Member Article

How to make your retailing successful

It’s retail focus week on Bdaily. Here, award-winning Sara Davies, founder of Crafter’s Companion, imparts some of her wisdom to traditional and online retailers.

Eye-catching…

When it comes to retailing, visuals are key; whether that is how your store is laid out or how products are displayed on your website, you must take time in planning your shop floor and window. Make sure you put coordinating items together so they’re easy to find; for instance within a pharmacy you’re likely to see flu remedies and tissues in the same place, or in a fashion outlet you’ll see all winter coats in one section.

You also need to think about the impulse buys too - a trick that supermarkets use is put all the essentials on the outside edges and place the impulse buys in the centre. Have you ever noticed that you need to walk past the confectionary aisles to get from the bread to the milk? You can take the same principle in your stores too. If you’re an online store, look into getting a ‘similar items’ feature on the individual product pages to entice the customers. Retailers also have to remember the informative point of sale to help show your customers how to get the most out of the product. Customer service is key when selling.

Inspire your customers…

As a craft manufacturer and supplier, we place a lot of importance on the inspiration side of the selling. Our customers want to see what they will be able to achieve when buying our products, so whenever we launch a new product, range or collection we task our team of designers to create lots of craft projects using the new products and show them off in as many different promotional ways such as in our newsletters, on our website, via social media channels, and as step-by-step projects in magazines. Although the format we take can’t be replicated for every market, the principles are the same.

For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, putting complete outfits together to show the customer how one blouse can look when part of an entire outfit and how by adding accessories makes the outfit pop is likely to increase your upsells as people can see what works with what and they’ll be more inclined to buy more of your products.

E-commerce…

Invest time (and money if your budget allows) into Search Engine Optimisation. SEO can dramatically help your rankings with search engines. When people search for an item that you sell, you want to make sure that your site comes in on the first page - preferably within the top few results. This all comes down to keywords on your site, your content, social media and how frequently the website is updated. If you’re not tech savvy then SEO may seem like gobbledegook but it really is worth it, do you really want your competitors getting the upper hand and stealing sales off you? If you don’t have the resources in-house then outsource.

Navigation of your store…

You want to make your customers’ shopping experiences happy and easy ones so don’t make it difficult for them to find what they are looking for. Everything in your store and/or on your site should be found in obvious places. The shopping basket and the checkout procedures need to be simple, clear and secure.

The most important thing you can do when setting up an e-commerce store is to make sure your customer details are secure and the customer trusts you - this is paramount to anything else you do on your site. You also need to make sure the customer can contact you easily, so make the ‘contact us’ tab prominent on the site. Ensure you include a phone number and an email address to provide customers with a choice on how to contact you.

Online descriptions…

Try to be as informative as you can in your descriptions with products. If appropriate, give measurements such as dimensions and weights and also list what materials are used so the customer knows exactly what they are buying. The more information you can give the more informed the customer, meaning a happy end user.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sara Davies .