Christmas is just around the corner…

Well, it’s not far off in terms of retail and it’s essential to make sure you’re ready way in advance of the Christmas shopping period. There’s a lot to plan, so here are a few pointers to get you started…

Plan your staff cover so you have enough people to look after all your customers. You don’t want to have long queues because you only have one till open, as you’ll end up with customers putting things down and walking out when they get bored of the wait. Make sure if anyone is on holiday during the Christmas period you have sufficient cover to make sure staffing levels are going to cope with the increase in customer numbers. 

Plan your products carefully, with the right seasonal products that will make great Christmas gifts and tempt customers. Make sure you’ve got enough stock to ensure you don’t run out and leave anyone disappointed. 

Give yourself a goal - take a look at last years sales figures to give yourself something to beat. How will you do this? More stock? More promotions? Put a plan together to help you meet this target.

Don’t forget to plan for your January sales too - what items will be in the sale, what displays will you have to let your customers know what items are included? Don’t forget you can customise existing displays or create new ones. 

Click here to find great new and used shelves and display units at Shelving4Shops, all at great prices!  

Making Your Convenience Store Convenient!

When you visit a convenience store, you’re often in a bit of a hurry - you might be popping in on your way home from work, trying to get round the store with a couple of kids in tow or simply doing a food shop when hungry (always dangerous!), so you want to get your food out of the door and home to eat in as short a time as possible. So what’s more frustrating than finding there’s no shopping baskets or trolleys to hand, meaning you have to balance your items in your arms, making life even more difficult and time consuming - especially if you have a child who wants to be carried too!

When considering the layout of your store, don’t forget to make space to put your baskets and trolleys. You need to ensure they are as close as possible to the door, without being in the way or creating a trip hazard. Neatly stacked baskets will encourage customers to grab one as they pass by- and having a basket encourages them to buy more as they have an easy way to carry all their goodies!

Shelving4Shops has a great range of sturdy baskets available, in blue, green, red and black. They’re all lightweight and easy to carry, with a comfortable handle which is easy to grip. The baskets all stack neatly, while Shelving4Shops also sell a basket stacker, which adds a clean, professional image to your stack of baskets- it also raises them up off the floor, making it easier to customers (particularly the elderly or disabled) to pick up. The basket stacker comes on small caster wheels, allowing you to easily and safely move around stacks of baskets. This makes it great to place by a till, so when customers empty their baskets, you can then simply wheel the stack back to the door- making your life easier, quicker and more convenient!

The Lowdown On Fruit And Vegetables!

If you’re a seller of fresh produce, you’ll know the importance of keeping all your fruit and vegetables in an easy-to-access manner while protecting them from the risk of bruising or damage as customers rifle through them. Healthy, pristine looking produce is always going to sell much better than damaged, tired-looking produce, so it pays to make sure you have suitable containment for your fruit and vegetables.

At Shelving4Shops we have sturdy fruit and vegetable trays, ideal for displaying produce in a safe, contained way that will still allow you to create attractive displays to catch the eye of your customers, while keeping the fresh produce safe and secure.

We found the best tips for selling your fruit and veg are the following:

• Tilt your trays forward, to make sure the produce is visible even from a distance. This makes sure no one misses it!
• Make sure the containers are always completely full to create the illusion of bounty. Pile things up to add a more impressive look!
• If you can, line your trays with fabric or bubble wrap to further prevent them from bruising or damage.
• Make sure you go through your produce every couple of days and pull out anything that’s rotting or looking limp.
• Display all fresh produce at least six inches off the ground.

Making Your Business Greene

Running a store is an expensive business, so we’ve put together a few ideas to help you save money and make your business more eco-friendly.

