The setup that always made sense
There’s a version of event trading that many equestrian retailers built somewhere between three and seven years ago and haven’t really changed since: a card reader running independently of the shop system, the website taken offline to avoid selling stock that was already on the stand, stock tallied manually and reconciled when they got back.
It held up, it got the job done, and because it got the job done it never became a priority to revisit.
A setup like that doesn’t necessarily fail; rather it costs in ways that are easy to overlook, especially when the show itself has gone well.
The hidden costs of show season
When you’ve packed up the tent, loaded leftover stock into the van and set off home, it’s natural to think a good trading weekend is exactly that. It’s only later (if at all) you realise the various costs that don’t show up obviously against your bottom line.
The thing that lands first is the admin time. Getting stock figures back to a place you trust after a busy weekend away from the shop always takes longer than it should, and it’s rarely the only thing on your Monday morning to-do list.
And then there’s the website taken offline while you were in the field; leaving you invisible to customers who aren’t at the show, but who are searching for the products you sell. It’s a cautious move that feels practical: you can’t afford to risk selling something at the stand that may sell simultaneously online.
The third cost is even trickier to measure, and arguably the most useful to address. Without clean event data sitting in the same system as everything else, it’s difficult to tally up if the show was worth attending in the first place.
What a more connected setup changes
When event sales run through the same system as the shop and the website, the stock picture stays accurate throughout the weekend, without having to take your site offline.
By the time you make it back home you already have all the data you need to draw solid conclusions about how worthwhile that particular show was, and if it deserves its spot in next year’s events calendar.
When the information is all in one place, you can weigh up what moved and what didn’t against the full cost of attending; without wasting time manually counting stock or guessing at the online sales you missed from the field.
It’s the difference between running event trading as a separate operation that needs stitching back into the business afterwards, and having it feed the business in real time.
Planning a successful show season
Show season has months left to run, and if the setup you’re taking into the field is the same one you built several years ago, there’s still time to change it before the calendar fills up completely.
Here’s what a smoother setup looks like:
- Your website stays live throughout the show. Because your stand and your ecommerce are drawing from the same stock record, every sale at the stand is immediately reflected online. There’s no risk of overselling, and no reason to go dark to the customers who aren’t in the field with you.
- Stock reconciliation stops being a job. Rather than returning to a manual tally that needs cross-referencing with the shop system, your stock figures are accurate in real time. What sold at the show is already accounted for before the van is unpacked.
- You leave with the data to make better decisions. Revenue, margin, which lines moved and which sat untouched; all of it sits in the same reporting view as the rest of your business. Working out whether a show was genuinely profitable, and whether it earns its place next year, becomes a straightforward calculation rather than an educated guess.
Ready to make this year’s event calendar your most profitable yet?
Fill in the form below and a member of our team will walk you through how to refresh your event setup before show season ends.
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