Are you a happy retailer?

by: Modulus

4 years ago

505

No Comments

React

4 min read

Retailing can be one of the most rewarding sectors to work in – day-to-day contact with customers who really want to buy your product and who love your brand.

But it can also be one of the hardest places to find success. At the start of 2016, there were a record number of private sector businesses in the UK – 5.5 million, and the retail sector accounts for 10% of all businesses in the UK.

That makes retail a potentially powerful sector, and it also makes it highly competitive, particularly in the fashion, footwear and sporting goods areas, where brand loyalty can be difficult to obtain, multi-channel sales is the best way to gain a foothold in the market, and prices are constantly under pressure.

How do you become successful?

The formula for retail success would seem to be pretty simple:

Create or fulfil a demand
Source or develop products at a price your target market is prepared to pay
Make it easy to find and buy your products
Deliver great customer service
Offer incentives to shop again or recommend to others

When retailers fail, it’s often because they haven’t delivered across all these steps, and that’s often not because of lack of energy or time or investment; it may simply be because although it looks simple, it’s actually pretty hard to succeed in all those areas without a little help.

Let’s take stock:

Planning and organisation are essential to helping you make that formula work. Happy retailers don’t tend to do things on an ad hoc basis – all their decisions are based on understanding their customers, planning ahead, having a strategy for the future, and having highly organised business processes.

Your customer wants to find their target product easily, see what options there are in terms of colour, size and style, order quickly and have the product as soon as possible. Whether you’re fulfilling that order from a retail store, your own website, a concession store within a wider retail space or another online marketplace, you still need to meet your customer’s expectations. And that means:

Selecting the right stock for your target market
Holding the right quantities of stock based on what you know about your customers’ buying habits
Being able to locate the right stock quickly and easily
Being able to move stock between stores or locations to satisfy customer needs
Being able to respond to queries and returns quickly and easily
Having a way of selling broken size stock, sale stock or unwanted stock

A surprising thought

Happy retailing is about being relaxed about your business. If you’re a retailer working all the hours in the day in order to make ends meet, that might sound surprising, but you can work hard and be relaxed at the same time.
And that relaxation is all about knowing you have the strategy, planning and systems in place to support your plans for the future.

Over the coming months, we’ll be showing you how you can join the happy retailing band – the retailers who have made positive decisions to give their business the support it needs in order to give their customers the service they deserve.

Bookmark our site so you can come back and read more, follow us on Twitter, or just search for #HappyRetailing