1. Using the right bulbs to save money on your energy bills and reduce consumption. LEDs offer a much more energy-efficient lighting solution, so it’s worth investing in these as they’ll pay for themselves in cost-saving.
2. A simple change in cleaning products can help the environment- switch to less toxic, or even better, make your own! You can make a simple, effective cleaning solution from water and distilled vinegar. This is cheap and friendly to the environment!
3. Buy used fixtures for your store. Used shelves and gondolas are a great area to save money in! Shelving4Shops offer a great range of used fixtures, which are in tip top condition and can be dismantled for easy transportation.
4. Use plants to help improve the air quality. Stores often suffer from stale air, lending a stuffy quality to the shop. This can be improved by adding a wall of plants which will help filter the air- more effective if the plants are placed below the air conditioning unit, helping the fresh air to circulate better around the shop.
5. Substitute plastic bags for paper ones - recycled paper bags would be even better. Make receipts optional- ask before printing one, to help save paper- you can offer to email one instead and save a trees!
6. Make sure you purchase energy-efficient equipment. When you buy a new printer or computer, for example, make sure you compare the energy ratings before making your purchase.
7. Turn your equipment off! Fridges and freezers aside, most equipment can safely be switched off at night, but many businesses leave them on to save time in the morning, or simply because they forget. If you can shut everything off each night to avoid sucking "vampire power" to dormant equipment.
   
   

Arranging Newspapers

Your newspaper display stand is an essential bit of equipment to preserve the life of your papers while offering your customers a clear view of what you sell, so they can find exactly what they’re after. One thing to remember is to stack the newspaper with the name at the top, to save your papers from being leafed through by customers searching for their daily read. This helps keep your papers from becoming dog-eared and dishevelled, as customers won’t buy these - everyone will want a newspaper that’s in perfect condition.

Shelving4Shops are proud to offer a selection of top quality display units, perfect for safely storing your newspapers. Our sturdy and durable units have a clear plastic riser at the front to prevent the papers from slipping off the unit and onto the floor. The angled tiers allow for easier viewing for customers, while the strong fixings ensure your display unit will last for years to come. The shelves are made from heavy duty powder-coated steel, so you can be sure your products will be safe, while the freestanding unit means you won’t have to worry about fixing it to a wall.

All our shelving can be made into a bespoke arrangement using other shelving units, providing a versatile option to your store layout plan.

Get The Message Across!

One thing most customers really hate is having to ask the price of something. Whether the product has been picked up and put down in the wrong place, or whether you’ve committed the crime of forgetting to put a price label on, it will still result in the same undesirable consequence - the customer will abandon the item.

When looking at shop shelving for your store, it’s essential to put some thought into the detailing you’ll need to add to make sure those shelves work for you. You need to let your customers see how much each item costs, making it clear which price is for which item. Customers won’t spend long working this out and if they can’t see a price at a quick glance, they’ll more than likely put the item back down again.

Don’t miss out on a sale, make sure you always let your customers know how much something costs by using price tags or Epos strips across the front of your shelves. These are available in a variety of different colours, so you can match them to your brand colours to add continuity and a smart touch to the appearance of your store. Make sure the price is clear (and if it’s per kg, for example, or per item/box/pack, etc) and ensure your item is clearly labelled so the customer doesn’t have to deduce for themselves which product the price label is referring to. This is especially important if you have several different sizes or weights of a particular item.

Shelving4Shops have a great range of Epos strips in a range of colours at unbeatable prices! Kit your shop out now and make those shelves sell for you.

How High Should Your Shelves Be?

Shelving height should be determined by a number of factors, including ceiling height and the type of products being placed on the units. There is no hard and fast rule about the heights certain items should be at, so first and foremost take into consideration the message you want to convey about your store and how you want customers to perceive your brand.

As a general idea, taller shelving conveys a sense of a bigger volume of products, with a wider selection and lower or discounted prices. Shelving at a lower height says more high quality, bespoke products, more expensive and limited selection, with a more intimate shopping experience. You can use this guide to add a variety of different feature points in your store, to add sale areas, speciality areas and broader, more generic areas to shop in. You can also use this to segregate sections and create departments.

Ceiling height shouldn’t make a difference to the height units you choose, so base your choice on the products you sell and the impression you want to convey to your customers.

Making The Most Of Summer Sales

There’s no denying it- every customer loves a sale, knowing they’re saving money with their shopping, grabbing bargains and making the most of the low prices you offer.

Summer is a great time to offer a sale, while everyone’s mood is just a little bit better as the sun is shining and the weather is (hopefully!) behaving! People are more inclined to shop and to take their time while browsing your products, so make sure you take full advantage of this, luring people out of their back gardens and into your store.  

So how can you make sure you make the most of this? Here are a few tips for luring in those customers and increasing your sales!

• Signage, signage, signage! Place brightly coloured signs to advertise your sale and grab the customer’s attention. Make sure your window displays shout about your sale in a way that a passer-by can’t fail to notice!

