At first thought, it is a marketing conundrum.  The only thing people love more than a bargain is to get something for nothing.   Yet if you hold too many sales, people will wait for items to go on sale before they buy.  The answer is to find ways to cut customers a  deal without hurting yourself long term.

One way to do this is to have an introductory sale.  This works especially well if you are introducing a new line of jewelry or have the option reordering  more merchandise.    The intro sale should  run for a short time, 1 month maximum.  It's purpose is to encourage people to look closely at your new line,  to get them to buy sooner rather than later, to quickly recapture some of your investment and to let you know which items, if any, should be replenished.

You can also offer closeout prices on slow selling, overstocked items.   Since this sale is only held on a small range of your products,  people will not wait for an item to go close out.  Sales will increase for close out items even if the markdown is minimal.

A third option for a niche sale is for special purchase items.  The Bead Peddler routinely buys manufacturer's overruns and sells them on a special  blow out page.  Many people will add a few blow out items to their order.  I often wondered if my special purchase items would sell as well if they weren't marked special purchase.  The answer is no.  We once got in some furnace wound beads that were mistakenly shipped to us.  We put them on the blow outs page.  They flew off the website.  I went back to the manufacturer and negotiated a deal to allow me to stock a whole line of furnace wounds at the same price that I paid for the blow outs.  The furnace wound do not sell nearly as well as when they were blow outs even though they are priced the same.

Sales are not your only 'bargain' options.  Incentives can be given for large purchases.  But if you give an incentive, try to be consistent.  For example, if you offer a free pair of earrings with every purchase over 100.00  make it part of your company's policy.  Once customers get used to the special, they'll feel cheated without it.  And, yes, it does give you an edge over the competition.  One of the Bead Peddler's competitors has included the cost of shipping into their items and gives free shipping for all orders over 100.00.  I have lost a few sales to this policy even though the overall price is lower on orders from my site.  It's not worth going through and raising all my prices to accommodate free shipping, but who knows how I'd work shipping prices if I were starting from scratch. 

Freebees can also be used to encourage repeat business.  Customer loyalty cards are one good method.  The cards should be given to customers free.  Your business cards will work just fine.  Every time a customer makes a purchase over x amount of dollars, you can mark the back of the business card.  When the customer receives so many marks, they can receive a small gift or shopper dollars towards their next purchase.  I give customers quantity discounts on my website.  It would be impossible to calculate these discounts in my new storefront.  Therefore, I have designed a 2 sided business card.  The front has all my contact info.  The back has lines drawn on it.  Every time a customer buys 10.00 worth of beads at my store, I mark the back of the card with the date  and my initials.  If they spend 20.00, they get two marks, etc.  If they get 10 marks (have spent at least 100 with me) within a year, they get 10.00 worth of beads free.  I just opened my storefront last week so it's too soon to tell if it will be an incentive, but I'm betting on it.