The May Bank Holiday looks like being a repeat of Easter – not so good weather on Saturday and Sunday leading to sales being down on the previous week when hopes had been for growth, and then better sales on Bank Holiday Monday itself as the weather improved significantly.

Despite the drop from the previous week, customer numbers and transactions held up enough for April’s sales totals in the GTN Bestsellers All Product index to be better than both 2013 and 2014.

If May shows the same improvement through to Whitsun then we could still get to the half-year up on previous years.

Reports are also coming in that garden furniture sales are doing very well this spring. That means turnovers are likely to be up year on year even if total volume sales may be down.

What is your furniture bestseller at the moment? Are your teams cross-selling packages of suites and gazebos together with outdoor lighting and other decorative garden items?

Garden centres supplying EPoS data to GTN Bestsellers certainly appear to be doing so – Gardman Solar Rock Spotlights are the No 1 Garden Product bestseller this week!

GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year...

• Garden Products – down 27%
• Veg-2-Gro Products – up 20%
• Growing Media – up 1%
• All items index – up 5%

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