6 Ways to Prepare Your Business for Holiday Selling

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As the leaves begin to change and the days get darker, many businesses begin thinking seriously about the holiday selling season.

For many retail businesses, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve brings in the largest amount of sales all year, making that month crucial to a business’s profits and success.

To prepare your business early for this holiday season, here are 6 things you need to get started on today:

Hire Seasonal Employees

The holidays can be exceptionally busy for many retail businesses. Between the added customer orders, employee vacations, and seasonal illnesses, your business could fall woefully short on staffing, causing stress, overtime, and low morale.

To combat this potential problem, consider hiring seasonal help for your business.

Whether your struggle comes in people to pick and pack orders, handle customer service requests, or staff a storefront, finding those extra hands early in the year prevents rushing to find more help at the last minute.

Start your search at least six weeks in advance of the start of the holiday season so you can interview, hire, and train seasonal employees before the rush starts.

If hiring seasonal help is too stressful to you, consider contracting with a third-party logistics company. They can handle many of your seasonal needs – shipping, returns processing, customer service, picking and packing, and more – for less hassle than finding people on your own.

Set Holiday Schedules

Long hours and days off make scheduling during the holiday season even more complicated.

Be sure you’re clear with your employees on your policy for asking for days off around the holidays to avoid confusion and frustration. Do you block off vacation requests surrounding a major holiday? Are some employees able to take vacation days around holidays and some aren’t? What days are your facility closed?

Get ahead of the game and send an email or note to all employees outlining holiday schedules. Include official holiday closure days, who can take vacation when, and your policy for requesting vacation days.

Try to send this communication early, by mid-September at the latest, so employees have ample time to make and change plans if necessary.

Add Extra Stock

Keeping pace with the orders that roll in during the holiday season is key to a less stressful time for everyone.

If you run out of a popular product, you add more work for your customer service team and potentially lose out on sales as people take their business elsewhere.

To prevent shortages at key ordering times, start stocking up on popular products early. 

Are you planning to run a special during the holiday season? Have plenty of extra on hand to cover not only your planned orders but unexpected additional orders.

Look through your past years’ holiday sales, as well as sales patterns from the past several months and industry trends. This can help you identify which products you will need to have extra of to help keep up with sales and avoid shortages.

Start Holiday Marketing

Sometimes, the key to a successful holiday season is all in marketing your business to the right people.

Attracting new business is great and should absolutely be part of your holiday marketing plan, but don’t neglect current and former customers. Send out marketing emails to those who have already purchased from you, offering a special insiders’ discount or early access to deals.

Leverage all your available options in creating your holiday marketing plan, including email marketing, your website, social media, and any print or TV marketing you may purchase. 

You don’t have to dump tons of money into your holiday marketing, but truly understanding your customers, where they are most likely to see your marketing, and what motivates them to make a purchase can make all the difference.

And don’t wait until November to start planning your holiday marketing – The earlier you begin creating your plans and campaigns, the better they can be!

Focus on Customer Service

The holiday season is a stressful time for everyone, retailers and consumers alike.

As a result, tempers can be short, and things that seem small and insignificant at other times of the year can quickly escalate.

To prevent a public relations nightmare, train any customer-facing employees in proper customer service and complaint escalation techniques. Handle requests for exchanges or refunds quickly and, if necessary, with a little extra something to help smooth over the customer’s frustration.

Killing your customers with kindness will go a long way, and can help defuse a tense situation.

Check Your Website

During the holiday season, your website is likely to get more hits than it does during the rest of the year.

An easy-to-navigate, functional website will help you get more completed orders. If your website is too slow to load, seems buggy, or makes it difficult to find the products and information customers want, they’ll leave and take their business elsewhere.

First, check that your website is loading quickly and doesn’t have any technical errors. If that all looks good, do a scan to ensure that all pricing, shipping information, return policies, and other information on your website is correct.

If you need to, enlist a professional to help you make quick work of checking through your website and fixing any issues. 

Logistics Help All Year Long

Getting your products from the shelves into the hands of your customers as quickly as possible is a key part of the success of your business. At Cannon Hill Logistics, we can help with every part of the process, including warehousing, shipping, picking and packing, and returns processing, so you can focus on providing great products to your customers.

We work with a variety of businesses throughout the world, and our convenient location on the East Coast allows us to ship to most of the United States within a few business days.

Let us design a customized logistics solution to meet your needs – Call today for a quote!

