Ideas to Help You Effectively Merchandise Your Store

Store Merchandising Ideas

Studies have shown that customers buy when you deliver properly chosen merchandise, sold in a pleasant shopping environment. This merchandise must also be well presented, properly priced and most of all – in stock. Merchandising is more of an art than a science, but there are a number of general guidelines that you can consider when placing your merchandise on your sales floor. Some of the most important ideas are as follows:


- Maximize your sales floor space - you cannot sell merchandise out of your stockroom
- Present your merchandise in a fashion that supports a counter-clockwise customer traffic flow, which is common
- Create unique departments with logical complimentary merchandise
- Make sure your offering is deep (numerous different types of the same item) as well as broad (numerous different items) as long as you can keep the items selling
- Try lifestyle merchandising, appealing to customers who lead a certain type of lifestyle and buy related goods
- Consider what types of sales floor fixtures will work best for you and show your merchandise in the most attractive manner – these can be low, medium, or high-density fixtures
- Know your top twenty profit margin items in your store and feature those items prominently
- Make sure you utilize the right number of checkout areas (cash wraps) so that customers do not have to wait long in lines to check out
- Make sure your signage (for departments AND pricing) are attractive and easily understood
- Merchandise high-margin “impulse items” near the check out area
- Create a tasteful clearance area in the store to collect old and slow-moving merchandise, mark it down aggressively, and sell it as fast as you can
- Watch your customers shop and pay attention to where they go, the order of departments (or areas) they tend to shop in, and where they spend most of their time – then re-do the areas they are least attracted to

These basic ideas will help you to drive more sales and will make the sales you make more profitable. Additional ideas can be found at the Furniture World website. You can contact us at WWW.AtlantaRetailConsulting.com.

How to Develop Your Own Performance Benchmarks

Retail Performance Benchmarks

One of the simplest tools that you can create for use in managing your retail organization is a list of business benchmarks (or often called, business metrics) that can be used as productivity goals. Few small retailers take this step; however, if done properly, the data you will create can be used for performance goals to help your employees attain higher levels of performance.

The “business metrics” concept is very basic. Essentially, it suggests that you identify each unique task that is performed in your firm. Let us take merchandise receiving, processing, and merchandising as examples of three tasks we must perform to run our retail operation. These tasks are often composed of the following key steps:

• Prepare the area where the merchandise will be received and processed
• Meet the inbound truck and place the incoming merchandise in an appropriate area for either immediate or later processing
• Count and sign for the received cartons
• Open the cartons and remove the goods, placing them on either a processing table (if more steps are required like removing packing material) or place the items directly onto either wheeled carts or wheeled hanging racks
• Mark the goods with the correct price
• Stage (store for later movement) the merchandise or move it directly to the sales-floor
• Move the goods to the sales-floor and place the merchandise in the correct location on the sales-floor in an attractive fashion to attract customer attention

The time it takes to perform those tasks can be measured easily. Assume it took 3 hours in total and you used three people to perform the work for those three hours. That means your team used nine total hours (or 540 minutes) to perform those tasks. Now, divide the number of items that were received, processed, and merchandised (let us assume 2000) by the 540 minutes used in order to calculate your productivity ratio for those tasks 2000/540 = 3.7 . That means your team averaged receiving, processing and merchandising 3.7 items per minute (for each person).

Now that you know that productivity number, you can do a few things with it. First, use it to calculate the amount of time you will need for future receipts and the related processing /merchandising. If you have been scheduling too much time for your team to get the job done, then consider scheduling less time. Second, look for ways to improve the efficiency of the tasks and measure it again. You may be able to reduce the total time needed by implementing improvements and then you would be able to calculate how much time you were able to save by doing so.

Your team may wish to consider creating productivity benchmarks for the following tasks in your business by tracking the following :

• Receiving - using cartons received per minute (or hour for large shipments)
• Processing - using units per minute
• Merchandising - using racks or carts moved/unloaded per minute
• Price changes - using process changed per minute
• Floor recovery - using aisles or store zones (areas) recovered (neatened up) per minute
• Cashiering - using items sold (or number of transactions) per minute

For more information, contact us at www.AtlantaRetailConsulting.com.

How to Increase the Productivity of Your Merchandise Receiving and Processing Activities

Improving Your Retail Merchandise Movement

After you have ordered new merchandise, the planning for its arrival should begin. Make sure you request a delivery date and a way to correspond with the vendor that you ordered from so you can accurately expect when the goods will arrive. Vendors are familiar with supplying their customers with “receipt of goods” dates. Once the merchandise does arrive you will need to receive it (physically bring it in your facility and store it), process it (open the carton, verify quantity (optional) and check the condition of the contents, strip off plastic or paper packaging and unwanted tags, hang/fold/or steam the merchandise), and finally merchandise it (move it to the sales floor for presentation or into a storage area).

While working with many retailers, both large and small, over the last three decades we have noticed that there is significant variance in how these functions are performed and how productive they may be. In order to assist your firm to optimize the productivity of these three key functions we would like to offer the following recommendations. Keep in mind that the size of your facility and the layout you employ will affect how you perform these tasks; however, the general concept of each recommendation should be considered.

• Make sure you are fully prepared for any large deliveries and have planned how you will handle them in advance
• Insure you have all the right conveyance and processing tools available and the area you will use to store and process the goods is clean, organized, and available
• When the goods arrive bring them in in a smooth flow and utilize as many of your employees as possible to unload the truck quickly and begin processing immediately
• If you have to store the incoming merchandise and process it after store hours make sure the cartons are available and stored on an organized manner
• Arrange your processing area to facilitate an organized and productive flow from one function to another. The more an item stops and starts during the processing flow, the less productive the process may be
• Utilize appropriate work tables to process the merchandise and do not process off of the floor or other cartons
• Once processed, hang the merchandise on movable hanging racks or movable carts with shelves (for folded goods) for efficient movement to the sales floor
• Clean up the area once all the goods are processed to make it ready for the next truck receipts
• Observe how many units your team can unload, process, and deliver per man-hour so that you can use those statistics to plan your labor needs for future receipts based upon the anticipated receipt volume

Here is an example of an efficient backroom receiving and processing area:

Some basic productivity guidelines for anticipating how much time you will need for each of these key functions are:

• Receiving: unload - about 300 cartons per man-hour*
• Process: from carton open to hang or fold on a rack or cart - about 150 units per man-hour
• Merchandising: moving rack or cart to sales floor (or stockroom) and placing items for sale - about 100 items per man-hour

* Note: that per man-hour means the time used for "each" person working. For example: 2 man-hours would equal 2 people working for 1 hour each.

 The time employed for all three functions should approximate the following:

• Receiving: 10% of total team time used
• Processing: 20% of total team time used
• Merchandising: 70% of total team time used

As each retail organization is unique and requires its own set of performance metrics, please contact us at www.AtlantaRetailConsulting.com if you would like more information.