After you’ve learned how to define your sales reports and use the Sales Overview to download all your data in one place, you’ll also need to have questions you can ask of the data. Reflecting on year over year activity can uncover helpful business insights.
If you’re looking to gain quick insights into your Year Over Year Sales performance, the PicThrive Workspace includes a Year Over Year Sales Count report has just what you need.
Managing Photo Sales Reports within PicThrive
Using the Sales Overview Report can give you a snapshot of any date range. Think beyond just End-of-Year, it could be end-of-season, or a particular window that you want to measure around peek holidays, for example.
A monthly report of your PicThrive sales, using PicThrive POS, can be downloaded. This contains all online sales and any Kiosk sales that use PicThrive as the payment processor.
Operations Managers and Adventure Tour Owners can also view individual sales, or issue refunds using PicThrive. To get a customized demo, start here.
Why analyze your photo sales performance?
As a business owner in a niche market, you may not have a lot of outside intel to help you assess business performance. And when something doesn’t turn out as you expected, you may not be able to identify where the impact came from. We also know as an industry, we’ve faced a lot of extreme changes in the past 3 to 5 years, so it can be hard to separate those uncontrollable factors with the ones you can manage internally.
So here’s 3 ways you can use Year over Year sales performance to think about your business.
1. Benchmark your business against the adventure travel industry as a whole
We’ve aggregated all North America operators together for a quick summary view. We’ve highlighted here how you can see a small increase year over year in July and August, and a slightly larger increase in May.
What can you do with this insight? Look at your own sales by month, in a year over year view. If your increase is lower than these averages, you can dig into those months if you find your results surprising. And for those whose results are higher than these averages, congratulations! You must be proud of your team! And for those months that stand out, maybe there are changes you can make to adjust for the others.
2. Analyze your results by Point of Sale activity
The majority of our operators manage more than one POS. It’s normally a combination of cash and digital payments, online kiosks in-store, as well as the PicThrive online store.
When analyzing sales orders or total sales by POS, you can look for shifts in guest buying behavior. If things aren’t trending up the way you’d like, you can also consider if you need new technology or a different way of managing your workflow from instore to online.
3. Identify Staff Wins!
Commission reporting no doubt already drives you to keep track of your sales reporting by staff member. If you have had the same staff for several years, it could be interesting to look at their year over year successes. And of course, it can be useful for management discussions and updating your training with best practices from your A-list team!
PicThrive provides a few different methods to help generate sales commissions. There are 4 ways to manage your sales data for commission reporting.
- Count of albums sold with the album names.
- Advanced – Raw metric data including sale amount for both instore and online
- PicThrive POS Sales Only – Each sale through PicThrive’s POS, includes the guest email & refunds.
- Instore Sales Only (Slow) – Each instore sale through your POS, but does not include sale amounts.
Photo Sales Tips Every Operator Can Use to Optimize Their Program
The best way to grow a photo and/video sales program can look different depending on how a business operates. We’ve collected several of the best practices from our most successful customers so adventure travel operators of all sizes can find a new idea to grow their photo sales program.
- TV slideshows can automatically display the best shots of the day or the week
- Add value to the guest experience and outsmart the weather with automatically enhanced images
- Adopt a universal naming convention for photo albums so guests can quickly find their personalized album, and your staff are all talking the same language when helping guests.
Adventure Tour Operators can keep learning with PicThrive Training
For more tips and operations advice, follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Customers can keep up with the latest product updates by subscribing to our newsletter. Operators interested to learn more can schedule a personalized demo here.
