Too Busy Doing Fairs to Sell Antiques in Your Shop? Really
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Too Busy Doing Fairs to Sell Antiques? Really?
We came across an antiques dealer from a far-flung corner of England on social media, who has announced that they’ll be doing fairs every week throughout November. The message to customers? Don’t bother calling!
Now, we’re all for getting out there, meeting customers and doing a good antiques fair. They have their place in the trade, and a good fair can be great business.
But a whole month away, doing a fair every week, while effectively telling customers not to bother contacting you? That’s an interesting business strategy!
Here at Top Banana, we’ve always believed that running an antiques business is about making it as easy as possible for people to buy from you, not giving them reasons to go somewhere else.
Customers have questions. They see something they like. They want a price, a photograph, a delivery arranged or perhaps to buy something they spotted last week. They might even have something to sell you.
And what happens if they’re told not to bother calling?
They might just call somebody else.
The beauty of a permanent antiques centre is that business doesn’t have to stop because the dealer is somewhere else. Your stock can still be on display, customers can still browse, and sales can still happen while you’re busy doing something entirely different.
Of course, fairs are part of the antiques trade. But so is being available, keeping customers happy and making sure the opportunities to sell don’t disappear just because you’re out of the building.
Being busy is not the same as being profitable.
And in business, surely the objective is to sell antiques, not simply to spend every weekend loading the van!
Just a thought from the far west. We might be wrong, of course. But we’d rather make it easy for customers to buy from us than tell them not to bother calling.
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