By Simon Le Grand, Senior Director of Marketing, APAC at Lightspeed

After another year with its economic pressures, peak season – starting with the Black Friday sales phenomenon and culminating in Boxing Day sales – was highly anticipated for an Australian retail industry eager to end the year on a high. For strategic retailers, the quieter weeks and months after Cyber Weekend, Christmas and the Boxing Day sales are an opportune time to analyse and evaluate their peak-season performance to refine and improve strategies and operations for 2025. While there’s many questions to ask and metrics to analyse, some important ones revolve around customers, inventory and discounts.

Should I prioritise acquisition or retention?

When it comes to acquiring and retaining customers, some retailers may focus on one at the expense of the other. The answer, really, should be both. Every interaction with every shopper – whether a first-time customer or a loyal one – is important, particularly when economic pressures persist. Retailers can analyse their data to understand metrics like their new customer acquisition rates, customer lifetime value and repeat purchase rates.

While both acquisition and retention are drivers of revenue, retailers should endeavour to improve both. For example, if a retailer has high acquisition rates but low retention, it might be a sign to improve their follow-up marketing or implement programs like loyalty schemes. According to Lightspeed research, 39% of consumers say loyalty programs are critical in their shopping decisions, which suggests these programs can impact both customer acquisition and retention.

How should I manage and optimise my inventory?

In many instances, a retailers’ business model is quite simple: to sell as much inventory, with as healthy a margin as possible, to shoppers. However, from supply chain disruption to unpredictable demand or overstocking, moving and managing stock isn’t always easy. Did retailers have enough stock of their popular products to meet the demand? Did they have excess stock of certain products that didn’t perform as well? Were they able to generate sales of high-margin items?

Retailers must not only understand what inventory is in-demand and what is selling slowly, but where stock is located too. Research from Lightspeed found that 45% of consumers research an item online but then proceed to buy it in a physical store, while 42% of surveyed shoppers indicate that the ability to check in-store stock availability online before making their in-store visit is very important or critical to them when shopping.

Agile inventory models, utilising advanced demand forecasting systems, can be helpful when it comes to managing and optimising inventory. For example – using POS data from a platform like Lightspeed – to compare online and in-store sales, can help guide what inventory is kept where, and allow greater visibility in real-time. Going into 2025, retailers can prioritise data-driven inventory management, focusing on agility to react to customer trends and demand as it happens. Inventory optimisation isn’t just about avoiding excess – it’s about demand anticipation and strategic placement to minimise risk and maximise sales, whether online, in-store or both.

Should I avoid big-discount culture?

In 2024, we saw  merchants extend their promotional activities  beyond only the Black Friday weekend to throughout the month of November, according to an analysis by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). But while discounts evidently help attract the attention of consumers, retailers should be careful and considered in how they approach discounts, to ensure they’re still enticing customers, without eroding their margins too importantly, diminishing the perceived value of their products or creating an expectation for perpetually low prices.

For certain retailers, leveraging value-added services or unique product offerings might be more sustainable. This can look like premium experiences, loyalty rewards, enhanced customer service, or even things like repairs, alterations, personalisation or other services, which many consumers appreciate today, according to Lightspeed research. While discounts still do have value, retailers can use the weeks ahead to think about how they can provide value for their customers beyond discounts alone.

Whether peak season generated a huge sales spike or struggled to get going, the new year is the perfect time for businesses to evaluate performance and assess new opportunities going into 2025. Whether it’s launching a loyalty program to boost retention, being more data-driven and strategic in their approach to discounts, or better managing their inventory and fulfillment, peak season can be used by retailers as a learning curve to help drive success for the weeks and months ahead.