Getting your counter ready for a festival rush

Diwali week is when a shop makes a serious part of its year, and also when the counter turns into the bottleneck. Stock you can plan for. The queue is the thing you have to design for.

Work out your fast movers before the rush, not during it

Look at what actually sold last festival season rather than what you remember selling — memory over-weights whatever ran out and forgets whatever sat there. If your billing keeps a record, last year's top-items list is this year's order sheet.

Order those early. Everyone else is ordering the same things from the same suppliers in the same fortnight.

Get the prices in before the crowd

Nothing slows a counter like looking up a rate mid-sale with six people waiting. Anything new for the season — gift packs, sweet boxes, decorative bits — should be in the system with its price before the week starts, not entered while someone waits.

Make your top twenty reachable in one tap

During a rush, the gap between a two-tap sale and a fifteen-second search is the entire queue. Your best-sellers should be sitting on the billing screen, not somewhere you have to hunt for them.

Have a way to park a bill

Someone is halfway through and goes back for one more thing. If your only options are to hold up the queue or cancel the bill, both are bad on a Saturday evening. Being able to park an order and start the next customer is what keeps the line moving.

Decide your udhaar rule now

Festival week is when udhaar balloons — everyone's buying more and it's the worst week to start being firm. Decide the limit before it begins and tell whoever else is on the counter. A rule made on a quiet Tuesday is far easier to hold than a decision made at the counter on a Saturday.

If someone's helping, give them their own login

A cousin or a helper billing during the rush shouldn't need your password, and they don't need to see your purchase cost or your profit. A separate login with limited access handles both at once.

Then write down what happened

The week after is when the useful details are still fresh — what sold out on day two, what you over-ordered, what nobody touched. Write it down, because in eleven months you won't remember any of it.

BazarBook suits this: best-sellers become one-tap tiles on their own, you can hold and park orders while the queue moves, and helpers can have their own logins with cost and profit kept owner-only. (Staff logins are on the Medium plan.)

Try BazarBook free for 7 days before the rush starts.