SALES TO ASTONISH #41 - JANUARY 2026
We need to talk about Fridays (and Sundays and Wednesdays…)
I spent a bit of time last year reading about and talking with some people on how AI could help the Unreality Store become more efficient, saving time in certain areas therefore freeing up other parts of the day or week to concentrate on new initiatives or, as I’d also learned at the tail end of last year, looking after myself.
The Shopify platform, has like other systems over the last 18 months, introduced an AI assistant that can help you interrogate data, suggest strategies to grow your business and so on. Given that last year I had had a nagging suspicion that Friday’s were my poorest performing day of the week I decided to ask the AI assistant to provide me with a breakdown of sales by day for 2025. It turns out I was wrong….
According to the data it’s Wednesdays that are actually the quietest day of the week, or certainly they were in 2025, and I’m pretty sure I know why that is. I would think that some of my customer base buy new comics as well as back issues and Tuesday and Wednesday are the new comic release days so having a quiet day in terms of sales on a Wednesday would be expected if people are picking up their subscriptions or standing orders
As for Fridays and Sundays the picture is perhaps a little more as a result of what I call after the ‘Lord Mayor Show Syndrome. I tend to have new stock on the website on a Thursday and a Saturday and it appears that if people don’t buy on those days from the new release stuff that’s on offer then they are unlikely to return on a Friday or a Sunday to make a purchase. I did ask AI why I saw a decrease in website traffic and sales on a Friday in particular and I was surprised by the response as it was something that I hadn’t considered in the five or six years of running the Unreality Store.
The response was centered around the fact that people tend not to buy from an online retailer on a Friday (unless of course you are Amazon and you are able to deliver the product over the weekend) on the basis of they weren’t going to be able to receive their item if they ordered it on a Friday afternoon the following day. As they would be expecting it to be sent out at the beginning of the following. Week, their decision to buy could be deferred into the weekend.
The upshot of investigating traffic and buying trends in relation to my cash flow and workload has crystallised some thoughts I had been having over how I can attempt to get people to visit the website more regularly than just two days a week when there is new stock on offer.
One of the beauties of shopping on eBay or Amazon is that there are always new items on offer every day largely on the basis that eBay is a marketplace and therefore the people that sell on eBay list at different times ,and Amazon has become such a huge platform that with its own workforce and thousands of affiliate sellers there’s always something new on offer every day. Although it is wholly unrealistic for me to want to match the volume of new items everyday on my website to eBay, I do think that I will need to make a transition into listing new items at least five of the seven days in the week just in order to keep traffic and hopefully sales on a more regular footing. Now how I do this remains to be seen and how I tell people there are new items in store without perpetually bombarding their inboxes with emails is something that I am trying to work out. The hope is that by February or March I will have figured out the best way to do this and will be offering new stock daily - anywhere between 20 and 50 items depending on what they are.
I had also asked Gemini to give its opinion on my pricing and also whether running a half price sale as regularly as I had been doing in 2025 was a good thing for my business. I was interested to see the response of what essentially is something that should be impartial and be based on the data it can obtain from the Internet.
interestingly whilst the response might have been somewhat generic in some aspects it pretty much sat on the fence and said that sales can be a bit of a double edged sword (exact words!) and they helped to clear stock but also you end up giving your inventory away at a proportion of its sale price and therefore your margins are smaller.
In terms of my pricing, it had obviously picked up something from either the website or maybe a previous column where I had referenced using eBay as a kind of price anchor and it said my prices were cheap in comparison to those offered on eBay and in some cases perhaps too cheap. Expanding on that it said given I was a business and therefore providing a level of service people would expect from a business rather than an individual selling items on eBay, or other platforms as a kind of side hustle, I should be reflecting that in my pricing. Overall it’s probably nothing I didn’t already know or had assumed would be the case, but sometimes it’s nice to get a second opinion or validation of your thoughts.
January is also that month where I, like many others, try to use it as a springboard to put back into practice some of the good habits that I’ve let drift over the previous year and also to consider what I want the next 12 months and beyond to look like. I’m pretty sure regular readers of this column will know that 2025 at times was a bit of a struggle so my main aim is to make sure that the lessons learned do not repeat themselves in 2026
With that in mind I was delighted to reach the end of January and find that it was better than January 2025 even including a sale on Blue Monday. The sale was busy and titles that had been languishing in back boxes for months, and in some cases years ,managed to see the light of day and find new homes - titles such as Green Lantern Justice League, Thunderbolts, Defenders and more.
Below is a picture of the empty boxes that have accumulated as a result of sales over December and January that I’m pleased to say need refilling and therefore I’m now actively looking to buy comics to add back into my inventory
I’m hoping that 2026 follows in the same vein as January there’s lots of things going on both in the world and on a personal level, but sometimes if you can shut out the noise and concentrate on what matters it gives you a better chance of success.
See you all next month!
Excelsior!
