OPINION: 3 ways to harness display and layout for your convenience offering

Below are some important considerations when planning display and layout in your stores to make the most of your retail estate.

Retail relies heavily on presentation and communication and this translates into retail at every level of complexity and size.

Prospective customers base their first impression of your store on the quality of this presentation and communication.

Once they are in the purchasing process, this can mean the difference between a small and large basket. Below are some important considerations when planning display and layout in your stores to make the most of your retail estate.

Change it up

If it’s true that diners eat with their eyes first, then the same very much holds for shoppers. Visual cues and suggestions are one of the most powerful tools at a retailer’s disposal to boost return customers and increase basket size. These tools can be employed in a number of ways.

Frequent display changes can work in response to seasonality, but grouping products by theme or use can also be just as effective. Show your customers what else they may need and organise displays by shopper mission (for example, grouping beers, burgers, and buns on a high-footfall location during the summer months), and in doing so you should expect to see multiple purchases and larger baskets.

It is important to track sales trends to establish which product groupings work and which don’t, allowing for flexible and reactive restructuring. The new PayPoint One platform helps retailers to run their whole store from one device, tracking sales automatically, down to the granularity of identifying frequent basket items. This will empower the retailers to capitalise on the data available to them and reap the rewards.

Point them in the right direction

Signage can be crucial in enticing and ultimately converting shoppers to purchase based on their different missions. From advertising your offering outside the store to guiding customer journeys from aisle to aisle, harnessing signage can be vital in driving sales within your store.

A structured shopping experience can help steer customers towards larger baskets as well as resulting in a positive customer experience, making return visits more likely. Finally, ensure that you show off your products with appropriate and sufficient lighting to show off the best of what your store has to offer.

Part of this visual communication can be as simple as ensuring staff are visible and accessible during store hours. People are your biggest asset and can combat the often fleeting nature of shopper visits to your store. If you can work to build relationships and human interaction through access and staff visibility, this can become a more important differentiator and set you apart from your convenience competition.

Speed and simplicity at point of sale is another important factor in maintaining a positive customer experience. Using a single platform can help to minimise disruption and delay. PayPoint One offers EPOS, card payments and PayPoint services which helps serve customers faster and enables retailers to spend more time engaging with them.

A store should make sense

We have touched on some aspects of store layout above, including the importance of visual communications and providing a structured, mission-based experience to shoppers, regardless of what’s brought them into store.

Beyond this, the traditional tenets still hold true: retailers should continue to prioritise the front of the store for newer, more expensive products and make sure their shop front reflects the offering inside. Store layout should be comforting and well-organised, minimising time wasting for customers and offering genuinely helpful solutions.Never is the truer than in the UK convenience market. According to the ACS Local Shop Report, 80% of transactions were conducted in cash last year and, although the range of different payment methods that consumers use grows by the day, cash shows no signs of disappearing just yet.

Offering shoppers choice in how they can pay in store is as critical as getting your range right or ensuring you’re marketing to your customers effectively. 75% of PayPoint shoppers, traditionally known for paying in cash, also use debit cards in store to pay for their shopping, with over 40% wanting to use contactless cards.

Cash has remained a central plank to our payment ecosystem, and should remain so for many years. The cashless society is a thing of the future right now.