• Ensure that customers know exactly which area of your shop holds the sale items. No one wants to have to stand and fathom out what’s included in the sale and what isn’t- this is a sure turn-off to purchasing!

• Identifying your sale area is a great chance for your to revamp your store’s layout, to give customers something new and fresh visually when they enter your store.

• Sales can get messy, so ensure your items are laid out on shelving that has plenty of room for everything to be picked up and put down again

• Get creative - don’t be afraid to combine different types of shelving. Put a variety of  combinations together to create the most effective sale area and display your products in the best way.
  
  

Shop Racking

To truly show off what you have to offer to customers, it’s worth putting some time and thought into how you display your wares and the equipment you’ll use to hold your products. Take into account the type of store you have and what sort of items you’ll stock to make the right choices for your business.

Depending on your products, you’ll need to look at different types of shelving, from magazine racking to gondola shelving. It’s also worth considering extras like dump bins where you can create sale promotions or sell off excess stock.

If you’ll be frequently revamping the layout of your store, make sure you think about interchangeable and non-permanent fixtures that don’t require huge amounts of effort and work to move. Shelving4Shops offers freestanding units that don’t require bolts or fixing to the wall, with a huge variety in the types of shelves that we offer.

Why not make a visit to our showroom where you can find examples of all our shelving, fully constructed so you can get a feel for how your store can be laid out to make sure your customers get the full shopping experience at your shop. We also sell top quality second hand shelving, so we can help if you need to kit your shop out on a budget. 

Shopping Psychology

When you want to pop into a shop and get a pint of milk, do you end up walking out with a basket full of other things you didn’t intend to buy? Supermarkets are brilliant at making us impulse buy, so how do they do it?

There are many different tricks to getting people to buy more than they intend to. Major brands and important, popular items are placed in the centre of aisles, increasing the length of time the shopper is in the shop and making sure they are exposed to as many items are possible.

Displays are everywhere! Not only do supermarkets have long, endless aisles, but even at the ends there are eye catching displays with even more products as are the till areas - so the customer is never not looking at products!

If the shop sells fresh bread, one of the oldest tricks in the book is pumping that freshly-baked smell into the store. It’s often poured out through the ventilation system throughout the entire day to give the illusion that the bread is being baked constantly, giving you the freshest product!

The endless psychology of shopping entices customers to buy more than they ever intended, in clever ways that customers simply don’t notice! 

Choosing Your Shelving

Finding the right shelving for your store is critical for the success of your business, to make sure your customers will have the best shopping experience and buy your products. You need to display your products clearly and efficiently, and to maximise the viewing exposure.

Start the planning by thinking about your products. What will you sell? Will you have heavy products? If so, you’ll need to make sure you have a display unit that can withstand the weight of your heaviest products.

Think about the dimensions of your products. The shape and size of the products needs to be taken into consideration when choosing the right shelving. Will the depth of a shelf be enough for you to stack products or will you need a peg board unit to hang them on? You have many options, so think about what will make your products look good.

The other things to consider include accessibility - how many of a particular item will you be holding? You need to ensure customers can get to your items easily and quickly, so make sure your shelving is adequate for your items.

Magazine Magic!

Magazines have a tendency to end up looking scruffy after they’ve been out for a while, so it pays to look after them and invest in specific magazine shelving to keep them secure and neat.

To prevent them getting damaged, Shelving4Shops sell specific shelving, designed to keep your magazines, stationery and even greeting cards neat and tidy. These units come with eight angled, tiered shelves, with a 470mm wide base, perfect for stacking newspapers. Additional shelves can be purchased and added if needed.

As with all their units, Shelving4Shops offer fully adaptable and adjustable magazine shelves, giving you the flexibility to create versatile and changeable displays. You’ll find the units strong and sturdy, giving you the peace of mind that when you buy, your products will be safely supported with high quality shelving that will last. These wall shelving units come in three different heights: 1.8m, 2.1m and 2.4m

These versatile units can be easily connected to other shelving units, so you can create unique runs or aisles that work for you. You can work these units into your displays to ensure your store flows and customers don’t bunch up where people stop to browse the magazines or cards, which can cause your store to look over-crowded or badly planned.

Storing Cigarettes

When it comes to storing cigarettes, the new rules make it very clear that you need to keep all cigarettes need sliding doors or screens fitted, otherwise the store owner can face hefty fines. To avoid this, make sure your cigarette gantry complies with the rules when it comes to storing tobacco products.

