While Riverdale Mac is booming all year long, back-to-school is one of the busiest times of year for electronics retailers. We spoke with Myles Kesten, President of Riverdale Mac, to learn how he’s getting his three locations ready for back-to-school.
Back-to-school is bigger this year than ever before, with schools and universities returning to in-person operations. How has this excitement translated into your business operations?
“Back to school for us starts in late June with graduation. Comparing this year to last year, our sales are probably about the same, but we’re still way ahead of where we were in the pre-pandemic summer. And back to school has a lot to do with that.”
How did you prepare your back-to-school inventory?
“We look at all of our inventory across all three stores and see where we put things and where we didn’t put them. Lightspeed’s reporting features are critical to our success. We have managers talking across stores taiwan contact number to see who has what, why, and who’s moving things. Until we know what the hottest products are going to be, we’re working to optimize our inventory to get rid of the dusty merchandise.”
What other Lightspeed features or add-ons are you using for back to school?
“Because of the shift in consumer behavior over the last year, contactless shopping is becoming more common. We’re also seeing a lot of our neighborhood customers use our Lightspeed e-commerce site to see what we sell and how much it costs. This helps our customers feel more confident about doing business with us. It also saves us a lot of time answering questions on the phone, like, ‘Do you sell iPads? Do you sell computers?’ They’re now seeing them online.”
Another big change in our business from a year ago to now is that we were able to integrate texting into the management software. We now use Ikeono (integration) with Lightspeed. Since we do a lot of computer repairs, timely reporting and messaging makes us much more reliable to our customers. They really want timely communications and the texting integration with Ikeono has really made a huge difference. You can really see it in our Google reviews; over the last 12 months, we’ve gotten a lot of five-star reviews. The feedback and exposure to the public is absolutely critical to our success.”
It’s amazing to hear that you’re getting such great feedback and reviews! Speaking of Google, have you used Lightspeed to set up Google Local Inventory ads?
“Yes, we’ve used Google’s local inventory ads to make sure our local customers know that we exist and what we do. We’ve invested quite a bit in advertising and promoting those links. For example, someone calls us and asks, ‘Do you have any monitors that fit my computing situation?’ And we’ll send them a URL to our site, which saves us a ton of time on the phone and also gives people a lot more rich information.”