Retail Sales Are Up! Why aren’t yours?

Bad news sells as the old saying goes, and the media is having a field day right now shouting from the rooftops about poor retail results and how it’s a precursor to a recession. Trouble is I’m not seeing it, and many others are saying similar. We’ve been achieving stellar results for clients, so if that isn’t you, maybe it’s time for a mystery shop to identify any issues.

What I learned

• Why retail isn’t all doom and gloom
• Why spending more can reap the rewards
• Treat your customers online the same as in store
• Is it time for a design evolution?

Transcript

Hey. Welcome back, you retailing Rankers. I want to talk to you about doom and gloom today. There’s a bit about on retail at the moment, and specifically, this article that came in from the Sydney Morning Herald this morning saying “No Christmas Retail Cheer.” But my comment was, you know what, apart from the retailer I spoke about last week who didn’t do the Black Friday sale because she’s having such a good year, since then I’ve spoken to at least three other retailers that are having exceptional years, all of them did Black Friday, but they simply can’t keep up. So I think there is a danger of believing some of the doom and gloom that’s out there. And I liken it a little bit to the property market, which is what I said when I posted this. Some areas aren’t doing so well, other areas are going gangbusters. The reason that might happen in retail is that you may not know things online that should be going on that are going on.

I was talking to a client the other week. I said, “How’s business, Pete?” He said, “Mate, I think there’s a bit of a recession going on because I’ve not been getting many enquiries.” I said, “Pete, your email’s broken.” “Oh, okay.” Fix that, lead’s start coming in. So you could talk about it’s a recession because that’s what I hear. That’s what I hear in the news. There’s a danger in believing that sort of stuff though. And this is another client who last year shouldn’t be if there’s a recession on, then this should not be happening. Right? And this is just his mobile traffic on ads last year. What if we spend extra this year, spend an extra 5K and made him an extra 60K right? So last year, so 205% increase and he’s only spent 5,000 more. So 30,000 to 90,000 and that was because of the way that he was treating his clients. One of the customers on the site. I mean, when’s the last time you walked into a store, and suddenly “Jesus! What are you doing?” “Oh, I just want to tag you so I can send you some notifications.”

“Piss off.” I mean it doesn’t happen in a shop, but yet we think it’s okay on a website. And it’s this sort of stuff that you need to be looking at and thinking about. I mean, no one, no one, and this is the design industry fault, right? No one is doing this. No one is walking past that website going, “Oh, there’s, Omni-Directional Rock Crawlers.” God damn. That’s not how websites work, but yet that’s how we have decided that they should work. You don’t walk around in a store with a trolley full of goods, saying, “Can someone tell me how much, can someone tell me how much this is going to cost to get delivered? I have to go all the way to the checkout? Really?”

I mean we don’t do it, right? But we think it’s okay on websites. That’s right. If you haven’t done a mystery shop, you really should.

Hopefully that’s helpful. And we’ll see you next week, which will be the final show for the year, and then we’ll start year 16. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.