Shelving4Shops offers a cost-effective, high quality cigarette gantry, which features sliding doors as standard - these are easily fitted to make sure you adhere to the law and don’t find yourself getting fined! Each cigarette gantry from Shelving4Shops comes with cigarette pushers and dividers to help you keep stock of your tobacco products. This also enables you to store at least 112 different types of cigarettes with 7 separate, adjustable shelves. The gantry is a compact size and can be wall mounted or put on a shelf meaning it takes up little space behind the counter. Epos strips are fitted to the front of the shelves, allowing you to clearly display the prices of your tobacco products.  

Make sure you choose the right storage products for your store to give your customers the best shopping experience and help your business boom!  

Make The Most Of What You’ve Got

The best floor plans will make the most of your store’s square footage, while creating displays that offer your customers the best shopping experience and give a good impression of your company. It’s worth researching the best floor plan for your type of business, as what is best for a convenience store, for example, may not be the best for a specialist shop.

A diagonal floor plan gives great visibility for both cashiers and customers, and encourages positive traffic flow for a self serve type of shop. Your wall spaces are very much useable, maximising on the space available for both displaying and using signage to help your customers shop and encourage impulse buys.

If you have a more specialist store, then it’s worth putting the effort into making your store look high end and more expensive, conveying the message that you sell exciting, high quality products. Use your space more liberally and look at an angular floor plan, with curves and soft angles to make displays that more focussed on individual products.

If you sell clothing, take a look at geometric floor plans, which are great for creating displays that are “out of the ordinary” without costing you an arm and a leg to set up. You can create feature points and use signage to let customers know where to find what.

For high quality display units, take a look at Shelving4Shops and their great range that will help you set up shop without breaking the bank. We know how important it is to get a great set up on a budget to balance the books, so we sell both new and used units.

Visit our showroom or give us a call to chat over how we can help!

Perfect Planning!

Your floor plan is the foundation of your store, so it’s crucial that you spend time working out what will be best for you and, ultimately, will produce the most sales and gain you the most profit.

You have several options to work with when it comes to floor plans, and Shelving4Shops are always happy to offer help and advice when you’re making those critical decisions. The most common and most efficient layout for smaller businesses is the straight floor plan. Here you have all the fixtures and displays at right angles, making the most of your floor space. Even corners can be successfully used to display your products- and Shelving4Shops has a great range of corner display units!

Straight floor plans accommodate all the major types of display unit, including gondola, wire and slatwall, so you’re options are still wide open when it comes to choosing the right unit for your products. Shelving4Shops have a range of different units which can be customised to work for your business. By carefully planning out your store, you can still work in any feel or theme you want to!

An “angle” floor plan is a bit misleading, as it is more of a “curved” floor plan, using curves to create a more sophisticated and visually diverse feel. This plan ends up with less display room, therefore it’s more commonly used by stores that have less products to sell or require less space, such as a jewellers, for example. Their products do get more emphasis, so this is more for high end retailers.

The mixed floor plan gives you the versatility to use a number of different set-ups, including angular, straight and diagonal. This is ideal for stores that have a variety of different products that need to be displayed with different vibes in different areas. You can highlight different products and create clear sections to your store, as this plan gives you plenty of flexibility.

However you choose to plan your store, Shelving4Shops gives you the ultimate choice in display units and we’re always here to help!

Avoiding Retail Disaster Zones

When a customer enters a shop, it takes a good few steps before they actually start engaging with the store and the surroundings. As important as that first impression is, it’s also important to help the customer “decompress” and take note of your goods. It therefore makes sense to not overload the customer by placing masses of products at the entrance - many of these will only get overlooked anyway as the customer walks past before they’ve started to properly engage. It’s better to place a few key items near the entrance and focus on using lighting and flooring that contrasts the outside environment. This will help the customer slow down and help them adjust to the store, to help them start processing what they see.

Make sure you pay close attention to your checkout area. Too often these are overcrowded and overloaded, so make sure the last impression a customer gets of your store is a good one. Although it’s tempting to place lots of items at the checkout to encourage impulse-buying, if you put too much up there, customers are more likely to ignore the white noise of too many products. Instead place a few well-signed items to get the customer’s attention without blinding them with too much. Make sure your staff have enough space too, while making sure your countertops are of high quality, attractive materials. You don’t want your customers to take away a claustrophobic and cheap feeling when they leave your shop!

