Four things every new retailer should know

Running a retail store today is harder than it’s ever been before. Firstly, you may have long hours and struggle to make sales, competing every day with the digital world. If you’re just starting in the retail industry this might all seem incredibly intimidating but fear not. There are a few steps you can take to ensure that you start on the right track.

Cash flow will no doubt be your first obstacle, after all, you want to hire excellent employees who will care about your brand. You’ll want to make sure your stock levels are a sufficient level, but you won’t want to do this in a way that compromises your profits. The aim should be to keep your expenses as low as possible.

Streamline Your Products

This might be difficult at first. You’ve just got your shop and you want to fill it with as many wonderful things as you can get your hands on, but stop, breathe, and remember to focus on products that will be worthwhile to your customers. The phrase ‘quality over quantity’ is a winner here. Don’t fall into the trap of filling your store with multitudes of random items that don’t correlate with your brand at all, it will only be confusing to your customers and definitely won’t help your sales.

It’s better to have a reduced product line where you know that all of the products are of a high standard that represent your brand. This will also help you build relationships with vendors, as you can assure them that you won’t be shopping from their competitors and then you’re likely to receive good deals and discounts from them.

Make Your Store Look Great

Many retailers fail to see the benefit of a well-laid-out store, and your products are the accessories in this scenario. Shopping can be stressful at the best of times, so you don’t want to add to that by having a cluttered store that’s difficult to navigate—your customers won’t hang around for long and certainly won’t be in a hurry to return. Your shop shelving is an important factor here, thankfully you can purchase flexible shop shelving from Crown Display that will allow you to maximise your space, plus they’ll make the shelving bespoke to you so everything aligns with your branding.

Create a Social Media-Friendly Environment

Social media today is more important than ever. More and more people are going online to buy their products, but one thing that your physical store has that the online world doesn’t is the ability to try it out. Create an experience for your customers that goes further than the sale.

Get creative with the design of your displays and store, utilise colours and other senses to create something unique that your customers will want to talk about online. If it’s photo-worthy, you might find yourself viral on Instagram, which is only ever a good thing for footfall and sales.

Make Your Store an Immersive Experience

Following on from the need to make your store social media-friendly, really utilise the other senses such as smell, taste and touch where applicable. You want your customers to completely immerse themselves into your store, this way you’ll be certain they won’t forget their experience with you and will surely be back again soon.