Know-How Exchange : Strategy

I don't have a link to the study regarding this but seasonal products certainly can lift sales of other products during their respective season, and in many cases the entire year.

More consumers are driven to your place of business, website, catalog, etc. to attain this seasonal product and they become aware of the other products you offer...maybe even buy those others at that time.

Driving more traffic through your store or to your website will increase sales, correct? One of the best ways to attain that additional traffic (awareness) is to offer an in demand seasonal product. I have even witnessed cases where the offering of a small, in demand, seasonal product has boosted sales across the entire year for the simple fact that it increased consumer traffic and awareness to the business.

I always like to see hard data but in this case I simply can't find the link to a study surrounding this...wish I could. I will say that if you're not using Google Analytics or some other form of killer website tracking software...then start! If your website is a resource for your customers then before you offer that seasonal product get something to track your increases in traffic. Then you can compare that to your sales data.

Hope this help,
Zack Pike

Assuming this is not a school project, Zack has some good suggestions. If you are doing general research (as opposed to research using your own data to make a decision for your own business), you might try interviewing store managers and business owners who do offer seasonal products and ask them if sales of their regular products rise when they offer seasonal merchandise. They might not share actual numbers, but they could give you some percentages so you'd have an idea how significant the lift is.

OKay, I have one word to describe this- 'bait'; by using promotions, sales, seasonal clearances, businesses are actually using those products as bait to draw-in customers in the shop.
You would have seen a lot of marketers use FREE stuff these days, be it free reports, ebooks, may be product sample, or free trial of the actual product-this is all part of the bait strategy.
Now, coming on to your actual point, you gotta understand one of the most important concept in product sales of modern times: cross-selling. With e-commerce becoming a widespread thing, cross-sellng and up-selling becomes lot easier. Have you ever shopped from Amazon? They are the masters of the technique. All the time during your shopping process, you are given recommendations: 'people who bought the product you are buying, also bought this'. Thats cross-selling.
Now these two bait ad cross-selling work together very well. You get people to your shop/website using a bait of seasonal sale and once they are here you try your best to sell other items, or at least expose other items to them while they are shopping.