When planning your aisles and space, take care to make sure pathways are left unobstructed and gaps are big enough to pass by without a customer accidentally brushing against another. Most people are quite particular about their personal space, and no one wants their intruded upon when they’re shopping and minding their own business! So ensure no one is put off buying by having their personal space invaded when browsing your products.

If you need any further help or advice feel free to visit our website or come and see us at our showroom.

Presentation, Presentation, Presentation!

By the time a customer has walked through your doors, they have already received several impressions of your store - by word of mouth, your front window display and any advertising you’ve done. The last chance you have to create an impression is by the actual product presentation in the store. It’s worth thinking about the way you do this and taking time to plan what you want your store to convey to customers as they enter and look around.

Will you go for a formal or a more relaxed style? Deciding this very much depends on the products you offer and the type of customers these attract. You’ll either need a professional, tidy layout or something more fun and relaxed. The store should always be a comfortable place to shop, so don’t make your aisles too small or cram too many products in one space, as it’s one way to make your customers abandon the store quickly.

Instead make sure all your products are organised neatly, either stacked or lined up in a orderly fashion. Regularly check your shelves to ensure products don’t become disorganised or messy, as this will give off the wrong impression to your customer. Neatly stacked products will always convey much more than just your stock levels - it says you care about the items you sell and the customer service you offer everyone who walks through your doors.

Make sure you clearly label each product that’s displayed, so people don’t have to ask or search around for a price or details. Nothing is more off-putting or disillusioning to customers than an unmarked item - and most will put the item back rather than asking or bringing it to the till.

Remember, you want your customers to not only come in but to come back to your store, so create a lasting impression that they’ll take away with them, but which will encourage them to come back too.

Using Our High Quality High End Bays!

Versatile high end bay units from Shelving4Shops are great for displaying a whole range of different products. Each unit can be configured to suit your needs, so there’s a few things you need to check before you buy:

• What will you be placing on the shelves?
• How tall are the items?

• Will you need a tilt to the shelves?
• If you need the tilt, what risers will you use - acrylic or wire?

It’s worth taking the time to measure your items to make sure you get the shelf height and depth right for your needs. We have 4 different widths available, so you can choose the right bay for your store. These look great alongside gondola units and sit flush against them to give your store a professional look.

The unit from Shelving4Shops includes 5 coloured Epos Ticket Strips, with a range of different colours for you to choose from, allowing you to tailor your high end bay to match the design and colour scheme of your brand or store.

If you need some help finding the right solutions for your store, feel free to call us or drop into our showroom to see examples of all the units we hold in the range of sizes we stock. We have professional, experienced staff who will be happy to offer advice and talk you through the best options for your store in terms of both layout and value.

Getting Christmas Right

Did you know that an enticing scent encourages “lingering” or “dwell time” by up to 26%? This is just one of the small, finite details that high end retailers pay particular attention to when contemplating how to get the most out of shoppers during the Christmas shopping period. Placing delicious scents, such as cinnamon and orange, that instantly evoke thoughts of Christmas encourage shoppers to slow down and spend more time browsing your products.

Music is also a big influence on a person’s mood, again influencing “dwell time” and therefore how much a person buys. Studies have shown that customers take approximately 17% longer to browse a shop aisle while music with a slower beat (approximately 60 beats per minute) was played, while sales increased by 38%. This means carefully choosing your Christmas music- with no crazy remixes of Jingle Bells or Deck The Halls!

Another concept to consider and utilise is exclusivity. People see things as innately more valuable if an item is exclusive, seeing it as a better way to express their individuality and identity. If you can offer exclusivity, your store stands to gain- and it’s a great way to draw customers in. Exclusive items make a great gift, as people feel better about giving something that isn’t a “common” item. Personal touches make a gift more unique and appealing.

Create the entertainment factor in your store during the Christmas period. As online shopping becomes more and more accessible, people are less inclined to enter a shop- unless they know that they’ll get something “extra” from going in. Offering incentives such as free mulled wine, hot chocolate or even a pop-up Christmas-themed show, willencourage customers through your doors. It will also slow down their browsing, encouraging them again to “linger” over your products, adding valuable purchasing influence.