January 7, 2025 • 28 mins
We are back! Mike shares e-commerce trends from Punchmark's data, focusing on average cart value and sales performance across different months and compares year to year.
Take Aways:
• AOV reveal fluctuations in average cart value from 2021 to 2024
• Notable months for sales performance include April, August, September, and October
• Friday emerges as the top day for e-commerce purchases
• Providing flexible financing options boosts sales potential for retailers
• Diverse payment methods enhance customer convenience and engagement
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Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to In the Loop.
What is up everybody?
Welcome for the first time toSeason 6 of In the Loop.
This is going to be our kickoffepisode and we're going to be
diving into some data and trendssurrounding the Punchmark
e-commerce platform and some ofthe statistics I was able to
(00:22):
pull.
I got a report delivered to meat the beginning of every month
that kind of summarizes theprevious month and what I've
tried my best is to pull acouple of key data points from
the past few years and then seehow 2024 kind of stacked up to
it and then maybe I'll do alittle bit of projecting and
(00:43):
predicting surrounding 2025.
So I think it'll be a reallygood talk.
Let's jump into it.
Maybe a shorter episode.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the
jewelry industry's favoritewebsite platform and digital
growth agency.
Our mission reaches way beyondtechnology.
With decades of experience andlong-lasting industry
relationships, punchmark enablesjewelry businesses to flourish
in any marketplace.
We consider our clients ourfriends, as many of them have
(01:15):
been friends way before becomingclients.
Punchmark's own success comesfrom the fact that we have a
much deeper need and obligationto help our friends succeed.
Whether you're looking forbetter e-commerce performance,
business growth or campaignsthat drive traffic and sales,
punchmark's website andmarketing services were made
just for you.
It's never too late totransform your business and
(01:37):
stitch together your digital andphysical worlds in a way that
achieves tremendous growth andresults.
Schedule a guided demo today atpunchmarkcom.
Slash go.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And now back to the show.
All right, let's jump into thisthing.
So, like I was saying in theintro, I get a report delivered
to me from the Punchmark systemon like day five of every month
and it recaps the previousmonth's e-commerce performance.
(02:11):
And I have been having thisreport delivered to me and I
kind of do a little bit offormatting and finagling so it's
more readable for the last fouryears, ever since November of
2020.
Last four years, ever sinceNovember of 2020.
And some of the things that ittells me, for example, are the
(02:33):
number of clients in our systemwho made at least one sale, and
it's something that we'retracking because we want more
clients to be successful.
Not every client has e-commerceturned on, though we hope more
clients turn it on, but we aretracking clients that
successfully make clients turnit on, but we are tracking
clients that successfully makeone sale.
It's kind of like landing afish.
If you're fish and you go andyou land at least one fish, it
means you have the right bait.
Then it's about getting on thewater more, and that's kind of
(02:55):
how we see e-commerce is.
If you successfully land a fish, that means that you're at
least fishing in the right spotand that there's fish in the
pond.
Another thing that we are alsotracking is the number of sales
in a month.
This can fluctuate and, asyou'll see, I break it down by
year.
One of the things that I've seenis that some years there's more
(03:17):
sales, more number of sales,and those years sometimes have
lower cart values.
That can sometimes have to dowith just fashion trends.
So, for example, in 2023,lab-grown diamonds were kind of
like at its all-time peak valuepeak, I don't know, just buy-now
(03:39):
reasoning, like you get such agreat diamond for pretty cheap
and people were sort of you knowall the consumers were buying
it up because lab grown diamondjewelry was pretty valuable.
So, as a result, people werebuying and checking out with you
know those more often and, as aresult, the average cart value
(04:10):
or average order value, aov, isa lot higher, but there were
fewer checkouts.
So no one metric is inherentlymore important than others.
I guess you could say totalsales dollars is important, but
that's beside the point.
And then some years we seethere's like a really high
number of sales but the averagevalue is a lot lower, and that
can actually be like last year.
Last year we saw a high numberof monthly sales and we saw a
(04:33):
low average value, and that'sbecause people were buying stuff
like fine gold jewelry and,like you know, simple, simple
jewelry online instead of havinga diamond in it.
And if you have a diamond in it, like, it pushes it up a lot
more, so there's no inherentvalue.
That is the end, all be all, Iguess, besides total dollars
(04:57):
transacted, which we do payattention to.
But that can also be lied aboutas well, because sometimes one
of our biggest whale clients youknow we have a couple of
clients that do really well one-commerce and they do sort of
move the needle.
If they have a sale that's likereally successful online, they
(05:17):
might single-handedly move oursystem and skew a lot of our
results, which has happened inthe past One year.
I was looking let me see if Ican go back and see there was
one year oh yes, august 2021.
One of our clients had thissale for, like, diamond
necklaces or something like that, and they moved like a hundred
(05:39):
of them in a month and theaverage value of the diamond
necklace was very high and itskewed all of our results for
that one month because it waslike suddenly there was like all
of these pretty expensivenecklaces that were getting
shipped out, and it reallychanged, kind of like what our
normal, because a lot of timespeople are just selling you know
(06:00):
pendants and you know littlestones and stuff like that and
those get.
