Many jewelry stores we've worked with do not have regular 9am to 5pm or 10am to 6pm store hours. Some have morning and afternoon hours and close for lunch, and many personal jewelers have morning hours some days and afternoon hours on other days. Most of the jewelry stores we know will also be closed on Sunday and Monday every week throughout the year.
Naturally these store hours start to shift during the holiday season. However you change your store hours, you need to make sure your customers know about it.
For starters, make sure you have an easy to find page on your website dedicated to your store hours. Yep, a dedicated page that actually says "Store Hours" as the link/button name in your navigation.
We've also seen some jewelers post their store hours on their home page, which might be a good strategy to change daily, but we don't recommend a long calendar of store hours on your home page because that website real estate is much too important.
If your hours will change daily or weekly, you need to indicate that on your store hours page. Keep it simple for your visitors, remember they will be in a hurry and they just want to know if you are open right now or if you will be tomorrow.
During the non-holiday season, we've seen many jewelry store websites store hours like this:
Tuesday - Friday: 10am - 6pm, Thursday: 10am - 8pm, Saturday: 10am - 4pm, Sunday/Monday: Closed
Closed Saturdays in July and August
Open Mondays 10am - 6pm and Sundays 11am - 5pm in December
Although this might seem easy enough to understand, it is rather confusing, especially considering it first implies Thursday hours are until 6pm, but then further defines Thursday hours until 8pm. It also squeezes in summer time off and holiday extended hours. During a busy December, you shouldn't expect someone to read to the 3rd line of your store hours if they believe they found their answer in the first line.
For the holiday season, this needs to be fixed. It's not that your customers are stupid; they just might get frustrated if you make them think more than a few seconds when you had the power to answer them in 1 second. Since we're suggesting a dedicated Store Hours page, we're also going to recommend that you either create a locally recognizable calendar with dates and store hours shown in each day, or you simply list the days in order.
Here's how we would lay out the above example:
Sunday, November 27: 11am - 5pm
Monday, November 28 - Wednesday, November 30: 10am - 6pm
Thursday, December 1: 10am - 8pm
Friday, December 2: 10am - 6pm
Saturday, December 3: 10am - 4pm
Keep listing the days and dates in order and program your website to remove all date lines as they pass so you can always keep the most current store hours at the top of the list.
If you are sending an email with last minute gift suggestions, you should also include the store hours for each of those final shopping days leading up to Christmas. Make sure to especially indicate your Christmas Eve hours since that falls on a Saturday this year and you will probably have last minute panicked shoppers.
One last suggestion for your store hours page is to always keep it up to date with the latest promotions and product offers. If someone is rushing to view the store hours they are probably a prime candidate to view a special product announcement or gift suggestion. Your store hours page is prime real estate for those announcements.
