Working Capital

5 Ways to Boost Online Holiday Sales for eCommerce Sellers

The holiday season means big sales for online sellers – but you need to be prepared if you want to make the most of the opportunities. Good planning is the secret to a successful holiday sales season – but you also need enough funds to carry out your plans.

Here are 5 ways that Payoneer Capital Advance can help you to prepare for the holiday season.

1. Get the best deals – early

You want to go into the holiday sales season with your inventory fully stocked and fully optimized. Competition is fierce, so in order to offer the lowest prices to your customers, you want to pay the lowest prices to your suppliers. To get the best deals from your vendor, you should place your order early – during the slow season that comes before the holiday sales. This is when suppliers are happy to have a large order, and are likely to give you a bigger discount.

The trouble is that during the slow sales season is exactly when you could have trouble finding the working capital to pay for your order, even though business will pick up again once the holiday sales start. You don’t want to have to ask your supplier for credit, because then you won’t get the best price deal.  Payoneer’s working capital solution, Capital Advance, can help you get the extra funds you need for your inventory ahead of the holiday season.

2. Boost your store’s visibility

The best time to launch your eCommerce marketing campaign is before the holiday sales begin. You want to increase your social media presence before all the noise of holiday shopping start up. By gradually ramping up your brand visibility in the months before Thanksgiving, you’ll help burn your business into your customers’ consciousness. Research has shown that it can take up to 4 months for a marketing campaign to have the maximum impact on sales – another good reason to begin your holiday sales pitch early.

That means that the period before the holiday sales is the right time to hire a new employee to focus on marketing, or to increase your existing worker’s hours so that he or she has more time to spend curating your Instagram feed and Facebook page. When you take a Capital Advance offer from Payoneer, you can access these crucial funds even if business is slow. This way, you’ll have the time to plan your marketing strategy with a cool head. You’ll be able to draw on vital cash for marketing ahead of time, and then pay it back when your marketing campaign starts bringing in higher sales income.

3. Expand your staff

Hiring new employees in a hurry is a recipe for disaster. Ideally, when the holiday sales season begins you’ll need another pair of hands to help you manage the increased orders. If you wait to hire extra staff until sales pick up and cashflow increases, you’ll find it hard to dedicate the time you need. Under pressure to add another employee now, you could make bad hiring decisions. It also takes time for a new hire to become familiar with your system. You don’t want to be onboarding a new employee at the same time as you’re juggling holiday orders.

When you get take a Payoneer Capital Advance offer, you’ll get the funds instantly and you’ll have time to find the best talent for your small business. You can hire new staff before it’s critical, and allow them to settle in and learn the system so they’re ready for the holiday boom. Because you’re accessing capital during the slow sales season, you’ll be able to spend enough time on the hiring process to feel confident about your choices.

4. Streamline your sales process

Ideally, your order fulfillment process should be perfectly tuned and working at maximum efficiency before the holiday sales surge hits. The busy holiday sales season isn’t the time to overhaul your sales process and find ways to make it more efficient to process orders. If you’re thinking of adding new delivery options, switching fulfillment partners or upgrading your software, you want to do it during a slow business period.

Business equipment and software upgrades can run expensive – do you have the working capital available during times of low sales volume? If you have to wait until your sales increase before you can improve your business system, you’ll miss out on the full benefit of your improvements. Getting a Payoneer Capital Advance allows you to optimize your online seller process without pressure, so that you can enjoy elevated sales and make your repayments when demand kicks in.

5. Discount early – and large

Flash sales and large discount can be very effective ways to draw attention to your online store and boost your holiday sales. They need to be used wisely and at the right time, and you have to make sure that you have enough working capital to cover this discount. Offering a large discount very early in the holiday sales season can boost your online seller profile and help draw customers to return to your store over the next several weeks.

When you use a Payoneer Capital Advance, you can finance this slash in prices without losing valuable working capital to run your business. You’ll be able to keep everything running smoothly even while your cashflow drops a little in response to your special offer, and repay the capital advance when your sales pick up again thanks to all the increased interest in your products.

Prepare your online stores for the holiday season with an instant boost of working capital – learn more here about Payoneer Capital Advance.

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