They all get weighed the same.
So let's talk about some of thetrends that I noticed from 2024
.
This is e-commerce trends.
So I don't know anything aboutwhat's going on in your store,
but I can tell you what we sawfrom your system.
So the average cart value so Isay cart value because it
(06:23):
delineates order value away fromjust your store, because
sometimes people can conflate itand it's different.
Some people call it AOV, I'mjust calling it average cart
value.
So I'll give these actual, truenumbers so that you can kind of
see how things fluctuate,because things did change kind
of a lot in 2020 to 2024.
(06:46):
2021, obviously the pandemic wasin and we were still getting
stimulus dollars and people werespending their dollars on
luxury goods online and nowadaysyou kind of have to compete
with the travel industry the youknow travel industry.
(07:09):
So in 2022, I'll give you anidea the average cart value was
very high.
It was $554 for an averagecheckout, but we actually had
that was our fewest number ofsales per month.
So like there was high averageorder value but lower number of
sales.
You see how they're kind oflike inversely correlated a lot
(07:29):
of the times.
But in 2024, our average cartvalue was $457.
So one of the things about thissystem and about this episode in
general is a lot of times I'mprobably not going to be saying
true numbers, like it's not inour best interest to share how
many dollars were transacted onour system, because that might
(07:53):
be a lot to some people and itmight be not a lot to a lot of
people.
You know, if you compare itversus a platform that has 2,000
retailers on it, as opposed to,you know, 500 retailers on it,
obviously it should be fourtimes better.
Their numbers should be fourtimes better.
(08:15):
But if ours is 3.5, or theirsis 3.5 times better, maybe our
clients are doing better.
Do you see what I mean?
So the other thing that we'reseeing is I'm noticing that the
number of sales per month stayedvery consistent across all of
the months, with the exceptionof a couple of months.
(08:38):
So I'm going to tell you whatmonths were big and which months
were bad this year as comparedto other, like months.
So I have a system set up whereI compare January 2024 to
January 2023.
And what I'm able to see is soJanuary, february, july, 2024
(09:01):
were down compared to 2023.
The month that was the mostdown and I have been trying to
figure it out, may did a lotworse, did a lot worse, and just
(09:32):
e-commerce wise.
Why is that?
Well, I could speculate, Iwonder sometimes.
If May, you know Mother's Day,it's not as big of a deal.
There wasn't as much of amarketing push.
Also, the economy was like alittle bit weird around,
especially around April, may.
In general, we didn't reallyknow what was going on.
There was a lot of fear withthe dollar.
We didn't know if there wasthat word I hate that word
(09:53):
recession vibe session.
The vibes were down even thoughthere wasn't a recession.
People felt like there might beone.
But when you compare monthsthat were up, here's the months
that were really good for 2024.
The months were April, whichwas actually really strong,
(10:14):
august, september September wasone of our best Septembers that
I've ever tracked and October.
So the months that were up wenotice April, august, september,
october.
So if you notice those monthsin particular August, september,
october.
That's when things kind ofsolidified, I feel like the you
(10:38):
know impending recessions sortof dried up, and you'll notice
that the months that were theworst were at the beginning of
the year.
So do with that information whatyou will.
It's just something I've beenpaying attention to.
So another thing I payattention to is what days of the
week are people buying, and oneof the things that I find
(11:00):
interesting is if you ask people, hey, what day do you think
people buy online, you mightexpect it to be the weekends and
you could be a little bit right.
Saturday is our second best dayfor buying and our best day is
Friday, but Sunday is actuallyour lowest day, which is weird.
(11:22):
I'm basing a lot of thisinformation on the month of
November, because November doeshave a lot of transactions and
it's probably the cleanest setof data I have.
But in order of most populardays, it goes Friday, saturday,
thursday, which is interesting,and then Sunday no one's buying
anything.
(11:42):
They're focused on gettingready for the workday.
I guess I don't know, butthat's just kind of the data I'm
able to pull.
So what I guess I don't fullyunderstand is the average number
of sales per month is prettygood this year, but the average
cart value was down and I wouldprobably have to, you know, if I
(12:07):
was to give a reasoning behindthat.
I think one of the things Iwould say and I'm in, you know
Jewelers, helping Jewelers, andyou know, ijo, exclusive, rjo,
exclusive I was noticing that alot of people were saying that
their months leading up to theholiday seasons were really good
, that they had already beattheir goals for Q2, q3, q4
(12:33):
pretty early on, and then theirDecembers had a really late
start and that they kind of werehaving like a there's a couple
of people freaked out a littlebit about how slow their
December started.
From what I saw online, it endedup, you know, meeting the norm.
I saw this one post I can'tremember, I think it was Travis
(12:56):
Piper.
He said he commented onsomeone's post who was asking
that same question and they werelike hey, like, don't freak out
.
Every year, when I do betterthan average, I always come back
to normal, and when I do worsethan average, I always come back
to normal, and that's what itis.
There's normalization for areason and I thought you know
(13:21):
what?
There's a reason why regressionto the mean is a real thing,
and it's one of like the laws offinances it's you're never as
smart as you think and you'renever as dumb as you think, and
for that we should be grateful.
