boils down to mastering complexity and facilitating the movement of goods from your suppliers to your buyers. Volo works with home and garden merchants and brand retailers to streamline their operations and profitably grow their multichannel business across the major marketplaces, dedicated home and garden marketplaces and web stores.
To organise a short, friendly call with us to map out your requirements for scaling up your home and garden sales in ecommerce, please complete and submit the form below.
