Business owners and entrepreneurs that manage eCommerce Stores in 2024 are wearing many hats and managing just as many things. Challenges such as slow selling products, marketing new or lesser-known products, capturing the attention of customers and managing your wider brand are some of the many things that must be routinely managed and well executed in-order to find success online. While there are many ways to solve these problems, the art of discounting and promoting these discounts (running promotions) can serve as part of a wider solution. The discussion will be ended with a short aside on the size or nature of the discount offered.


Discounted Product Promotions can help with:

1.      Liquidating inventory with slower turn-over times.

2.      Highlighting lesser-known products.

3.      Highlighting new inventory items.

4.      Align your business with a holiday/season/cultural/significant event.

5.      Capture the immediate attention of customers for a brief period.

 

1.      Liquidating inventory with slower turn-over times

Whether it is an old product that has become obsolete in many of its typical applications, but still has some use cases, or an item that you previously ordered a large volume of, dealing with slower-moving or long turnover time inventory is a challenge of any product business. By using discounted product promotions, you will have a reason to highlight this product, meaning that those that already order the product may choose to purchase an additional one (taking advantage of the price discount). Other existing customers who previously haven’t used the product will be tempted to put it within their order cart, as it has been available for some time they would have already had some knowledge of its existence as part of your brand/store. For implementing the above, we recommend using the Announcement Banner feature in dazzly to ensure this is easily highlighted and readily available for all website visitors. Additionally, you can pair this with a well-written article (via Articles within the Content menu in dazzly) to give another organic SEO boost through this new content you have created/are promoting temporarily.

 

2.      Highlighting lesser-known products

When your business is established, or at least with a few months trading history, your hero product and other products will start to have a consistent presence if you were to break-down your sales dollars by product sold (sales-mix). Naturally, as your product range expands, there will be some products that are a lesser part of that sales mix, and others that consistently rank highly and become a consistent staple of your offering (accompanying the hero product(s)). Although this is a good sign of success, in-order to have a successful online store, it is crucial to also pay attention to the products that are getting less sales volume than the others. Although they may not make-up a large part of your revenue, and may never be your star product, their presence among your range should be highlighted to ensure that there is still turn-over of this product (see previous point) but also that it is still relevant to your customers/offering, which may even lead to you considering discontinuing the product. In-order to test this, you can draw attention to this product by offering a discount product promotion. This will not only highlight the product, but with a discounted price, will allow customers and newcomers alike to give you feedback (sales volume) on whether this product is still relevant, whether they’re still willing to give it a try, and subsequently whether it is still worth you continuing to stock it. In the fore-mentioned case of a product that may be obsolete in its main application, take the time to highlight the alternative application in-case there is any chance of a lack of solutions in that space.

 

3.      Highlighting new inventory items

Similarly to the above case, instead of it being a long-standing item of inventory, you may find yourself with the opportunity to stock an entirely new product, and there will likely be some uncertainty to the sell-through potential of this product. Further still, knowing that you will have to invest monies into advertising to get the discussions flowing online, it may be valuable to order a smaller volume of this new inventory and then run a discounted product promotion to verify that the product will even sell-through in the first place. Highlighting a new piece of inventory brings attention to it and with a limited-time discount price offer, you can very quickly get a test sample on sell-through, even if you break-even on this exercise, it is worth the risk to save you the trouble and expense of slower selling inventory that “never really took off”. You don’t want to be the person living off 6 months of discount diet drinks that didn’t sell through.

 

4.      Align your business with a holiday/season/cultural/significant value/event

With a relevant product, you can use a discounted product promotion to align your business with a particular event. Recently it was Chinese New Year, and many businesses displayed temporary re-branding to incorporate the colour red and various aspects of Chinese culture associated with luck, prosperity, health, and more values that we all share. With a relevant product and some design work, you can convey the genuine values that your business and brand share with a relevant holiday, which will resonate with your customers, and perhaps result in further exposure/coverage for the offer if there are aggregators or people on the look-out to share such offers among their friends. Who doesn’t love a discount?

 

5.      Capture the immediate attention of customers for a brief period

No matter whether it is the holiday season or the slow season, by offering a significant discount on products, and putting the word out on social media, enables you to get an immediate slice of the attention of those on your contact lists, those of your friends, and the wider communities they are a part of, just by enlisting their support to comment, like and generally promote your offering to their groups of friends. The power of social is strong, but the power of a good discount is timeless, utilise your friends, WhatsApp groups, and any other social skills you to get the word out there. The ability of dazzly to manage everything website-related from your mobile phone makes the process either than ever!


To summarise, successful online businesses use discounted product promotions to solve a range of problems that they encounter in managing inventory and brand. We hope that the above examples were helpful in learning more about the challenges of running an ecommerce store and we hope that you take the time to check-out dazzly and learn more about how we’re solving these problems for every-day people and businesses. We end this discussion with some short questions and answers.

 

How much discount should I offer in a discount product promotion?

Consider the cost of receiving the product, the cost of packaging, and any shipping (full landed cost) for the product to get to you, and then consider your terms and typical conditions surrounding shipping and delivery. By comparing this to your selling price, it will give you a good idea of your margins on each product sale, and therefore, taking aside overheads and other non-immediately attributable costs, how much money you can potentially discount or offer as a limited-time discount. Again, as per the previous discussion, it depends on your goal and reason for the promotion. Another benefit of having a good grasp on your product margins is that you can then factor in other things such as your time, which may or may not be significant on a per-product basis (with home arts/crafts made products it certainly can be!). Dazzly offers multiple options for structuring your discount (further information below).

 

How to implement a discount product promotion?

Using dazzly, under the Ecommerce menu, select “Promotions”.


Screenshot of the Promotions option within the dazzly Ecommerce menu.


Click the ‘New Promo’ button.

You can then enter the Type of promotion, such as: Free Shipping, Percentage or Fixed. Each type comes with the corresponding values that you would need to run the promotion such as value of discount, % (to discount), as well as minimum spend, start/end dates and promotion code for customers to activate.


Fixed discount Promotion creation screen.


Percentage discount Promotion creation screen.


Free shipping Promotion creation screen.


Where can I build an online store?

We recommend the eCommerce Store 2 template by dazzly. With dazzly, all your initial website content will be generated by our helpful AI based off your business/industry. From there, with no-coding required, you can easily add products, pictures, and everything you need to showcase your business to the world. Our helpful team are ready to support you, but the most important thing is that you sign-up now, at no cost at all, and give the easiest way to build a website a try!

Build a website on dazzly’s eCommerce Store 2 template now!