Get Organized
Here’s an important key to making more money: Make it easier for customers to make decisions. Make it easier for them to see and understand the differences between products and, thus, easier to decide which of the available choices best meets their needs.
It’s difficult for customers to make informed decisions when merchandise is scattered around the sales floor, in no apparent order. That’s why it’s important to organize and display products in a logical manner. Here are some basic principles you should follow when doing so:
Like products together; related products nearby You most likely have all of your masks displayed in one place, with snorkels and fins close by. How about your wetsuits? Are they, too, in one spot — or scattered across half the sales floor? When customers come to look at wetsuits, they want to see all of your wetsuits, so that they can compare them side by side.
Look at your sales floor. Are there out-of-place items that would be easier to sell if grouped with similar or related items? Is there something you can do to solve that problem?
Organize by type, thickness, price, color, size, etc. Let’s say you have all of your BCs on display in one location. That’s a good start. Now, how should you organize them? Depending on the mix of models you have available, one approach might be:
- Type: Group all the technical BCs together, and all the recreational BCs together.
- Style: If, within your recreational BCs, you have both back-inflation and traditional wraparound styles, group each style together.
- Gender: Within each type and style grouping, separate the women’s models from the men’s/unisex models.
- Price/Features: Finally, rank BCs within each type/style/gender grouping according to price and features.
The idea here is to make it easier for consumers to comparison shop. For example, let’s say you have a recreational customer who tells you she is interested in a women’s wraparound BC. You happen to carry three different models of this style from two different manufacturers.
Rather than having to run to three different locations in the store to show and explain these models, you have them hanging on the wall, side by side. Additionally, you have the most deluxe model at one end, the economy model at the other and the medium-priced model in the middle.
This makes it as easy as possible for the customer to decide which combination of price and features best meets her needs. One thing you may want to consider:
- In western culture, people read from left to right. Therefore, there is a logic to displaying similar products left to right, ranking them from least expensive to most expensive.
- On the other hand, most of us like to present our best products first and, if that is beyond a customer’s means, move to successively less-expensive models. This makes an argument for ranking products in the reverse order, from most expensive to least expensive.
However you choose to rank products, it’s most important you do so consistently throughout the store. Also, if circumstances dictate that you display similar products in a vertical column, there is a very strong argument for placing the best, most expensive model on top, as nearly everyone associates this with being the “top of the line” position.
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