It’s time to kick off the summer season and start thinking about what products your eCommerce store needs to be more effective and what products or services you could be selling during warm months.
As reported by the market and Google Shopping, summer can be the slowest month in terms of revenue. During the slower months, we have the opportunity to recharge and take advantage of discounted software or services that will benefit us in the upcoming season.
Whether you are looking for something trend-forward or classic, we have some great ideas to make you stand out from the crowd. Pair that with some effective product descriptions, and you’re set for great exposure on search engines!
So let’s get ready to dive into our top product suggestions inspired by these sunny months!
For this article, we’re looking at a two-part hypothesis:
Hypothesis A: The season of summer is upon us. And aside from enjoying outdoor activities under the summer sun and getting tanned on the beach, this also means that you should take advantage of the summer discounts, especially if you have an eCommerce store.
Hypothesis B: More than 259 million people are choosing to shop online in the US alone (with the number of online shopping decisions steadily increasing). Since your customers likely make up a part of this statistic, it makes sense to lure them in with summer sales, too.
- Summer-Inspired Products You Should Be Buying From Small Businesses
- Summer-Inspired Products You Should Be Selling to Small Businesses
- Supercharge Your eCommerce Store With HostPapa
Summer-Inspired Products You Should Be Buying From Small Businesses
1. Email Marketing Services
The holiday season is just a hop, skip and jump away from the summer months, and everyone knows customers just love to purchase during the holiday season (think of all the Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas sales!).
In fact, holiday sales can account for more than 25% of all retail sales.
If an email design agency offers any discounts on its products, our recommendation would be to not let that offer go. This is because if you wish to tell your customers about your offers during the holiday time, you’ll need email marketing software to keep them in the loop.
Alternatively, if your existing email marketing software is offering any upgrades, and you wish to reach a bigger audience, segment your audience, or jump on certain Google Trends or other such premium offerings – this might be another purchase worth considering.
2. Lead Scoring and Identification Software
Lead identification and scoring models might be another smart investment to purchase. This is mainly because many salespeople and marketers often struggle with finding and targeting the right leads.
If you don’t have a system in place to know which leads are wrong and which ones are right, you might just spend all your money acquiring the wrong leads – and all that time and energy spent by your team members will basically just go down the drain.
The fix to this problem is to build a lead scoring model or to get a lead identification software that can help you understand which leads indicate a high purchase intent in real-time or which leads might get categorized as an ideal customer profile.
Although not a small business, companies like Breadcrumbs offer the software to identify and score leads for free. You should also keep an eye out on their pricing page to find the best summer deals.
3. Smart Summer Suits
Alright, so this suggestion is perhaps not completely in-tune with the directly business-related purchases and investments we have on this list. But smart outfits can be a good payoff for your business, especially if you operate as a solo entrepreneur – and make direct meetings.
As the saying goes, “Your professional style can bring your career to a whole new level.”
Summer fashion isn’t the same as winter fashion or autumn fashion, so it makes sense to invest in quality linen suits, breathable outfits, and lighter colours during summertime.
With that being said, we’re no fashion experts, so you might benefit from finding out the latest trends (depending on the year you’re reading this article) from classics like GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue, or your favourite influencers.
4. Courier Service Deals
Courier services might be another great investment for your business. As we mentioned above, the holiday season is just around the corner when summer ends. If your business sees a larger volume of orders, then it’ll be beneficial for you to negotiate a sweet deal now.
Summer is usually not a “hit” season for most service providers – this is mainly because so many people are out enjoying the summer sun; they don’t really have time and energy to buy something new.
To make up for the loss in business, some companies offer great discounts. And if your courier service company happens to be one of them (for example, they might agree to an extra 20% discount if you sign a year-long contract with them), go ahead and take it, because if you don’t, you might end up regretting it later.
5. Content Marketing Services
Some content marketing agencies offer seasonal discounts. For example, you might get a service bundle package or a year-long retainer package at a good discount.
Getting these services on board will help with lead generation, customer engagement, and making your presence known in front of your audience.
And if you can’t find an agency who’s offering these discounts, your next best bet would be to look for software companies that offer solutions like an AI writer or a free social media management tool so that when your in-house team goes to create marketing campaigns, they’ll have tools that can help them with inspiration, research, and optimization.
6. Courses and/or Books
Every business needs to spend some money on upskilling, and a good course or book can be the bearer of change.
The investment value is most definitely there in books and courses. But if you can get the same value for a discounted price, that’s just the icing on the cake, right?
So, if your favourite books or courses come at a good discount during the summer, grab them!
7. Customer Engagement Platform
Customer engagement platforms, primarily if you work in the B2C industry, can be a game-changer. However, finding a good platform that can keep your customers engaged, improve your sales, and basically end up paying for themselves might be a little tricky.
Peter Michaels, the founder of Yeespy, suggests getting a platform that could offer features like gamification, personalized recommendations, and interactive content to increase customer interaction and conversion rates during the summer season.
8. WordPress Themes and Plugins
WordPress themes and plugins are a great product to invest in during the summer.
