It doesn’t matter what you call them – it could be shelf warmers, dogs, slow sellers or dust gatherers, even a “buying mistake” – they are doing the same things. They are taking up valuable space and using working capital or, in other words, cash.
Today I received our alcohol license renewal request – £180 to keep in the game. Dead lines will not help pay for this so I printed off a slow sellers report from our EPoS system to see which lines are not earning their space.
The report indicates the number of days since we last sold the particular product. A line drawn across at the one month point revealed that we had 28 different wines that have stopped selling, so then the next question is what to do you with dud lines?
A WHSmith area manager that I worked with under 30 years ago put quite simply what you can do with stock: a) Sell it at a profit, b) sell it at a loss or c) throw/give it away. Still taking this advice, I have set up a promotion to sell the stock off at £3.49 a bottle, with a view to going lower if we need to.
It will certainly be at a loss, but it will get it out of the way to make room for products that we can sell and make a profit on. If a line is not selling, leaving it on the shelf will not make it sell – a retailer needs to take action to move it along. The bonus is that our customers will get a bargain, and that’s a hook for the next offer.
nick shanagher
13/10/2009
NY Times writer Charles Blow reported that 13 million songs were available for sale on line in 2008 and of these 10 million never got a single buyer – 80 per cent of all revenue came from 52,000 songs.
Marketing guru Seth Godin concluded from this that for most people who upload their songs zero sales is the most likely outcome. If you can’t sell one song to 1,000 people, why market it to a million?
Thanks for the prompt Steve.
Tom Searle
26/10/2009
I could not agree more Steve. We identify dead or slow moving products on a regular basis and clear them out. Tobacco products are obviously excepted because the tobacco reps swap them up.
Best example we have are our greetings cards. We support approximately 30 publishers at any one time. Most product is supplied firm sale at much enhanced margins and many are niche publishers. We don’t get selections right all the time and accept that between 5 and 10% of purchases may not sell. Any non-moving or end of range titles are sold off in mixed 10 for £1.99 bags. For these we have designed and printed colourful barcoded packing labels. These packs are very popular but in no way detract from the sales of other cards. In fact, they actually enhance sales.