Achieving impressive sales levels is about more than simply offering attractive products. If you want the goods to fly off your shelves, you’ll need to get to grips with the basics of shopping psychology. It’s only by really understanding what makes your customers tick that you’ll be able to achieve the results you’re after. So, to help you boost sales in your stores, here are three interesting facts about retail psychology.
1) ‘Dwell zones’ are key to enticing customers
The way you set your shop up could have a huge bearing on how much money you make. For example, take the ‘dwell zone’. This is the space located just inside your front door. According to retail experts, it is not a good place to position products because when consumers enter this area from the street, their senses are overwhelmed by the changes in smells, temperature, sounds and lighting, meaning they are unlikely to put much thought into the products they see. Rather than filling this space with goods, it’s best to lure people further into your shop using appealing and informative signage. Department stores often utilise this zone for directories, while fashion outlets tend to promote the season’s top trends.
To ensure this part of your store looks the part and helps to entice consumers further in, it’s a good idea to display attractive and dynamic digital signage. Point of sale installation and maintenance experts CJ Retail Solutions note that such signage can offer an effective and affordable way to communicate with shoppers. These solutions also allow you to update your marketing messages at the click of a button, meaning you can keep your content up-to-date.
2) Shelf setup can have a big impact on buying decisions
The way you position your goods on your shelves could also have a major impact on your bottom line. Experiments have shown that when people walk down shop aisles, they often focus on the shelves that are level with their eyes. For this reason, it’s wise to place the products with the biggest profit margin at eye-level.
It’s also worth putting your most profitable goods, and any you hope people to purchase on impulse, at the end of aisles as these areas tend to get plenty of traffic.
Even the way you lay your products out on your shelves could help to drive your sales. Retailers often use a tactic called ‘triangular balance’, which means they put the biggest products with the highest profit margins at the centre of their shelves and arrange other products around them in descending size order to create an attractive display. Because people’s eyes are automatically drawn to the centre of these patterns, they may be more likely to opt for the larger, pricier goods.
3) Music can sway shoppers
Even the music you play in your shop could influence your customers’ shopping decisions. Research conducted by a team from Leicester University found that when French music was played in the wine aisle of a supermarket, sales of French bottles increased. The following day, German folk music was played and this led to a rise in sales of German wine.
This might be a crude example, but it’s certainly well worth trying to find music that has a positive effective on the purchasing behaviour of shoppers in your store.