Merchandising a Business

A new retail establishment will have much of its success or failure in merchandising products. Products must be presented to shoppers in a organized attractive way that appeals to shoppers in such a way that shoppers can find what they are looking for and can be persuaded to buy more than what they originally intended to buy. What is ideal is to have the prices of basic things that people come to a store to buy very low and then have the profit margin much higher for the little things that people need to buy in order to go along with but do not think about buying until they see those items, and this method of pricing goods will attract people to shop in your store and this is the model that I assume when talking about how to merchandise your store.

In other words people will be attracted to shop in your store if you sell a TV or computer for very cheep, and you may be able to sell such a item at cost. Customers that put a new TV or computer into their carts will then be excited about their potential benefits, and at this time your store must be set up in such a way that the customer will notice the cables, screen wipes, stand, power strip, and everything else that goes with buying a new TV or computer. Successful merchandising will get customers to be attracted to the main things that they came into the store to buy that you will sell for very cheep, and then successful merchandising will get customers to realize everything else that they need to go with their new items that you sell at a much higher profit margin. Successful merchandising thus has much to do with organization and placement of goods on aisles and on the end of aisles known as end caps, and what thus becomes fundamental for business success is choosing the correct shelving, installing shelving effectively for sales, and stocking shelving in a way that brings about maximum sales.

After you choose your store layout that maximizes sales potential through organizing merchandise around the target customer while providing maxim comfort for customers to navigate through, special merchandising signs and displays should be considered along with vender signs and displays before considering regular store merchandising. Some venders for example use special displays, special shelves, and racks that will not work well with your store if you do not consider these special displays prior to making your own displays and signs. On the other hand vender displays may not always stay the same as product size and products themselves may change and thus require new vender displays in the future anyway, but nevertheless regular store displays and signs should always go along with vender merchandising because otherwise your store will look very odd.

What is important to realize is that customers almost always usually only recognize what is at their eye level first, and then customers will usually look down from eye level only two feet and look up from eye level only two feet because any more effort will often result in a head tilt that will require mussels to be used. As a result of this, a aisle should always have extra stock at the very vertical tops and the very vertical bottoms of the aisle. In other words shoppers should never have to look for goods below two and a half feet up from the floor, but all the goods that shoppers need to look for should always be in the next four foot up from the initial two and a half feet from the floor. The only problem with merchandising in order to prevent customers from tilting their heads is that perishable goods such as food products that are at the very tops and bottoms of shelves have to be rotated into the four feet height zone of shelves that customers will be most likely to look into and buy most all of their goods from because otherwise goods at the very tops and bottoms of shelves will go bad if perishable since these zones get overlooked by shoppers.

End caps at the end of aisles need to be so attractive as to make a person notice what is at the end of the aisle and then cause that person to be interested in everything else contained in that aisle. Some end caps should thus contain really good deals, other end caps should contain really unique and amazing things, and other end caps should contain really popular products. The danger in having end caps that only have popular products or only have really good deals is that people may only shop your end caps and never go into the aisles for their purchases, and the danger of having all end caps with unique and amazing things is that people might think that your store is strange and thus stop shopping at it.

End caps and aisles should contain everything that people normally need to make their regular purchases usable, and a store should always have the essential things that people need. In other words never buy a bunch of special deal products from a distributor and then only sell those products because if this happens then people will not think of the things that they need and then be reminded of your store. If for example a store always has what a person is looking for, then people may always be reminded of that store when they are looking for those products, but if a store just has a bunch of special deal strange products, then people will stay away from the store unless they have extra money or would like to waste some time.

A store layout should be set up in such a way that people do not feel like they are in a big maze when looking for products. Everything should be organized in order to make the store pattern easy for customers to know where everything is, and the store should be organized in order that people can remember the pattern of the store. Some stores are organized in order to get the customers to move about the store outside main aisles in either a counter clockwise direction or a clockwise direction, and this is important because orderly store traffic flows can provide maximum comfort to shoppers and this can provide a context for organizing the merchandising strategies. All merchandising strategies should always be made to work with store traffic flow and store layout.

Plan-O-Grams (POG) are the basic instructions for how shelves are to be merchandised, and they include the exact placement of goods onto shelves. If you are running a franchise, then your corporate headquarters will most likely give you the POG plans that you need, but if you are in a independent business, then you need not make POG plans for shelves unless you plan on duplicating your store somewhere else. Overall, POG plans can be difficult to work with because sometimes some products might be out of stock while others may have more than enough for the POG stock location, and in this case the temptation is to change product placement in order to get the maximum product into the shelf (this over a long course of time could make POG plans differ greatly from actual product placement).

In all of merchandising the most important concept is cross merchandising, and this means taking complementary merchandise and putting it together in a organized way. For example merchandising some shirts, ties, and pants all together on a sales display just prior to a dance event would be a example of cross merchandising, but other applications can involve seasonal goods, goods that people do not normally buy, and goods that people always buy together. Cross merchandising will involve stoking merchandise in a regular stock location and in a cross merchandised stock location, so when labor is doing inventory or is stocking shelves both stock locations will need to be evaluated.

Cross merchandising can multiply sales very easily, but in a big store if workers do not know the locations of all the cross merchandise, then soon enough the entire store can become one big mess. For example a department store that has a department for household goods such as vacuums and a department for electronic goods such as TVs along with a department for home repair may stock extension cords with the TV's and with the vacuums, but most all the extension cords may all belong in the home repair department. In such a case if the man running the home repair department forgets about merchandising extension cords in the other two departments, then that can be bad for inventory counts and for keeping the shelves stocked. The down side of cross merchandising is that it can be very labor, thought, and memory intensive since products are stocked in more than one location across the store.

Merchandising is a very well developed field of study, and I have just covered the basics. A successful retail store will have people that know how to merchandise the store very well. Although merchandising does not by far involve everything that a person needs to know about a retail store, it nevertheless makes the difference between success of failure.