With more and more businesses moving online, having a functional and visually appealing website is crucial. It’s not just picking the most affordable web hosting provider you can possibly find. Spending some time finding the most SEO-friendly and bug-free theme is just as important.
WordPress offers a variety of themes and plugins to help businesses customize their websites and improve their online presence. Additionally, you have the option to acquire a wider selection of themes from well-known marketplaces such as ThemeForest. There, you can find various themes and plugins that are compatible with the popular CMS.
As an eCommerce store owner, you can benefit by expanding your WordPress theme or plugin collection. You can even team up with a developer to create custom templates and plugins that cater to specific industries or niches.
Summer-Inspired Products You Should Be Selling to Small Businesses
1. Templates and Bundles
Regardless of whichever kind of business you operate, there’s a high chance you’re doing certain tasks that you’ve become quite good at.
For example, if you’re a content marketer, you might be excellent at creating briefs. Or, if you’re in the sales industry, you might be creating some winning pitches day and night. Or if you’re an email marketer, you know everything about how to perfect an email.
If you have skills like these, you can earn a passive income by templating your processes and selling them on your site as part of a summer sale.
Or, you can also look at creating bundles and selling them to your audience in the summer. For example, a marketer can bundle up courses and templates. Or, a retailer can bundle up their popular products to sell as part of an offer.
2. Activity Planners
It’s no secret that most organizations see a downfall in productivity levels during the summer.
After all, who wants to be trapped inside working when they could be outside experiencing the summer fun? Obviously, this is a cause for concern for many managers and business owners.
That’s a relevant pain point in the summer by selling activity planners that keep productivity levels high.
For example, if you have a list of team-building activities that you use to boost team morale and improve productivity, you can share those on your site!
And if you have concrete numbers on the results these activities can achieve (e.g., productivity at our organization increased by 10% by incorporating Activity A, B, and C), you might have a better chance of converting the customer.
3. Content Planners
Content planners are another thing that you can sell on your website. This product, in particular, might be especially beneficial to smaller teams who don’t have the resources or capacity to create one.
We don’t just mean selling content planners that require your buyers to populate the activities. Instead, we mean selling content planning frameworks that you use in your organization and have seen great results with.
If you plan to sell one, make it more elaborate by posting content plans for different social media channels, ideal posting time, post ideas, and preferred content type and length for each channel (e.g., video, text, images, PDF, etc.).
4. Consultation Calls
If you’ve been in your industry for more than a while (think 5+ years), you have industry experience and topical authority on many industry-relevant topics.
When blessed with such good tidings, it only seems fair to share it with others, and what better way to do that than to share your insights through consultation calls?
These insights can be for other folks trying to make it into your niche or for those who want to pick your brain about a topic in which you have expertise.
But why during the summer, you might ask. Well, with the good weather and reduced sales, you might be in the mood for a conversation and would have more time on hand.
5. Brand Merch
Your brand merch is another thing you can sell during the summer. Sure, you might sell it all year round, but this time of the year might just allow you to pull all the items on sale.
And if you have things like stylish tote bags, water bottles, caps, etc., as part of your brand merch, you might just end up selling them faster than expected.
Oh, and a tip? Consider creating bundles of your brand merch items, too, to make it a better deal for the audience.
Branded merch is the perfect way to run a summer promotional for your eCommerce store without sounding spammy or inauthentic. It’s a win-win.
6. Your Primary Dervices
While this one isn’t a novel idea, because yes, you do sell your primary services all year around, too, you can position them differently during the warm weather.
For example, you can offer discounts, or you can run loyalty programs and give out summer-inspired products in exchange for people who buy the most products from you.
The latter idea will specifically work well if you sell products users find useful for the summer. For instance, summertime is the perfect time for dog owners to be outside with their dogs. You could add a free bug spray safe for pets for clients who spend a certain amount of money at your eCommerce site.
Before You Start Selling
With the summer season in sight, you need to get your store ready to meet customer expectations. For that reason, we have put together some tips to help you stay ahead of the game and stand out from the competition:
- Identify popular summer products, and make sure you have enough stock to meet the expected demand.
- Optimize product descriptions and highlight their relevance to summer activities. Emphasizing their benefits can make them more appealing to customers and encourage sales.
- Have a privacy policy available for all customers to revise to prove your commitment to protecting their data. If you still don’t have a privacy policy, you can use a free online privacy policy generator to get one that’s comprehensive and compliant.
- Make sure you have enough customer support resources in place to meet the high number of customer inquiries.
- Get ready for increased order volumes and make sure your shipping processes are efficient and reliable. One way to do this is by partnering with reputable shipping providers that can manage order deliveries on time.
Supercharge Your eCommerce Store With HostPapa
We may be done with this listicle, but there’s another product you can invest in this summer – and that is web hosting.
For as little as $2.95/month, you have access to 100GB of SSD storage – enough to house your shiny new website project. Paired with a free domain registration, a standard SSL Certificate, and up to ten email addresses HostPapa makes sure you have a complete package to work on.
And if you need more resources, unlimited SSD storage, automated backups and a Wildcard SSL Certificate, all the paths point to Pro. For as low as $5.95 per month (a whopping 70% discount), you have all these features to build your eCommerce store!
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