Flowers for Valentine's Day, bubbly for New Year's, and candy for Halloween are all must-have items. As last-minute customers hunt for holiday necessities, make sure they trust your hours - whether you're open or not - so they don't lose faith in your brand.
Why Set Special Opening Hours?
Even though most holidays occur at the same time each year, many individuals wait until the last minute to shop.
Google searches for "bunny ears" and "chocolate eggs," for example, reach an all-time high around Easter. Some country-specific holiday goods, such as the Swedish Easter soda "pskmust," are nearly never searched for outside of their holiday season, as evidenced by the Google Trends screenshot below:
Source: Google Trends
So if you’re open during the holidays – when many of your competitors might not be – it’s important to let your potential customers know.
But it’s just as important to let your customers know if you aren’t open, because there are few things as frustrating as showing up to a business that claims to be open and finding it closed.
To cope with businesses not updating their store hours, sites that have business listings often show a disclaimer when they display open hours around holiday times. Since Google has the biggest share of business listing traffic in most markets, we’ll use a Google business listing as an example:
Source: Google Maps
In the image on the left, “Christmas Eve might affect these hours” is shown because the business hasn’t supplied Google with any special open hours. Google does this so that a person seeing the info knows the hours might not be accurate.
In the image on the right, the green text saying “Christmas Eve hours” shows that the business has updated their info, so the person seeing that message can feel confident that the hours are accurate.
How to Set Special Opening Hours
There are many networks that display special open hours, and each requires a slightly different process to update them, so it can seem like a major task to set special open hours for all your locations.
The easiest way to set special open hours across many locations is by using a listings management service, like PinMeTo Listings platform, which gives multi-location brands a one-stop dashboard for setting special hours across all their locations. Once you set special opening hours in a listings management service, those changes will then be made across all the networks connected to that service (PinMeTo includes Google, Yelp, Bing, and many other major networks).
We've also heard of multi-location firms employing decentralised methods, such as sharing a spreadsheet between store managers and corporate headquarters and organising who will update what information in which locations. We do not advocate brands who do not centralise their listing administration since they risk setbacks and inefficiencies.
If you host your special opening hours information on your website, you may also share that information with search, social, and mapping networks via an API connection via a listings management platform. If your brand already updates their special opening hours information on their website, PinMeTo can link with your website, allowing you to make changes in one location and have them reflected by the app.
Reviewed: August 25, 2023
