5 Tips For Prosperous Retail Sales

Take a good, tough look at the outside of your store, particularly if you use a rear employee entrance daily. 

FREMONT, CA: There are five keys to success in retail: location, marketing; store layout and appearance; service and assortment, and bundle selling. Let's look at how these can help you establish a prosperous retail operation.

Location
You may not be able to alter the physical location of your store. Still, there are ways to maximize its appearance, whether in a retail strip mall or an industrial park. Also, your store is a specific target for your customers. Take a good, tough look at the outside of your store, particularly if you use a rear employee entrance daily. 

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What first impression does your store make? 
Do you have professional signage that identifies the name and purpose of your store? 
Does it demand a fresh coat of paint or to be professionally cleaned? 
Are you using large windows to display merchandise and entice people with professional signage if you have large windows? 
Are you rotating this merchandise and signing on at least a quarterly basis?

Marketing
Once you've evaluated the outside of your store and made notes on what needs to be enhanced, walk through the front door as though it's your first time. It takes seven feet and seven seconds to give a lasting impression of your store the first time a customer walks in. After that, the store makes the most significant and lasting impression on a customer. 

Retailers focusing more on in-store marketing, design, merchandise presentation, visual displays, and in-store promotions will experience greater sales and profits. It's a fact in the retail world. Are the glass doors and windows clean? How does the carpeting look? Is it worn, frayed, or dirty? Do you have curled entrance mats, creating a trip hazard? People generally look to their right when they walk into a store—what is the first item or product show they will see? What impression does your store give you? 

Most DME stores use either a free-flow or spine layout for their merchandise. A free-flow layout is typically found in bargain stores. Since it forces customers to move throughout the merchandise in narrow aisles, this layout may not contribute to people with mobility products or mobility problems. 

The spine layout contributes to specialty stores such as DME providers with 2,000 to 10,000 square feet of showroom space. As the name implies, the spine layout is based on a single main aisle running from the front to the rear of the store, conveying customers in both directions. Merchandise is shown on both sides of the aisleway, with departments distinguished by different color flooring, walls, display racks, and signage.

Store Layout and Appearance
Merchandising refers to using specific product selection, design, display, packaging, and pricing to stimulate and entice customers to purchase. Plain and simple: Your retail success starts and ends with products. 

The products you exhibit on your showroom floor must serve a specific purpose and target a specific customer base. For each product category, you must display a range of styles, price points, and options— a good, better, best selection will provide an appealing product mix that will fulfill most shoppers' needs and wants. 

A picture is worth a thousand words. 
Second, only the product display. Nothing impacts a customer's purchasing decision more than images of the product in a real-world setting. You don't have to employ models and a professional photographer to achieve this visual in your showroom. 

Ask vendor partners what point of purchase (POP) materials they have available for their customers at little or no cost. Posters, banners, & hang tags can all make a lasting notion of how much better life can be using that particular product. 

Better lighting boosts your bottom line. 
An important but often neglected element in successful store design is lighting. Most stores have fluorescent lighting. Lighting sets a particular mood and can dramatically affect the appearance of certain products, particularly lift chairs. Without the right lighting, lift chair fabric colors can look more diverse in your store than in a person's home, possibly resulting in an unsatisfied customer after delivery. Can customers notice the colors in their true hues? If you have heard the complaint, "It looked so different in the store," you have a lighting issue. 

A wide range of professional lighting products is accessible to produce natural light or lighting, usually found in the home. Spot lighting can also be utilized to highlight certain types of merchandise, but make sure lights will not be glowing in your customers' eyes when trying out the product. 

Color influences shopper behavior. 
Colors can influence a customer's behavior. Rather than simply selecting colors you like, starting with a theme and choosing colors representing that concept can be more effective. Warm colors, like oranges & browns, are inviting and reassuring, while cooler colors, like green and blue, can have a calming effect.

Orange causes people to be happy, and happy customers are more likely to linger longer in your store. Bright colors like yellow & red grab customers' attention, halting them in their tracks before they breeze past a product display. 

Don't be scared to have a lift chair in a bright color, such as pink, on your floor. It's not about the chair's color, which would not likely be ordered for a customer's living room, but about catching attention and highlighting the product. 

Sound engages attention. 
Customers can get out from products or your sales staff, but they can't listen away from the sound as long as they're in your showroom. You can ignore videos on a monitor and store signs, but the sound is always there.

Keeping that in mind, many retailers use music, sounds of nature, or recorded product announcements to strengthen the brand image created by store merchandising and design. It's crucial to make certain the music you are playing or the information you are announcing fits your target demographic. 

Scents affect behavior. 
Have you viewed or noticed how your store smells? That may seem odd, but does your store smell clean or dusty? Does your store have an overwhelming scent of cleaning products that will offend an older customer's more sensitive olfactory senses? Many scientific studies have proven that adding scent to the store environment affects consumer behavior in a set of ways that are good for business, comprising increasing sales; enhancing customer perceptions of your store and product quality; encouraging customers to expend more time in the store and increasing customers' intentions to return to your store. Atmosphere scenting can be done with motion-activated, timed, or user-initiated shelf devices.