The other thing I kind of wantto shed a little light on, I
would like to shout out ifthere's one thing I would
(13:41):
recommend people consider forthis year is do you have a good
financing option, both onlineit's very important to have it
online and in store.
And what I like about thesefinancing options, we have a
couple of partners.
So we have Sezzle, which allowsyou to split payments into four
, and you have Affirm, whichallows you to split your
(14:03):
payments, I think, up to 12.
So, for example, if you had a$1,200 ring, you could pay it
over, you know, 12 months, Ithink, for like almost $0 of
interest.
And I believe both of thesefinancing companies pay the
merchant 100% upfront and theyassume the risk.
(14:25):
So what's cool about that is itdoesn't really matter to you.
I don't even think that theytake any percentage or very much
percentage.
What they do is they reap theinterest and they assume the
interest loan.
I would recommend that you lookinto a financing option, and the
reason why is we saw that 8%,just about 8%, of sales were
(14:52):
financed, and this is actuallyjust for November.
It's too hard for me to takeevery single sale across all the
years or anything like that,but to give you a snapshot,
November of 2024, we had about8% of sales were financed.
But what's interesting aboutthat is of our top performing
clients.
(15:13):
So in our top 20 clients whoyou know, if you stack rank them
for dollars transacted therewere 10 of them.
So fully 50% of the top 10 orso had, or of the top 20, had a
(15:34):
form of financing andsuccessfully checked, had
someone check out with it.
And what that's telling me isthat it's not like a make or
break but it does help, and Ithink it's twofold.
A lot of times when you have afinancing option, you are
(15:56):
encouraging people who might beon the fringe of ability to buy
a piece of jewelry to be able tosay yes and successfully
purchase.
So maybe someone that's like,hey, I need a piece of jewelry
for a gift, or I need a gift ingeneral, it's $200.
I'm going to split it out overfour payments.
That's $50 payment for fourmonths and then suddenly it's
(16:17):
within reach.
But also what we're seeing isthat financing is allowing
people to have higher averagecheckout values.
So people that do havefinancing I think that this is
true across all industries theyare typically having higher
checkout values because peopleare able to go from you know,
maybe their budget is $100, butthey can split it out over four
(16:43):
months and now they can afford a$400 piece of jewelry as
opposed to just a $200 piece ofjewelry.
So we're seeing that it allowsthings to flex both ways.
And then the other thing I kindof want to draw some attention
to, and this one I don't evenhave a piece of advice related
to it, but it's just more of anobservation, so do with it what
(17:05):
you will.
Advice related to it, but it'sjust more of an observation, so
do with it what you will.
One thing I see is we havealternative payment methods.
This is this kind of catch-allphrase, so what that means is we
have Amazon Pay, which allowsyou to pay through your Amazon
account.
We have PayPal Pay, whichallows you to pay through PayPal
(17:29):
, which I got.
To be honest, I don't use PayPal, so I don't, it's never been
applicable to me, but somepeople like it.
And then there's Pay byTelephone, and that one I've
always been a little bit iffyabout, because telephone
payments, I've heard, are muchmore likely to be scams.
That's why I always recommendthat you have you know, um,
that's why I always recommendthat you have you know a second
(17:50):
level of credibility behind it,such as a fraud protection
system like, like um, clear saleor eye for fraud.
So I think that havingalternative payment methods is
just a win.
If people want to give youtheir money and, for some reason
, they like PayPal, I think youshould just be able to offer it.
Luckily, the Punchmark systemdoes offer those types of things
(18:12):
and we're working to expand itto include other peoples, but
it's worth mentioning.
I think you're seeing it on alot of different platforms,
especially when it comes toluxury merchandise.
It's worth it to you know.
Offer other payment systems.
Okay, we're going to take aquick break and then I'm going
(18:34):
to sort of wrap it up and see ifI can put a bow on this.
I think the main things I wantyou guys to focus on going into
this year and what I can helpyou with.
Okay, stay with me.
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(19:19):
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Learn more at punchmarkcomslash email dash marketing.
Again, that's punchmarkcomslash email dash marketing.
And now back to the show.
Okay, everybody, this is goingto be a little bit of a shorter
(19:41):
episode anyway, so I do kind ofwant to wrap this up.
But the one thing I want tosort of encourage and the one
data point that I've beentracking the most and I'm
looking at my data points acrossall months I have things split
out over the course of the lastfour years and I have them all
side by side in this bar chartAcross the 12 months.
(20:06):
I will say that it looks likeit's about eight out of 12.
We set records for the mostclients who made at least one
sale.
So what that means is we've hadthe most clients who
successfully caught a fish, andI think that what I really want
(20:30):
to encourage people for thisyear, going into 2025, it's okay
to try, man, and I think thatit may be it's partially my
fault.
I think that a lot of people gointo this and they're like I'm
going to do a million dollarsonline or I'm going to do
whatever that number is for you,I'm going to do $100,000 online
, or they set these goals forthemselves and I sometimes am
(20:54):
like you know what?
Just let's just get startedfirst and then we can decide
what is actually, you know, abenchmark of success.
