Merchandising is one of the biggest opportunities a retailer has to connect with their customer and sell their products.
Merchandising involves anything done in-store to promote and sell your product to your customer.
From window displays to shelf signage and product placement on tables, the merchandising of your product endeavours to catch the eye of your buyer to encourage purchases.
Like remodelling your home or getting a haircut, remerchandising your store is something you can do to keep things fresh and entice your customer into visiting often.
At Silverman Consulting & Retail Services, where we specialize in store closing sales events, we have years of expertise in remerchandising, and we are here to help you if you feel overwhelmed by the prospect.
Let’s have a closer look at remerchandising and how it can benefit your business.
What Is Remerchandising?
Remerchandising, by definition, is the act of moving a product from one location to another one within your store.
This could be as simple as changing up your displays each month, or as large as moving the location of a specific type of product within the store.
You may do this seasonally to give the store a fresh feel, or a little each day to highlight new products or feature sale items.
Whatever the reason, remerchandising your store often is an important part of retail sales and can give a store a totally new look with all the same merchandise.
You may find the prospect of remerchandising daunting and think it better to keep things in the same place, where your customers are used to finding them.
But when it comes to getting the most out of your store and your customers, the opposite is true.
Let’s look at some strategies for remerchandising, along with the benefits it can bring to your business.
Remerchandising Strategies
Look around your store at the areas where you merchandise product.
These may include:
- Store window displays
- Table displays
- In store signage
- Shelf talkers and promotional material displayed in the store
- Products grouped together by theme
- In-store demonstrations or samples
- Well stocked shelves
- Checkout area displays for impulse items
When was the last time you visited each of these areas and made a change?
Making your products appealing to your buyer starts with your displays.
When remerchandising an area in your store, make sure you take the time to clean the display shelves and dust the merchandise.
Give your customer the sense that they are visiting a store with fresh, new items.
This will encourage them to stay in the store for longer, and to visit more often.
In a bookstore, for example, face out different titles each week, to give better visibility to more titles.
You don’t have to do it all at once.
Use any downtime during the day to rethink displays or rework your impulse items.
One way to do this is to make a folder with several copies of a blank map of the displays and showcases in your store.
Put the date on todays copy and list where things are, and on a blank sheet strategize where you can remerchandise to give the store a refreshed look.
Once you’re ready, arrange the store in this way, and make a note of how sales go for the time your store is arranged this way.
This information can help you remerchandise better the next time.
You will most often see an increase in sales from some aged inventory just by refreshing regularly.
This is one of the many benefits of remerchandising.
Let’s look at some of the others.
What Are The Benefits Of Remerchandising?
Changing the look and feel of the store keeps your business looking current to your customers.
In some cases, this might be seasonal, but in others it can simply depend on the day.
For example, if it’s raining and you sell umbrellas, keep them close to the door, and if it’s snowing do the same with window scrapers.
But it still helps to shuffle your core items around to change how they do from a sales perspective.
If an item is slow to sell, moving it to a prime spot in the store may encourage faster turnover.
In addition to this, moving new items into the prime selling spots within your store allows you to rotate out the items that are not selling, or that customers have already bought.
A customer that visits once a week, for example, may already have purchased the items on display at the front of the store, or by the checkout.
Placing new items in these locations regularly will encourage your regular customers to purchase something new every time they visit.
Remerchandising frequently also allows you to deal with new inventory as it arrives, highlighting the new offerings.
Introduce your customer to new items each time they visit.
Frequent changes within the store will encourage regular customers to check back more often, as they won’t want to miss out.
You will see an improvement in customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and faster turnaround on your inventory.
Keep in mind too that if you have a product that’s merchandised well and it’s still not moving, it could be that your customers are just not interested.
In that case, you might consider ways to liquidate it and purchase new more saleable products.
How To Change Your Marketing To Match Your Remerchandising
Changing your signage when you remerchandise draws your customer’s attention to the fact that there has been a change.
Keep things current by using changes of season or current trends to dictate sales or front of store displays.
Group items together in the middle of your store to make a statement – whether it’s a flash sale, a new release, or the trending colour of the season.
If you move inventory around within your store, you may want to place signs where it used to be to direct your customer to its new location.
If you are running a promotion, use prime locations to advertise that promotion.
Contact Silverman Consulting & Retail Services
At Silverman Consulting & Retail Services, we understand the challenges involved in making a change, especially major changes
If you’re considering a major change in your business, contact us today and let us help.
Silverman Consulting & Retail Services229 Yonge St suite 400,
Toronto, ON M5B 1N9, Canada
1 (888) 955-1069