What Is a Seasonal Business?

Seasonal commodities refer to commodities that have significant seasonal characteristics in production, acquisition, and sales. Such as agricultural and sideline products, summer cool goods, winter goods and so on. Such commodities include seasonal production, seasonal acquisition, and annual sales; there are annual production, annual acquisitions, and seasonal sales; there are seasonal production, seasonal acquisitions, and seasonal sales. In order to ensure the normal supply of seasonal products in the market, enterprises generally purchase and reserve in advance for seasonal commodities according to the characteristics of production and sales, and do a good job of preparing the goods before listing. The purchase and storage of seasonal goods is mainly undertaken by primary and secondary wholesale enterprises in China.

Seasonal goods

There are several types of seasonal products:

Unimodal.

This seasonal product only peaks once in a sales cycle. It can be divided into three types: the first is that the price of the product increases during the peak sales period, and the price decreases during the low period of sales, such as clothing; the second is that the product decreases in price during the peak sales period During the trough period, the price rises, such as vegetables and fruits; the third type is that the product has no change in prices during the peak sales period and the trough period, such as ice cream and cold drinks.

Bimodal type.

This seasonal product reaches peak sales twice in a sales cycle. Such as air conditioners and refrigerators, sales peaks in winter and summer, and sales troughs in spring and autumn. In the process of selling seasonal goods, the best way to expand the strong season and eliminate the effects of the off-season is to accurately plan and grasp the scale of the off-season and peak-season marketing. Balance the relationship between the product during the off-season and peak seasons, especially to determine the relationship between order volume, sales volume and pricing, in order to go rough and reduce the risk of decision-making and maximize profit. Of course, you can also adopt special marketing strategies, such as off-season sales, to mitigate the impact of the off-season.

The characteristics of seasonal goods determine that the pricing of seasonal goods has the following characteristics that are different from general goods:

Seasonal goods cannot be uniformly priced in accordance with marginal cost pricing or average cost pricing. The reason is that the demand for seasonal commodities fluctuates regularly; however, seasonal commodities are not storable and cannot be adjusted according to the supply and demand of inventory. They can only be produced and sold. Therefore, if uniform pricing is based on marginal cost or average cost, then the product may be in short supply during peak periods; otherwise, it may be oversupply during low periods. Therefore, the pricing of seasonal goods must be based on the regular fluctuations in market demand to formulate corresponding multiple prices.

Seasonal commodity pricing behavior is affected by the magnitude of demand fluctuations. The reason is that fluctuations in demand for seasonal goods directly affect the fixed costs of producing goods or providing services, and then the average production cost of goods. Because in the trough period, most of the company's production capacity is idle, but the company must invest in production capacity based on the maximum load; increasing production capacity can meet the market's peak demand, but it also increases fixed investment. Therefore, the smoother the demand fluctuations, the lower the investment in production capacity, and the smaller the price fluctuations of seasonal commodities.