If I was to make a, you know,make a stance for something or
make a projection, I wouldrecommend that you do make some
goals, but make them smart, andwe talked about this in my
(21:17):
second to last episode of theseason with Hope, about making
them manageable, attainable,time-related.
So I would recommend making agoal for yourself and if you've
never even turned on e-commerce,now would be a great time.
That's a great first goal Turnon e-commerce, do the steps it
takes to turn on e-commerce.
(21:38):
If you have a punchmark website,it's very easy, but if you have
another website, it's probablyvery easy too, and I would say
just go out there and try tomake your first sale and if
that's already done, no problem.
Let's try to make 10 sales in amonth.
And I always laugh, is thatthose 10 sales?
(22:01):
If you had like a random youknow day in the off month, we'll
just say, like in March, andyou have a kind of a slow month
or whatever, and then on like arandom Tuesday, you're out and
you come in at you know fouro'clock to say what's up at your
store and hey, how was the day?
Oh, you won't believe it,someone came in and bought 10
(22:24):
pieces of jewelry.
Suddenly, it's like, holysmokes, pretty, pretty decent
day, you know, and not a sleepyday.
It's like, well, someone camein and that's a pretty decent
purchase amount.
I always think that we sometimesare always chasing bigger
numbers, and I think that havingthem be attainable when you're
just getting started would beawesome.
(22:45):
The other thing I wouldrecommend is, if you haven't
done this yet, let's take oursteps forward and start being
more strategic.
So, what kind of jewelry do youhave on your store?
I recommend you have yourentire inventory on there.
If you have the edge, youshould be syncing it to your
(23:05):
website.
That is just.
It's kind of goes without saying, and what that'll allow people
to do is more than ever, isbuying jewelry because they
started online, put it in theirwishlist, show up to the store
and then say, hey, I want to buythis.
What's really too bad aboutthis and I promise I won't
complain about this too often iswe don't get the credit for
(23:26):
that sale, even though peoplegive us credit, but we don't get
the credit credit for it,because we don't get to say, oh,
that was an e-commerce sale,even if it started online.
But at the same time that iswhat the omni-channel experience
is about is maybe they go instore and they see a piece of
(23:47):
jewelry and then they go homeand they hem and haw or whatever
, and then they buy it.
That's one way, but the otherway, more often, is they go and
they window shop from yourwebsite and then they find two
pieces, or maybe they let theirsignificant other pick out two
pieces and they put it into awish list and they go into the
(24:07):
store and they say, hey, do youhave these pieces?
And please have those pieces,because then it's just like,
yeah, we got them and, you know,maybe we can even do a little
bit better.
We offer a service that reallypushes it over the edge.
That's what I think is prettyattainable and reasonable and
time-based.
(24:29):
The other thing I think ispretty interesting there are a
couple of months in here thatkind of stink.
One thing that we see fore-commerce is that the good
season, the up, is not alwayssyncing up when the store's good
season is.
(24:49):
For example, I think that I'mlooking at my metrics March kind
of stinks.
July not usually the best, butwhat's funny is like a couple of
these are pretty good Februaryobviously, valentine's Day
pretty good, august also prettygood, and it's kind of like we
(25:11):
should just be trying to takeadvantage of some of these
random not random some of thesemonths.
And again, if someone came intoyour store, if you sold 20
pieces of jewelry online in amonth and you might think, oh,
that's not that much, and thenif someone was to go into your
store and buy 20 pieces ofjewelry, or 20 different people
(25:34):
was to go in and buy one pieceof jewelry all over the course
of like one day, suddenly you'dbe like, ah, not bad, you know
that, decent, decent, littlerush.
I think that that is what theperspective we should have on
this thing is.
Is it just kind of like, when Ilisten, when I, you know, post
podcast episodes sometimes I'mchasing bigger numbers it's like
(25:56):
, oh, only this many peoplelisten to this episode.
But then it's when I go to theclient workshop and I see what
you know, 40 people is like.
It's like holy smokes.
You mean, you know, 200 peoplelisten to this.
This conversation I had.
And imagine having 200 peoplein the same room.
(26:19):
It would be intimidating andscary.
And I think that that's thekind of perspective Sometimes
when you go online, bring itinto a realistic, real life
version, it kind of it'll freakyou out a little bit and I think
that that's kind of fun.
All right, I think that withthat we'll probably end our
first episode.
(26:39):
Good luck everybody with thisyear.
If you don't have e-commerce on, just try it out.
And if you do have e-commerce,let's try to get you your first
sale.
And if you have a first sale,we'll try to get you an average
of three sales every month.
That'd be pretty cool.
And if you already are doingthat and you're crushing it and
you got this thing figured out,let's try to be more strategic.
(27:00):
Let's try to set things up forin-store sales and let's set
things up for, you know,strategic posts on your social
media and, if that's the case,maybe you try to get into our
100K, 200k, 500k clubs wherewe'll send you a plaque for
doing well.
Okay, everybody, I think that'swhere I'm going to end the
(27:22):
episode.
Thanks so much for listening.
This episode was brought to youby Punchmark and produced and
hosted by me, michael Burfo.
This episode was edited by PaulSuarez with music by Ross
Cockrum.
