Traditional shops have to work extra hard to compete with the world of online shopping. Customers are incredibly fickle and online shopping is so much easier for them so one simple mistake could send them running for the door. People still prefer to buy certain products in a physical shop so you’ll still be able to find enough business as long as you’re offering a service that can match the ease and convenience of an online shop. These are some of the most common mistakes that retail stores make and how you can avoid them.

Not Offering Card Payments

If there’s one thing that will stop people from even coming into the shop in the first place, it’s a ‘cash only’ sign out front. A lot of people don’t even carry cash with them or they’ll only be carrying a little bit because you can pay on card pretty much anywhere. Cash is becoming even rarer now that phone payments are taking off so a shop that doesn’t offer card payments is going to struggle. If your card machines are broken, you need to get a mobile computer repair company in right away. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can get by just taking cash payments for a couple of days, you’ll see a huge drop in sales if you do. If you don’t have any card payment options at all, you need to invest in them right away. It’ll cost you some money up front but you won’t be alienating customers and you should see a spike in sales.

Making People Hunt For Products

When you go to a website to buy something, the first thing you do is type it into the search bar and 9 times out of 10, it pops up. The amount of effort it takes to find what you’re looking for is minimal and people want the same experience when they go into a physical shop. If the shop floor is badly laid out and there isn’t adequate signage to point people in the right direction, they’ll soon become frustrated and probably leave. You can easily solve this by grouping things in a logical way, putting your biggest sellers right near the door and hanging signs above each aisle so people can see exactly where they need to go as soon as they walk in.

Not Using The Checkout Area Properly

When a customer gets to the checkout, they’ve already decided that they’re willing to spend money in your shop. That gives you a good opportunity to upsell and increase the amount that they spend by offering more products. Put up good displays in the area where people will be queuing because they’re more likely to grab another small item on their way past. If you’re not taking advantage of that, you’re not selling as much as you could be. However, don’t go overboard with pushing things on customers when they get to the till because people do not like to be pressured and they probably won’t come back if they feel they have been.

Avoid these 3 mistakes and you should see an increase in profits in your retail store in no time.

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