Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne talks about the weekend's bad weather and how it affected his store's conversion rate.
 
Well, the last couple of days have certainly proven that even the holiday shopping spirit is no match for Mother Nature as the elements saw fit to drop a foot of snow throughout most of the Midwest, forcing the cancellation of the town's major Christmas event, the Lights Fantastic parade.  Typically, the Lights Fantastic parade brings thousands of people into downtown for most of the day as they jockey to get good viewing spots for the spectacle.  This gives stores in the area bordering the parade the opportunity to entice them inside prior to the parade with specials or, more often as in our case, hot cider or tea and cookies, as well as the opportunity to use the bathroom.  The Lights Fantastic Parade typically increases a December Saturday sales by about a third with minimal effort on our part.
 
Unfortunately this year, instead of sidewalks covered with spectators, we have sidewalks covered with snow and ice, pushing sales down to the level of a non-December weekend.  Looking for a silver lining in all this, at least it pushed our conversion rate to about 90%, higher than our normal 70% but not particularly surprising given the weather.
 
The conversion rate is simply what percentage of customers that come into a store that make a purchase.  Naturally this is a very important figure to a retailer because customers are the life's blood of a store.  When they come in, we want them to buy, so conversion rate is important as it measures the likelihood that a customer coming into a store will make a purchase.  With weather such as we had the past few days, I do not expect customers coming to the store to drop by on impulse.  The amount of snow still on the sidewalk and roads creates a bit of an impediment for them to get here.  Ergo, I don't expect them to come in unless they plan to make a purchase, leading to the high conversion rate.  In fact, it rather surprised me when two couples left the store without making a purchase, since they had to make a special trip to get here.
 
As a destination store, game (and comic) stores have a big advantage over mass merchants and mall specialty stores (as well as many online retailers) in terms of the conversion rate.  Unless you are located in a high traffic location, such as in a mall, your customers have made a special effort to visit your store and thus enter predisposed to purchase.  Once they are in the store, however, it depends on two things, store layout and store staff, to convert them from potential to actual customer.  The key to giving those two things the opportunity to work, most research shows, is to keep them in the store as long as possible.  Both chain stores and casinos know this.  They next time you are in either, take a look around for something you won't see: a clock.  Not having a clock on display helps remove the customer's immediate sense of time.  Lacking that sense of time, the customer stays longer, losing more money at the slots, or in the store’s case, browsing and buying more, always a good outcome for us.
 
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.