If you’re in the middle of setting up a retail store, and you want to know you’re drawing in your customers as much as possible, you need to focus a little bit more of your energy on the floor plan. You’ve set up the website just right, and you need to do the same for your physical location — they work in very similar ways. So, let’s think about some key factors involved in ensuring you’re working with the best layout possible.
By Team Savant
Image: Erica Zhou on Unsplash
After all, the way we walk around a store very much informs what we’re going to buy, and it’s always important to figure out how customers tend to behave when presented with a store’s layout.
Lead Your Shoppers to the Right Place
You want the people who enter your store to follow a clear and select path — you want them to find the items they want easily, but you also want to draw them deeper and deeper into the store. Most of all, you want them to pick up the most expensive items, and that means you need them to be accessible and always in the eye line of your shoppers.
Indeed, checking out sites, such as https://www.design4retail.co.uk/about/retail-design/, could help you with working a plan like this organically into your store, to ensure you’re never being too ‘in your face’ with your customers.
Stock Up Properly
Stocking up on the right items ensures people are always able to buy what they need, but it also sends out a message about your store - you’ve got quantity, and you’ve got value, and that’s quite attractive for most shoppers out there. Indeed, no one wants to walk into a store with empty shelves and broken boxes all over the floor.
At the same time, be sure to read the room. Are you a high end boutique, or designer store? Then you’ll want to be choosy about what’s on display. But if you’re more of a budget store, having walls of shelves that are high enough to keep more than three separate shelves in someone’s eye line could be best for you.
Always Prioritise Space
And finally, always give your customer some space — don’t crowd them, and let them browse around as they please. Give them personal bubbles to stay comfortable in, and make sure they can move around the store as easily as possible. And most of all, make sure they never have to move out of the way of another customer, because you might just lose a sale if they do!
Your store needs a good layout, in order to get as many sales as possible. Make sure you do some research into consumer habits, and make sure you know how the layout of your shop best works. Even if you like a free and open plan shopping space, it might not work as well as you’d like for the types of products you’re selling.