Convenience stores, mini marts and shops carrying a very wide range of goods — clothing shops among them — all run into the same question: how do you lay a shop out so it draws customers in, so they find what they came for easily, and so they decide to pick it up and pay for it in a single trip? In this article we have seven good techniques for laying out the shop and managing stock with a POS for convenience stores and clothing shops. Get it orderly from the shop floor through to the stockroom and the sales and the regulars will follow.
1. Give the shop a theme of its own — and keep it clean
First of all, what a customer will remember about your shop, and what makes them feel like coming back, is a style of fit-out that is unlike anyone else's: recognisable at a glance, easy on the eye, somewhere worth walking into. Fit-out does not only mean the floor colour, the wall colour, or picking shelving and rails that suit the type of goods. It also means having enough light, neither too much nor too little, and caring about how clean the shop is. A clothing shop in particular has to be free of dust and rubbish. The till area, or the retail POS, should be compact and uncluttered. If your shop can keep customers in it for longer, the odds of the goods selling rise with it.
2. Get price labels and product information right
If you went shopping and the price at the till did not match the label on the shelf, you would be annoyed, would you not? So would your customers. So check regularly that price labels match the goods, and keep each item's promotional price up to date, to head off the sort of mistake that makes a shop look unprofessional. Use a POS system for clothing shops and retail shops designed to hold a large number of product records, and managing goods and ringing up sales becomes both easy and accurate.
3. Put the best sellers by the entrance
To give people a better shopping experience, you might put your best sellers, or whichever items you want to shift this month, right by the entrance — and then hang or place them again at other points around the shop. When a customer sees the same item several times, curiosity can set in, and curiosity can turn into wanting it.
4. Put what you most want to sell at eye level
When we walk, we tend to focus on whatever is at eye level. Laying out goods in a retail shop works the same way. If there is a product you particularly want to sell, put it on the shelf where a customer need not stoop or look up, where they can see it without any effort at all — then run the rest of that category down the shelves below it.
5. Keep selling right to the last minute
A customer's shopping journey should not end at the last aisle they walk out of, because you can stretch their buying to the final second by placing goods near the till. Put something expensive alongside small, inexpensive items so the decision is easy — breath mints, tissues, crackers. Sometimes the customer has dropped another item into the basket before your staff have even started ringing up.
Bonus: make customers feel you care by sticking a small note next to whatever you particularly want to sell. A clothing shop wanting to move a newly arrived blazer might write "very Korean for the office". A mini mart might put a note by the fruit juice saying "just checking — had your vitamin C today?"
6. Pair the things people always need into a set
Another layout technique that works is grouping goods that get used together into a set, which improves the odds of selling the whole lot at once. A clothing shop might pair a top with trousers on a mannequin or hang them together, with a label saying the pair costs less than the two separately. An ice cream shop might run a bundle promotion pairing the brownie flavour with vanilla at a special price. And once you have paired them up into a promotion, do not forget to update the price in the POS system for convenience stores, so ringing it up is straightforward.
7. Good stock in the back means a good shop floor out front
Finally, laying the shop floor out in an orderly way depends on the stock behind it being well and smoothly managed. Use a barcode system and a retail POS to check stock and track goods at every stage, from delivery to shelving to the till, and the system updates quantities and statuses in real time. That is the end of the numbers in the system not matching the stock on the shelf.
Looking for a POS solution for retail shops? At Qashier we provide tills and POS systems designed specifically for convenience stores and clothing shops carrying a wide range of goods, helping you keep the shop floor, the stockroom and your promotions all in order in one system — and making the whole experience of shopping with you good enough that customers want to fill the basket and take it to the till.