There’s a conversation I have more often than I’d like. Someone comes to me excited about their new ecommerce idea. They want to sell tents. Or golf clubs. Or pet strollers. They’ve done some research, they’ve found a supplier, and they’re ready to build their store.
Then I ask them about seasonality and they look at me like I just spoke Mandarin.
Most people who are new to selling online think seasonality means weather. They think it means geography. I hear it constantly – “but Chris, in Florida you can camp all year round.” “People in Arizona play golf twelve months a year.” “Pet strollers work in any season in the Southern states.” And every single one of those statements is true.
That’s not what seasonality is.
Walk into a Walmart in February. Find me the big tent display. Find me the wall of golf bags. You won’t, because retail marketing isn’t about when someone can use something. It’s about when they’re psychologically motivated to actually buy it. Those are two completely different things, and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes a new online seller can make.
Retail is seventy percent psychology. If you don’t understand the psychology of when people buy, none of the rest of it matters.
Here’s what actually drives seasonality. As the weather warms up in spring and early summer, something shifts in people’s heads. Like bears coming out of hibernation, they start thinking about being outside. Sunshine, warmer temps, barbeques and beer.
They start getting excited. They start buying outdoorsy things. Tents move. Golf clubs move. Outdoor furniture, camping gear, lawn equipment – all of it moves. Once summer arrives, they already have everything they need for summer. That’s when those sales go spotty. Not because people stop camping or stop playing golf. Not because they can’t use those things. Because the psychological trigger that motivated them to open their wallets has passed for the year.
The people who know this better than anyone are the wholesalers and the manufacturers. Wholesalers won’t stock heavy quantities of outdoor products before or after that window because they’ve been doing this long enough to know the demand isn’t there.
Manufacturers won’t run production on seasonal products outside their window because they’re not going to sit on inventory that won’t move. The entire supply chain is built around consumer psychology, not around what the weather happens to be doing in Tucson.
So when you’re building an ecommerce store and choosing what to sell, you need to ask yourself a hard question. If this product category goes quiet for ten months out of the year, what is your store doing during those months? The answer is very little to nothing. And very little to nothing doesn’t pay the bills.
A well-built online store generates relatively consistent sales throughout the year. That doesn’t mean every month is identical – there will always be peaks and valleys. But you don’t want those peaks and valleys to be “steep and deep”. You want gently rolling hills, not the Rocky Mountains. Never count on a two-month seasonal window to carry you through a twelve-month year. Building a store around highly seasonal products, no matter what their season, isn’t a business. It’s a side hustle with an expiration date.
Understanding seasonality the right way – the way the wholesale industry understands it – is one of the things that separates online sellers who are still around five years later from the ones who burned out after their “season”.
Here are five things you can do right now.
First, before you commit to any product niche, look up its Google Trends data going back to 2004. If you see the same spike every spring and a flatline or a graphic version of the Rocky Mountains between the Holiday Season peaks (when everybody buys everything as gifts), you’re looking at a seasonal product. That’s not a business model. That’s a part-time job with a short contract.
Second, understand that a website has to be tightly focused on a single subject to ever rank in Google (much more about this in my free Ebiz Insider Video Series). That means you can’t solve a seasonality problem by adding unrelated products to the same store. The fix isn’t inside the store. The fix is choosing the right product category before you build the store. A seasonal niche doesn’t become a year-round business because you stuffed other things into it.
Third, talk to your wholesaler about sell-through rates by month. Any wholesaler worth dealing with tracks this. If they can’t or won’t tell you when a product moves and when it sits, find a wholesaler who will. That data is worth more than their entire product catalog.
Fourth, stop confusing “people can use this” with “people are buying this.” Those are two different questions and only one of them keeps your store alive. The buying question is the one that matters. Answer it before you build anything.
Fifth, when you’re evaluating a new product to add to your store, ask yourself what the display looks like at a major retailer in January. Not in May. Not at the peak of the season. In January. If it’s buried in a clearance bin or missing from the floor entirely, you have your answer.
The supply chain already knows when people buy. The manufacturers know. The wholesalers know. The big box retailers know. The only people who don’t know are the ones who haven’t asked the question yet. Now you have.
FREE – get my 
