Here’s How You Design a Retail Space to Engage Customers

Let’s face it: getting a customer into your retail space is only half the battle. There’s the unique challenge of guiding buyers to certain key areas of your store. And if you’d like to lead customers to high-profit products, or “hot spots,” you’re going to need a great floor plan. 

While a great plan, one that’s optimized with displays near or enroute to desirable items, can boost sales, it won’t design itself. Fortunately, there are a handful of tried-and-true techniques to get customers to high-profit items. Here are a couple of useful pointers to create an engaging retail space and customer journey, which drive sales.

Create a Flow

A first step is to strategically place essential items in such a way that it creates a flow of customers past key areas of the store. Here’s a classic example: it’s very common that a grocer put milk and bread in the back of a store so that customers must walk past each display to reach those essentials, improving the possibility of those customers picking up more items. Makes sense, right? 

The quality of how a product is displayed is also a motivating factor. There are certain fixtures and locations that do better than others. There’s evidence that a Free Standing Unit (also called a FSDU) is effective at boosting sales. And they can be shuffled around a store, including key sales areas. Bulk displays of promotional or high-profit products are another effective, easy way to present to a customer a product that is on sale or new to market. An end cap, also called a gondola, is a great tool to promote or launch a new product. Finally, any high-traffic area with great visibility, such as a check out, is an ideal spot for promotion.

Have a Map

Waste is the enemy of a great floor plan. And a store planning software such as Scorpion Planogram gives retailers the tools to maximize their floor space by using square footage and display measurement data. This allows retailers to get the most out of their store and eliminate wasted space. 

Scorpion tests a plan – its layout of departments, categories and displays – before you put in the time, energy and resources to physically arrange a store. On top of that, it gives you the confidence that you’ve optimized your space and can begin engaging buyers immediately by getting your floor plan right the first time. 

It uses data and available space to find if a plan will work and is backed by easy-to-use data analytics, which allows the retailer to:

• Gauge the performance of a department and its displays 
• Highlight “hot spots” in a store
• Use data to outline spots for high value, high profit margin, promotional or new-to-market products on FSDUs, bulk displays or end caps

In short: Scorpion Planogram Store Planning takes the guesswork out of your store’s planning and performance. It puts all the tools you need to get started – planogram design, fixture design and store layout design – at your fingertips, and is supported by a user-friendly data analytics and interface, which makes it easy to use and get started.