Business It All Adds Up
GDA Staff -- Gifts and Dec, 12/1/2011 2:00:00 AM
66 % | of small business owners don't use Direct Deposit for payroll, according to a survey by NACHA - The Electronic Payments Association.
30 % | of those that do use Direct Deposit for Payroll have 100% employee participation.
18 % | of businesses with revenue between $10 and $20 million do not use direct deposit at all, even though it saves about 11.5 cents per payment.
96 | is the average number of vendors that a small business pays by check each month. To see how much paper you'd save by switching to direct deposit, visit www.payitgreen.org/ business/dir Dep Calculator. aspx.
ACCORDING TO SAGEWORKS, A FINANCIAL INFORMATION COMPANY:
• Stationery and gift stores are among the least profitable kinds of retailers over the last 12 months, with a pretax profit margin of 1.57%. That's less than half the 4% profit margin for privately held stores overall.
• However all is not lost: more profitable categories of retail overlap increasingly with today's gift marketplace offerings, including jewelry and luggage, at 5.94%; clothing, at 5.04%; specialty food, at 4.92%, and personal care, at 4.45%.
RELAXED SHOPPERS ARE WILLING TO PAY UP TO 15% MORE FOR GOODS THAN LESS-RELAXED ONES, ACCORDING TO A RECENT STUDY IN THE JOURNAL OF MARKETING RESEARCH. In a simulated auction, relaxed participants bid about 11% higher for a digital camera than less-relaxed participants, whose bids were closer to the product's estimated market price on online auction sites. Researchers theorize that relaxed consumers think about the value of products at a more abstract level.
70% of shoppers leave.
About 70% of American adults would avoid shopping at a retail store if they encountered empty shelves there, a survey by Harris Interactive on behalf of Galleria Retail Technology Solutions found. So stocking up on inventory may save in the long run, since, according to Galleria, it costs five times more to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Harris also found that women are more likely than men to say empty shelves would cause them to avoid shopping at a given store.
And empty shelves aren't the only dealbreaker: Nearly two out of three U.S. adults also said they would shun a retail store because of long checkout lines, or if their desired items were out of stock or difficult to find.
> NEARLY HALF of small retailers (49%) say they are more optimistic about holiday sales this year versus 2010, according to a survey from Manta, an online small business community. Some 30% are as optimistic as last year, and 21% are less so.
> FOUR IN TEN SAY THEY already have better sales than they had last year. (More than a third say sales are flat and about a quarter say they're down.)
> SOME 75% say they'll use social media tools to promote their holiday offerings this year. Other online and email marketing tied for second place, at 60%, supplanting traditional offline methods such as direct mail (22%), advertising (27%) and flyers (32%). Only 8% were using mobile and 14%, daily deals.
> HOWEVER, 86% don't plan to hire additional holiday staff. Of those who don't, half say it's because they don't need the help and one-third because they cannot afford any additional payroll expenses.
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