The golden rules you must follow on your shop shelves

How many times have you been told that magic does not exist?

How many times have you heard that there are no tricks and that those who sell them to you are selling nothing but smoke and mirrors?

How many times have you believed it?

As all of us, many times, right?

Take up this challenge and you will see how true it is that if you follow the golden rules for your shop shelves, the results will seem like magic, the good kind of magic.

Try to implement these strategies, accept the challenge and, trust me, you will believe in magic again because, definitely, the results you will achieve will make you question each and every one of those truths that you have been hearing for so long. Knowing that, if you believed them, they could slow down or kill the profitability of your sales room.

But you’re not willing to let that happen, what you’re looking for is to increase the profitability of your showroom.

Here are the golden rules and the rest is up to you.

Go for it.

• First: Get to know your client, offer closeness, advice, good customer care; because you can spend all the years you want and different trends can happen, but what will never, never change is the way to build customer loyalty by offering them that pleasant and special feeling of being understood, supported and cared for in an exclusive way.

If you are a retailer, you are well aware of the effects of a good customer service, together, of course, with a good product offer in terms of range, trend and stock, all of which is made visible in the right measure.

Don’t take unnecessary risks, don’t innovate right now, at this point in the design of your sales strategy, it is neither necessary nor the time.

Rely on marketing and merchandising studies, on the valuable experience of your colleagues and even take a look at the competition – knowing your rival will make you stronger.

You may not like the rules, and we understand that, some of them you will be able to get around without taking unnecessary risks, but not in the case of the golden rules of the shelves, no, those are not open to discussion.

Take our word for it and use just the right amount of experimentation.

• Second: follow to the dot the directions for displaying each product on its proper shelf. Placing the most popular products above the head is basic reasoning: the most popular products are the ones that the customer is going to look for, even if it takes a little extra effort. And they will not hesitate to use that effort to follow the reasonable decision of bending down to access those products that you, driven by the elementary logic of avoiding accidents and facilitating loading, will have placed at a rather low height.

For the eye level shelf, bring out your most seductive instinct and choose the products that, in each area of your showroom, attract the most customers, as is the case, for example, with the most well-known brands.

The shelf located at hand level makes it easy for you and also easy for the customer.

For you, because it is the right product whose sale gives you a higher profit margin. For the customer because, with hardly any effort, he gets the product he was looking for.

Simple and equidistant, everyone wins.

And what should be reserved for the lower shelf, apart from the space dedicated to bulky or heavy products?

The new discoveries, the surprises! The bargains!

It allows for a touch of feigned listlessness, a perfectly controlled disorder, an informal but “smart” look.

Many of your customers will thank you so much for it that they will never leave you because you have unique material and you offer those products that are hard to find in other salerooms, which are so organised, measured and ordered.

• Third: stay informed about your sector, be aware of trends and changes in consumer habits.

For example, and speaking of assigning each product to its shelf, it is very convenient that you are very clear that, according to several studies, raising a product from a lower level to the hand level increases its sales by up to 78%. And lowering it reduces them by 33%.

Keep this in mind when doing the numbers. These are very high percentages, which translates into money to be won or lost.

Mathematics, right?

Well, the third golden rule is not only that: rationality, now we must open our minds and let creativity play its role in order to pay as much attention as possible to the commercial techniques that may arise. We must open our minds to merchandising, that resource that must be implemented to design, with flexibility, the trajectory of a product once it has been launched on the market; those variations that are good to apply in its sales cycle to make it more visible, more desirable, more necessary.

Any merchandising technique applied on the point of sale shelf is focused on improving the profitability per square metre of the sales room and that is your main objective, isn’t it: to optimise the profitability of your sales room as much as possible?

Now you have the treasure map, follow the golden rules and you will achieve your goal.

Maybe it’s not magic, but it looks a lot like it.