End-of-Year Essentials for Your Ecommerce Store

The end of the year sends ecommerce entrepreneurs scrambling to finish everything on their to-do list, but it’s also the perfect opportunity to get your essentials in check. Whether you want to earn more profit, work less, travel more, or reduce your overhead, there’s always a way to accomplish your goals & prepare your store for the new year. 

Here’s an end-of-year essentials guide to ready your online store for the next chapter. 

Launch Last-Minute Sales & Promos

The end of the year means last-minute sales & promotion launches to clear out your inventory & generate more cash flow. Whether you want to delight customers with a New Years’ sale or offer a super secret VIP-only promo, outline your strategy & profit margins. You may decide to let slow-moving products go at a loss to get them out the door while testing new products to see how well they sell. 

Rethink Your Inventory

Before ordering new inventory & experimenting with designs, rethink what you really need to earn more profit. Do you need to try new designs? New products? A little of both? If you’re feeling the strain of your inventory overhead, expand both your product base & creativity with the help of print-on-demand (POD) technology.

CustomCat empowers ecommerce businesses to sell more while working less. Easily connect our plugin to platforms like Shopify & Etsy so you can start earning by selling custom products online. Just upload your designs, & when you make a sale, we produce, fulfill, & take care of all the details before shipping them out on your behalf. We even add a custom shipping label from your business so your customers always see your logo & other info. Best of all, you never have to deal with overhead or excess inventory. 

Learn how to get started with CustomCat here. 

Minimize Your Overhead for the New Year

There’s more to figure out than reducing inventory for a brand new year of business. If you decide to make a bigger push to print-on-demand, you won’t need as much square footage to store or fulfill orders. Reducing packing supplies & time spent fulfilling orders are also part of the benefits of using POD.

Reducing overhead also means streamlining your systems & processes. Rely on apps & time batching to simplify your business & get more done. Pull reports & do your accounting at the same time each week or find an app that tackles abandoned shopping cart reminders that are automatically sent out to your customers. The more you can automate & do in batches, the more productive you’ll become.

You can also hire a Virtual Assistant to take time-consuming tasks off your plate, like bookkeeping or updating your product listings. Make a round-up of everything you do in your business & how much time you spend on each area. Outsource higher-level tasks, like accounting, to the pros & lower-level responsibilities, including cleaning up your inbox, to a Virtual Assistant. You’ll find that you’re more productive (& earning more) when you’re only working in your zone of genius that best serves your ecommerce business.

Generate End of Year Reports & Statements

Did you know that ecommerce growth is expected to continue, reaching 23% by 2025, which translates to a 5.2 percentage point increase in just five years? Make sure your taxes & financials can take any unexpected upturns in sales.

The end of the year is also the time to see how your ecommerce store thrived & where you can make improvements. Start by generating your end-of-year reports & statements from online traffic to financials. You can take this information to your team, whether an SEO assistant or accountant, to assess where your business should head next.

Start Tax Planning with Your Accountant

With your financial reports & statements in hand, ask your accountant about a tax planning call to get ahead of the filing season. They may suggest last-minute contributions or investing in that new computer or software you wanted to boost your business deductions. It’s also wise to ask about how to lower your tax liabilities even lower for the following year & come up with an actionable plan that keeps more profit in your pocket.

Depending on your tax structure & financial goals, your accountant may suggest it’s time to look into specific tax-deferred retirement accounts. For example, there are savings & retirement plans designed for self-employed professionals. 

Identify What Went Wrong (& What Went Right) in Your Ecommerce Business

Now is the time to identify what went wrong (& right) in your business. What goals did you hit—both financially & personally? You may have generated more revenue during Q2 than you thought possible, while Q3 fell short of your plan. Or you may have relied on POD to free up time in your business & work while traveling for three months but ultimately want to globetrot for an entire year.

Hitting goals is nearly impossible if you don’t know what they are. Write out your goals in detail, & note how you think you could realistically accomplish them. Earning another $1,000 in profit is doable, but you need a plan of action, like increasing your SEO or influencer marketing to get in front of your ideal customer base.

Survey Your Audience

Sometimes you’re so close to your business that we don’t know what our audience really thinks about it or what they want. Send out an end-of-year survey to current customers & ask what they liked about your business & what they would like to see more of. Here are a few questions to ask:

• What products do you love to shop for online?
• If you could do anything, what would you do to improve our ecommerce store?
• Where do you think we fell short this year in our business, or how could we improve it?
• What did you like the most about shopping with us this year?

Leave your questions open-ended so customers can get honest & “spill the tea” on all things online shopping.

Celebrate Your Ecommerce Business

You made it through another year of business! Whether it’s your first year running an online store or your tenth, you deserve to celebrate your smallest to biggest wins. Take the time to honor your accomplishments, & cheers to a chapter of success in the new year.

 

What are your end-of-year essentials for your ecommerce store? Let us know by leaving a comment below!