Planning your retail space is as crucial as any effort to make your retail business successful. It may look like a simple task, but there are a lot of details that can affect the purchase outcome. From creating a perfect footpath for customers that impacts sales to product placement in your retail shelves, planograms can help you hit the right spots.
What Is a Planogram?
To put it simply, a planogram is a schematic representation of your store layout with detailed attention to product placements based on sales data and customer behavior studies. In addition to visual merchandising, planograms help in managing inventories with accurate replenishments. You also know where everything is located in your store.
Larger retailers with multiple products and brands form various suppliers generally use planograms with accurate shelf analysis to fill the store.
The Benefits
Maximizing your sales and effectively using your retail space are the two significant aspects in which planogram benefits your retail business.
Maximize Sales
Using planograms in your store merchandising process is the best way to test and extract valuable insights on customer behaviors inside your store and how your product displays works. With this data, you can develop merchandising strategies in the future and capitalize on sales opportunities. You can also recognize the maximum-converting locations in your store, and you can display the products there that you want to prioritize. Studies prove that even the number of products displayed has an impact on sales.
Planograms allow for strategic product placement. This includes the number of facings a product should have on the shelf, the altitude of product placement, and supplementary products that should surround it. You can cross-sell with the help of historical data on what products sell more when placed next to what product. Bread and butter sell together. Likewise, the chance impulse purchase increases if you strategically place your most selling or the essential products on the far back of the store. This routes your customers through almost every product in your store.
Maximize Space
The cost of retail space depends on usable space, store location, and many other factors. Mostly they are expensive. Hence efficient use of the space can be cost-effective. Every square inch of retail space is money. Also, a well-organized store can attract more customers and can be easy for your employees to manage.
Planograms not only assist you in in-store space management but also with inventory optimization and stock maintenance. Since every product and stock has its own place, your staff doesn’t have to scratch their heads when replenishing stock.
If you have multiple vendors and suppliers working with you, planograms provide the opportunity to create ownership of retail space and ensure consistency in shelf layout at all your store locations. This can help your customers have a similar and unique experience no matter which store they visit.