Pre-booking hedge: Sky Jewellery

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Jewellery retailers begin prepping early for the mega sales season that kicks off after Diwali each year. The run-up to Diwali is peppered with auspicious jewellery-buying occasions, such as Pushya Nakshatra and Dhanteras. By the time the festive sales are over, retailers have done considerable business — but all of it is just a warm-up for the year’s most lucrative period: the wedding season.

Dubai-based retailer Sky Jewellery managed to make festive jewellery shopping even more attractive for its customers this year. It chose a brilliant stratagem: a 1 per cent pre-booking rate for Diwali jewellery. With a minimal pre-booking payment, the company announced, a customer could confirm and block a piece of jewellery.

Not only was this offer convenient for customers, it helped protect Sky Jewellery’s inventory against gold rate fluctuations. The customer’s purchase price was calculated from the gold rate on the day of the pre-booking payment. The customer’s price was thereby insulated from any rise in gold rates. What’s more, if gold rates fell, the jeweller ensured that the price of its inventory would decrease progressively. Sky Jewellery also introduced an express delivery system for Dhanteras.

Online jewellery retailers have the great advantage of not needing to roll out any seasonal consumer-friendly offers. Shoppers today are quite comfortable purchasing expensive luxuries like jewellery online. E-retailers already provide flexible payment options and streamlined delivery systems, and can more easily monitor customer buying trends. Hence, offline line players do need to roll out more such offers to cope up with online sales.

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