Don't forget to rate thepodcast on Spotify and Apple
Podcasts and leave us feedbackon punchmarkcom slash loop.
That's L-O-U-P-E.
(27:43):
We'll be back next week,tuesday, with another episode.
Cheers, bye, thank you.
Welcome to In the Loop.
What is up everybody?
Welcome for the first time toSeason 6 of In the Loop.
This is going to be our kickoffepisode and we're going to be
diving into some data and trendssurrounding the Punchmark
e-commerce platform and some ofthe statistics I was able to
(00:22):
pull.
I got a report delivered to meat the beginning of every month
that kind of summarizes theprevious month and what I've
tried my best is to pull acouple of key data points from
the past few years and then seehow 2024 kind of stacked up to
it and then maybe I'll do alittle bit of projecting and
(00:43):
predicting surrounding 2025.
So I think it'll be a reallygood talk.
Let's jump into it.
Maybe a shorter episode.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the
jewelry industry's favoritewebsite platform and digital
growth agency.
Our mission reaches way beyondtechnology.
With decades of experience andlong-lasting industry
relationships, punchmark enablesjewelry businesses to flourish
in any marketplace.
We consider our clients ourfriends, as many of them have
(01:15):
been friends way before becomingclients.
Punchmark's own success comesfrom the fact that we have a
much deeper need and obligationto help our friends succeed.
Whether you're looking forbetter e-commerce performance,
business growth or campaignsthat drive traffic and sales,
punchmark's website andmarketing services were made
just for you.
It's never too late totransform your business and
(01:37):
stitch together your digital andphysical worlds in a way that
achieves tremendous growth andresults.
Schedule a guided demo today atpunchmarkcom.
Slash go.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And now back to the show.
All right, let's jump into thisthing.
So, like I was saying in theintro, I get a report delivered
to me from the Punchmark systemon like day five of every month
and it recaps the previousmonth's e-commerce performance.
(02:11):
And I have been having thisreport delivered to me and I
kind of do a little bit offormatting and finagling so it's
more readable for the last fouryears, ever since November of
2020.
Last four years, ever sinceNovember of 2020.
And some of the things that ittells me, for example, are the
(02:33):
number of clients in our systemwho made at least one sale, and
it's something that we'retracking because we want more
clients to be successful.
Not every client has e-commerceturned on, though we hope more
clients turn it on, but we aretracking clients that
successfully make clients turnit on, but we are tracking
clients that successfully makeone sale.
It's kind of like landing afish.
If you're fish and you go andyou land at least one fish, it
means you have the right bait.
Then it's about getting on thewater more, and that's kind of
(02:55):
how we see e-commerce is.
If you successfully land a fish, that means that you're at
least fishing in the right spotand that there's fish in the
pond.
Another thing that we are alsotracking is the number of sales
in a month.
This can fluctuate and, asyou'll see, I break it down by
year.
One of the things that I've seenis that some years there's more
(03:17):
sales, more number of sales,and those years sometimes have
lower cart values.
That can sometimes have to dowith just fashion trends.
So, for example, in 2023,lab-grown diamonds were kind of
like at its all-time peak valuepeak, I don't know, just buy-now
(03:39):
reasoning, like you get such agreat diamond for pretty cheap
and people were sort of you knowall the consumers were buying
it up because lab grown diamondjewelry was pretty valuable.
So, as a result, people werebuying and checking out with you
know those more often and, as aresult, the average cart value
(04:10):
or average order value, aov, isa lot higher, but there were
fewer checkouts.
So no one metric is inherentlymore important than others.
I guess you could say totalsales dollars is important, but
that's beside the point.
And then some years we seethere's like a really high
number of sales but the averagevalue is a lot lower, and that
can actually be like last year.
Last year we saw a high numberof monthly sales and we saw a
(04:33):
low average value, and that'sbecause people were buying stuff
like fine gold jewelry and,like you know, simple, simple
jewelry online instead of havinga diamond in it.
And if you have a diamond in it, like, it pushes it up a lot
more, so there's no inherentvalue.
That is the end, all be all, Iguess, besides total dollars
(04:57):
transacted, which we do payattention to.
But that can also be lied aboutas well, because sometimes one
of our biggest whale clients youknow we have a couple of
clients that do really well one-commerce and they do sort of
move the needle.
If they have a sale that's likereally successful online, they
(05:17):
might single-handedly move oursystem and skew a lot of our
results, which has happened inthe past One year.
I was looking let me see if Ican go back and see there was
one year oh yes, august 2021.
One of our clients had thissale for, like, diamond
necklaces or something like that, and they moved like a hundred
(05:39):
of them in a month and theaverage value of the diamond
necklace was very high and itskewed all of our results for
that one month because it waslike suddenly there was like all
of these pretty expensivenecklaces that were getting
shipped out, and it reallychanged, kind of like what our
normal, because a lot of timespeople are just selling you know
(06:00):
pendants and you know littlestones and stuff like that and
those get.
They all get weighed the same.
So let's talk about some of thetrends that I noticed from 2024
.
This is e-commerce trends.
So I don't know anything aboutwhat's going on in your store,
but I can tell you what we sawfrom your system.
