With running a business, you need to ensure you are doing the work to prepare for the future and so we have put together an ecommerce checklist for February to help you make sure you are tracking. While every category can have different needs we designed this ecommerce checklist for February for the more traditional product lines that may ebb and flow throughout the year but peak in the holiday seasons. With that said, if you are seeing an evergreen type of product or a product that peaks in sales outside of the holidays, you can still use the checklists but would need to be working them at different months to prepare.
As February is safely out of the holiday season and you should have by now processed your returns and refunds that fall out from the peak in sales, now is the time to continue to reassess your data. Most online sellers sell in more than one location like their own website, Amazon, eBay and other locations. The reality is that not all avenues for sales are the same and for each business one or a few may outperform the others. Take the time in February to review how you performed in sales across your sales channels. Review the traffic data to your own website to see what is working to bring awareness to your site. Use this information to help put a strategy in place for the upcoming year. Are you putting effort into a marketplace that is not performing? Now is the time to either stop and spend the effort somewhere else or fix what is not working for you on that channel. Are you seeing more sales come from social channels like Facebook than from search channels like Google? Then double down this year on your social presence and spend less on search.
The main take away for your ecommerce checklist for February is that you need to take the time to look at the data from your last sales cycle to see what performed well and which did not. You should do the same for your product lines to review which products sold well and which underperformed. Also reviewing your costs for your products to see where your largest profits were as you may find you truly make more money on items you sell less of just because the profit margins on those are larger than some of the faster selling items. Once you have this data, you need to come up with your plan for the upcoming year of what products you want to invest in, what channels you want to put the effort to list your products on and how you plan to market and sell them. Once you have the data you will be able to easily drive your own ecommerce checklist for February with a clean list of items you need to do to grow your business in the upcoming year.