6 Industries That Use 3PLs for Improved Efficiency & Profitability

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Third-party logistics companies are designed to help make other businesses more efficient, effective, and profitable. 

They manage inventory, handle picking and packing, and ship products from one location to another as quickly as possible. 

While its use in the retail industry is a fairly foregone conclusion, there are a variety of other industries that can benefit from the services of a 3PL. Here are 6 of those industries:

Medical

In the medical industry, lives are literally on the line when it comes to devices and samples moving from one place to another. Many of these items must be shipped carefully to prevent breakage or spilling, and some need careful temperature and humidity control.

A 3PL has the experience shipping fragile items to avoid damage while maintaining speed of delivery. 

Pharmaceutical

Much like the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry relies on expedited shipping that can also meet the need for protecting the integrity of the product being shipped.

Moving shipments of insulin or other refrigerated medication requires strict temperature control throughout the entire process, and the trucks available to 3PLs provide notification in the event of a problem with the cooling capabilities of the truck.

Manufacturing

Timing is everything in manufacturing, and trying to run production without a key part or ingredient can cause the whole floor to come to a grinding halt, costing precious time and money. 

Partnering with a 3PL experienced in quickly and efficiently moving large amounts of products long distances allows manufacturers to maintain the steady flow of raw materials they need to keep production moving. Using a 3PL also is more cost-effective for most manufacturers, as they don’t have to manage fleets of vehicles and drivers in far-flung locations and instead let the 3PL worry about that.

Seasonal Retail

Year-round retail stores need and utilize 3PLs, but the efficiency and cost-savings afforded by a 3PL is essential to seasonal retail stores.

Each fall, Halloween-themed stores pop up in empty storefronts in nearly every city, bringing in mountains of costumes, makeup, and decorations. But all those items need to be stored somewhere in the off-season.

Thanks to the flexibility provided by 3PL warehousing, these seasonal stores can scale their warehousing space up during the off-season and down when they’ve got storefronts open. A 3PL also eliminates the need for a dedicated fleet of vehicles transporting products to all corners of the country.

Construction

Big construction projects require lots of materials, with many often coming from multiple vendor warehouses.

Utilizing a 3PL for transporting wood, fixtures, and flooring to a job site ensures that things arrive on time, together, and as undamaged as possible. This keeps construction projects on track and under budget, making for happier clients.

Restaurants

Getting the fresh ingredients a restaurant needs to create delicious dishes can be a challenge, especially if a specific item is out of season.

A 3PL works with regional suppliers to get the freshest ingredients and transport them as quickly as possible to preserve quality and flavor. For many food suppliers, that level of service wouldn’t be cost-effective without the use of a 3PL.

East Coast Logistics Service

For more than 30 years, Cannon Hill Logistics has offered customizable logistics and warehousing solutions to businesses across the world. Our facility is located near the Port of Baltimore and Baltimore-Washington International Airport, meaning we have easy access to all the goods your business needs. Call today at (800) 822-4747 for a custom quote!

Client Spotlight: Molly Moorkamp

In the ever-changing fashion industry, one thing’s for certain to designer Molly Moorkamp: Some styles are timeless.

The Missouri native launched her line a few years ago, initially taking only custom commissions.

In late 2018, however, she launched her website and opened access to her designs to anyone who wants to order.

Moorkamp and her brand has been profiled in Vogue, and her designs have been worn by the likes of Ariana Rockefeller and Nicky Hilton.

She offers clean, classic lines in both her dresses and separates, with many comparing her pieces to what would have been seen on stars in Hollywood in the 60s.

Customers can order pieces directly from her website or commission a custom piece.

Moorkamp is a Missouri native who now resides in New York City. She graduated from FIT (the Fashion Institute of Technology) and previously worked for both Ralph Lauren and Oscar de la Renta.

She began her brand with her brother, who runs the business development side of things while she handles design and innovation.

Follow Molly Moorkamp on Instagram to see the designer, and her select grouping of models, show off all her great fashions.

At Cannon Hill Logistics, we’re pleased to help Molly Moorkamp offer high-quality fashion to her customers by providing a variety of logistics services, including warehousing, trade show prep, picking, packing, and shipping, gift wrapping, returns processing, inventory control, and more!

East Coast Warehousing & Logistics

As a modern business, you need your products to get from the warehouse into your customers’ hands – Fast. For more than 35 years, we at Cannon Hill Logistics have been doing just that. It’s our goal to support your business in whatever way necessary, and we offer custom-built service quotes designed to suit your needs. Call today!