So the average cart value so Isay cart value because it
(06:23):
delineates order value away fromjust your store, because
sometimes people can conflate itand it's different.
Some people call it AOV, I'mjust calling it average cart
value.
So I'll give these actual, truenumbers so that you can kind of
see how things fluctuate,because things did change kind
of a lot in 2020 to 2024.
(06:46):
2021, obviously the pandemic wasin and we were still getting
stimulus dollars and people werespending their dollars on
luxury goods online and nowadaysyou kind of have to compete
with the travel industry the youknow travel industry.
(07:09):
So in 2022, I'll give you anidea the average cart value was
very high.
It was $554 for an averagecheckout, but we actually had
that was our fewest number ofsales per month.
So like there was high averageorder value but lower number of
sales.
You see how they're kind oflike inversely correlated a lot
(07:29):
of the times.
But in 2024, our average cartvalue was $457.
So one of the things about thissystem and about this episode in
general is a lot of times I'mprobably not going to be saying
true numbers, like it's not inour best interest to share how
many dollars were transacted onour system, because that might
(07:53):
be a lot to some people and itmight be not a lot to a lot of
people.
You know, if you compare itversus a platform that has 2,000
retailers on it, as opposed to,you know, 500 retailers on it,
obviously it should be fourtimes better.
Their numbers should be fourtimes better.
(08:15):
But if ours is 3.5, or theirsis 3.5 times better, maybe our
clients are doing better.
Do you see what I mean?
So the other thing that we'reseeing is I'm noticing that the
number of sales per month stayedvery consistent across all of
the months, with the exceptionof a couple of months.
(08:38):
So I'm going to tell you whatmonths were big and which months
were bad this year as comparedto other, like months.
So I have a system set up whereI compare January 2024 to
January 2023.
And what I'm able to see is soJanuary, february, july, 2024
(09:01):
were down compared to 2023.
The month that was the mostdown and I have been trying to
figure it out, may did a lotworse, did a lot worse, and just
(09:32):
e-commerce wise.
Why is that?
Well, I could speculate, Iwonder sometimes.
If May, you know Mother's Day,it's not as big of a deal.
There wasn't as much of amarketing push.
Also, the economy was like alittle bit weird around,
especially around April, may.
In general, we didn't reallyknow what was going on.
There was a lot of fear withthe dollar.
We didn't know if there wasthat word I hate that word
(09:53):
recession vibe session.
The vibes were down even thoughthere wasn't a recession.
People felt like there might beone.
But when you compare monthsthat were up, here's the months
that were really good for 2024.
The months were April, whichwas actually really strong,
(10:14):
august, september September wasone of our best Septembers that
I've ever tracked and October.
So the months that were up wenotice April, august, september,
october.
So if you notice those monthsin particular August, september,
october.
That's when things kind ofsolidified, I feel like the you
(10:38):
know impending recessions sortof dried up, and you'll notice
that the months that were theworst were at the beginning of
the year.
So do with that information whatyou will.
It's just something I've beenpaying attention to.
So another thing I payattention to is what days of the
week are people buying, and oneof the things that I find
(11:00):
interesting is if you ask people, hey, what day do you think
people buy online, you mightexpect it to be the weekends and
you could be a little bit right.
Saturday is our second best dayfor buying and our best day is
Friday, but Sunday is actuallyour lowest day, which is weird.
(11:22):
I'm basing a lot of thisinformation on the month of
November, because November doeshave a lot of transactions and
it's probably the cleanest setof data I have.
But in order of most populardays, it goes Friday, saturday,
thursday, which is interesting,and then Sunday no one's buying
anything.
(11:42):
They're focused on gettingready for the workday.
I guess I don't know, butthat's just kind of the data I'm
able to pull.
So what I guess I don't fullyunderstand is the average number
of sales per month is prettygood this year, but the average
cart value was down and I wouldprobably have to, you know, if I
(12:07):
was to give a reasoning behindthat.
I think one of the things Iwould say and I'm in, you know
Jewelers, helping Jewelers, andyou know, ijo, exclusive, rjo,
exclusive I was noticing that alot of people were saying that
their months leading up to theholiday seasons were really good
, that they had already beattheir goals for Q2, q3, q4
(12:33):
pretty early on, and then theirDecembers had a really late
start and that they kind of werehaving like a there's a couple
of people freaked out a littlebit about how slow their
December started.
From what I saw online, it endedup, you know, meeting the norm.
I saw this one post I can'tremember, I think it was Travis
(12:56):
Piper.
He said he commented onsomeone's post who was asking
that same question and they werelike hey, like, don't freak out
.
Every year, when I do betterthan average, I always come back
to normal, and when I do worsethan average, I always come back
to normal, and that's what itis.
There's normalization for areason and I thought you know
(13:21):
what?
There's a reason why regressionto the mean is a real thing,
and it's one of like the laws offinances it's you're never as
smart as you think and you'renever as dumb as you think, and
for that we should be grateful.
The other thing I kind of wantto shed a little light on, I
would like to shout out ifthere's one thing I would
(13:41):
recommend people consider forthis year is do you have a good
financing option, both onlineit's very important to have it
online and in store.
