Everyone in retail knows that store traffic was down last year and the challenge has continued in 2018.
The good news is that many jewelers were up in sales, but the reasoning is somewhat mixed. Some jewelers had an increase in average retail sale, while others just had fewer “shopping” trips to their stores as opposed to “buying” trips. By this I mean that at least some of the lost traffic may have been from fewer “lookers” who tend to want to get an education about diamonds and jewelry, but can now seemingly get similar information online. And in many cases, the playfulness of shopping and browsing for information at your fingertips, let alone buying in many cases, trumps the hassle of going out to gain the same knowledge.
Take this example: Amazon Prime users often have multiple individual packages delivered to their home each week. The trouble it takes to leave the house, drive to stores (often in unfriendly weather), and not see what you really need to buy can be frustrating and a waste of time. Today’s time-constrained consumers tend to side with the efficiency of shopping from the comfort of their home. Most really don’t make jewelry purchases this way, but they certainly search for information via the web that will help them make buying decisions.
Regardless of the reasoning of why store traffic is down, it is disconcerting to most jewelers who gauge their business by their busyness, which is not always a good thing. At The Gordon Company we try to help jewelers in at least two significant ways. One is to generate abundant new store traffic that leads to fresh new customers for the store. Every sale we run generates 25 – 50% new customer purchases – people who have never shopped in the store before – leaving our retailers with a much larger email and direct mail list to market with in the future. Another is to help dispose of aged and under-performing merchandise that is weighing every jeweler down. We can usually dispose of 50 – 90% of unwanted merchandise, depending on the type of sale we conduct.
So if you need the kind of “lift” I’ve described, we welcome your call. Our goal is to use our expertise gained over many decades to help jewelers thrive.
Sincerely,
Jeff Gordon
