Owning and running a store can be difficult at times, and one of the most difficult parts about it can be how to merchandise your stock. You have to consider several factors to try and make it appealing to your customer in order to draw them in to making a purchase or even just looking at certain pieces of stock. Have a look below at some of the things you can do to improve your in-store merchandising.
Have A Look At Your Bestsellers.
If you’re not already it’s a good idea to start keeping a record of which items of your stock are selling the best. This allows you to not only re-order and keep your shelves or racks full but also take advantage and use these items as showcase pieces. By this, we mean that you could use them for things such as displaying them in the store window, in-store displays and locating the items in easy to view places within the store such as eye level or near the shop entrance. Keeping a record of your bestsellers throughout the year could help to give you an indication of what your customers want and help with future stock purchases. It will also help you to decide what stock you should be adding to a possible sale.
Update Your Fixtures and Fittings
If you look inside your store now, how does it look? If you're still using fittings and fixtures from a while ago it may be time to update these. It’s also important to ensure you are using the right equipment to showcase your stock such as displaying clothes items on commercial clothing racks makes much more sense and will look much more appealing than using shelves that are more adequate for food items or household items. You could always invest in having more flashy fixtures for the front of the store that could draw people in from the outside. A good example of this is having a bestseller or complete outfits put together on a fixture at the front of the store if you have a clothing store. Another good way of updating your store is to update the bags that you use to give to customers, try to keep everything to a clear theme throughout.
Staff Training
This may seem like a strange one to include on the list but many many stores fail with their merchandising purely because their staff isn’t trained properly. If they haven’t been shown how the store should look then how can you expect the standards in your store to remain the same or improve? Try putting together a training programme that includes an element of merchandising the stock. You could start off simply by making sure the store is tidy and walked through at the end of each day or familiarising your staff with the location of best sellers so they can make refills if stock is becoming empty. They should be able to make decisions on replacing the stock with alternatives rather than leaving empty spaces.
Do you have any other way to improve the merchandising in-store? Please share them in the comments section below.
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