And what I like about thesefinancing options, we have a
couple of partners.
So we have Sezzle, which allowsyou to split payments into four
, and you have Affirm, whichallows you to split your
(14:03):
payments, I think, up to 12.
So, for example, if you had a$1,200 ring, you could pay it
over, you know, 12 months, Ithink, for like almost $0 of
interest.
And I believe both of thesefinancing companies pay the
merchant 100% upfront and theyassume the risk.
(14:25):
So what's cool about that is itdoesn't really matter to you.
I don't even think that theytake any percentage or very much
percentage.
What they do is they reap theinterest and they assume the
interest loan.
I would recommend that you lookinto a financing option, and the
reason why is we saw that 8%,just about 8%, of sales were
(14:52):
financed, and this is actuallyjust for November.
It's too hard for me to takeevery single sale across all the
years or anything like that,but to give you a snapshot,
November of 2024, we had about8% of sales were financed.
But what's interesting aboutthat is of our top performing
clients.
(15:13):
So in our top 20 clients whoyou know, if you stack rank them
for dollars transacted therewere 10 of them.
So fully 50% of the top 10 orso had, or of the top 20, had a
(15:34):
form of financing andsuccessfully checked, had
someone check out with it.
And what that's telling me isthat it's not like a make or
break but it does help, and Ithink it's twofold.
A lot of times when you have afinancing option, you are
(15:56):
encouraging people who might beon the fringe of ability to buy
a piece of jewelry to be able tosay yes and successfully
purchase.
So maybe someone that's like,hey, I need a piece of jewelry
for a gift, or I need a gift ingeneral, it's $200.
I'm going to split it out overfour payments.
That's $50 payment for fourmonths and then suddenly it's
(16:17):
within reach.
But also what we're seeing isthat financing is allowing
people to have higher averagecheckout values.
So people that do havefinancing I think that this is
true across all industries theyare typically having higher
checkout values because peopleare able to go from you know,
maybe their budget is $100, butthey can split it out over four
(16:43):
months and now they can afford a$400 piece of jewelry as
opposed to just a $200 piece ofjewelry.
So we're seeing that it allowsthings to flex both ways.
And then the other thing I kindof want to draw some attention
to, and this one I don't evenhave a piece of advice related
to it, but it's just more of anobservation, so do with it what
(17:05):
you will.
Advice related to it, but it'sjust more of an observation, so
do with it what you will.
One thing I see is we havealternative payment methods.
This is this kind of catch-allphrase, so what that means is we
have Amazon Pay, which allowsyou to pay through your Amazon
account.
We have PayPal Pay, whichallows you to pay through PayPal
(17:29):
, which I got.
To be honest, I don't use PayPal, so I don't, it's never been
applicable to me, but somepeople like it.
And then there's Pay byTelephone, and that one I've
always been a little bit iffyabout, because telephone
payments, I've heard, are muchmore likely to be scams.
That's why I always recommendthat you have you know, um,
that's why I always recommendthat you have you know a second
(17:50):
level of credibility behind it,such as a fraud protection
system like, like um, clear saleor eye for fraud.
So I think that havingalternative payment methods is
just a win.
If people want to give youtheir money and, for some reason
, they like PayPal, I think youshould just be able to offer it.
Luckily, the Punchmark systemdoes offer those types of things
(18:12):
and we're working to expand itto include other peoples, but
it's worth mentioning.
I think you're seeing it on alot of different platforms,
especially when it comes toluxury merchandise.
It's worth it to you know.
Offer other payment systems.
Okay, we're going to take aquick break and then I'm going
(18:34):
to sort of wrap it up and see ifI can put a bow on this.
I think the main things I wantyou guys to focus on going into
this year and what I can helpyou with.
Okay, stay with me.
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(19:19):
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Again, that's punchmarkcomslash email dash marketing.
And now back to the show.
Okay, everybody, this is goingto be a little bit of a shorter
(19:41):
episode anyway, so I do kind ofwant to wrap this up.
But the one thing I want tosort of encourage and the one
data point that I've beentracking the most and I'm
looking at my data points acrossall months I have things split
out over the course of the lastfour years and I have them all
side by side in this bar chartAcross the 12 months.
(20:06):
I will say that it looks likeit's about eight out of 12.
We set records for the mostclients who made at least one
sale.
So what that means is we've hadthe most clients who
successfully caught a fish, andI think that what I really want
(20:30):
to encourage people for thisyear, going into 2025, it's okay
to try, man, and I think thatit may be it's partially my
fault.
I think that a lot of people gointo this and they're like I'm
going to do a million dollarsonline or I'm going to do
whatever that number is for you,I'm going to do $100,000 online
, or they set these goals forthemselves and I sometimes am
(20:54):
like you know what?
Just let's just get startedfirst and then we can decide
what is actually, you know, abenchmark of success.
If I was to make a, you know,make a stance for something or
make a projection, I wouldrecommend that you do make some
goals, but make them smart, andwe talked about this in my
(21:17):
second to last episode of theseason with Hope, about making
them manageable, attainable,time-related.
So I would recommend making agoal for yourself and if you've
never even turned on e-commerce,now would be a great time.
