Best Practices

After spending more than four decades in retail, I have become convinced that the businesses that consistently outperform their competitors aren't necessarily the ones with the occasional brilliant marketing idea. More often, they are the businesses that become slightly better at marketing every week. Small improvements compound.

Before launching a holiday campaign, retailers should rehearse what happens when a customer finds a product, places an order and needs help afterward. These nine tests can identify problems while there is still time to fix them.

More traffic feels like the obvious answer when e-commerce sales are soft. For independent retailers, however, increasing ad spend before identifying the real bottleneck can turn a sales problem into a margin problem.

Every retailer loves marketing when the store is busy. Then traffic slows. Suddenly, every marketing expenditure gets examined under a microscope. Good marketing should not collapse when traffic softens.

Price transparency has become the glass storefront every retailer trades behind. You do not need a data team to do better. You need a short list, a fixed routine and rules you set before you look at a single price. Here is how to build all three in an afternoon.

Launching an e-commerce website can get expensive pretty quickly. Rather than just throwing all of your products onto the site all at once, this article offers a step-by-step guide to helping small businesses get started with e-commerce without overspending.

Price is marketing. In fact, the price on a product may communicate more about your store than the advertisement that brought the customer through the door. This article offers tips and tricks for retailers to market through curated pricing strategies.

Retailers have always understood one of the most basic principles of human behavior: People tend to want something a little more when they think they might not be able to get it later. That is scarcity.

Every day, your customers make hundreds of decisions before they ever walk through your front door. By the time they arrive at your store, their brains have already been working overtime. Instead of giving shoppers decision fatigue, this article offers some tips on how to make decisions easier for your customers.

For online retailers, the package that lands on a customer’s doorstep may be the only representation of the store they encounter. This article offers some tips for elevating your brand's packaging.