That's a great first goal Turnon e-commerce, do the steps it
takes to turn on e-commerce.
(21:38):
If you have a punchmark website,it's very easy, but if you have
another website, it's probablyvery easy too, and I would say
just go out there and try tomake your first sale and if
that's already done, no problem.
Let's try to make 10 sales in amonth.
And I always laugh, is thatthose 10 sales?
(22:01):
If you had like a random youknow day in the off month, we'll
just say, like in March, andyou have a kind of a slow month
or whatever, and then on like arandom Tuesday, you're out and
you come in at you know fouro'clock to say what's up at your
store and hey, how was the day?
Oh, you won't believe it,someone came in and bought 10
(22:24):
pieces of jewelry.
Suddenly, it's like, holysmokes, pretty, pretty decent
day, you know, and not a sleepyday.
It's like, well, someone camein and that's a pretty decent
purchase amount.
I always think that we sometimesare always chasing bigger
numbers, and I think that havingthem be attainable when you're
just getting started would beawesome.
(22:45):
The other thing I wouldrecommend is, if you haven't
done this yet, let's take oursteps forward and start being
more strategic.
So, what kind of jewelry do youhave on your store?
I recommend you have yourentire inventory on there.
If you have the edge, youshould be syncing it to your
(23:05):
website.
That is just.
It's kind of goes without saying, and what that'll allow people
to do is more than ever, isbuying jewelry because they
started online, put it in theirwishlist, show up to the store
and then say, hey, I want to buythis.
What's really too bad aboutthis and I promise I won't
complain about this too often iswe don't get the credit for
(23:26):
that sale, even though peoplegive us credit, but we don't get
the credit credit for it,because we don't get to say, oh,
that was an e-commerce sale,even if it started online.
But at the same time that iswhat the omni-channel experience
is about is maybe they go instore and they see a piece of
(23:47):
jewelry and then they go homeand they hem and haw or whatever
, and then they buy it.
That's one way, but the otherway, more often, is they go and
they window shop from yourwebsite and then they find two
pieces, or maybe they let theirsignificant other pick out two
pieces and they put it into awish list and they go into the
(24:07):
store and they say, hey, do youhave these pieces?
And please have those pieces,because then it's just like,
yeah, we got them and, you know,maybe we can even do a little
bit better.
We offer a service that reallypushes it over the edge.
That's what I think is prettyattainable and reasonable and
time-based.
(24:29):
The other thing I think ispretty interesting there are a
couple of months in here thatkind of stink.
One thing that we see fore-commerce is that the good
season, the up, is not alwayssyncing up when the store's good
season is.
(24:49):
For example, I think that I'mlooking at my metrics March kind
of stinks.
July not usually the best, butwhat's funny is like a couple of
these are pretty good Februaryobviously, valentine's Day
pretty good, august also prettygood, and it's kind of like we
(25:11):
should just be trying to takeadvantage of some of these
random not random some of thesemonths.
And again, if someone came intoyour store, if you sold 20
pieces of jewelry online in amonth and you might think, oh,
that's not that much, and thenif someone was to go into your
store and buy 20 pieces ofjewelry, or 20 different people
(25:34):
was to go in and buy one pieceof jewelry all over the course
of like one day, suddenly you'dbe like, ah, not bad, you know
that, decent, decent, littlerush.
I think that that is what theperspective we should have on
this thing is.
Is it just kind of like, when Ilisten, when I, you know, post
podcast episodes sometimes I'mchasing bigger numbers it's like
(25:56):
, oh, only this many peoplelisten to this episode.
But then it's when I go to theclient workshop and I see what
you know, 40 people is like.
It's like holy smokes.
You mean, you know, 200 peoplelisten to this.
This conversation I had.
And imagine having 200 peoplein the same room.
(26:19):
It would be intimidating andscary.
And I think that that's thekind of perspective Sometimes
when you go online, bring itinto a realistic, real life
version, it kind of it'll freakyou out a little bit and I think
that that's kind of fun.
All right, I think that withthat we'll probably end our
first episode.
(26:39):
Good luck everybody with thisyear.
If you don't have e-commerce on, just try it out.
And if you do have e-commerce,let's try to get you your first
sale.
And if you have a first sale,we'll try to get you an average
of three sales every month.
That'd be pretty cool.
And if you already are doingthat and you're crushing it and
you got this thing figured out,let's try to be more strategic.
(27:00):
Let's try to set things up forin-store sales and let's set
things up for, you know,strategic posts on your social
media and, if that's the case,maybe you try to get into our
100K, 200k, 500k clubs wherewe'll send you a plaque for
doing well.
Okay, everybody, I think that'swhere I'm going to end the
(27:22):
episode.
Thanks so much for listening.
This episode was brought to youby Punchmark and produced and
hosted by me, michael Burfo.
This episode was edited by PaulSuarez with music by Ross
Cockrum.
Don't forget to rate thepodcast on Spotify and Apple
Podcasts and leave us feedbackon punchmarkcom slash loop.
That's L-O-U-P-E.
(27:43):
We'll be back next week,tuesday, with another episode.
Cheers, bye, thank you.
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