If sales at your independent pharmacy aren't what you'd hoped, strategic use of pharmacy shelving can help you make attractive displays that will catch customers' attention – and will make products easier to find, too.
Here's how you can practice merchandising and display optimization for your pharmacy
Display seasonal items prominently
Is it cold and flu season? Make sure you display cold and flu medications, as well as allergy remedies and general pain relievers, prominently and together so that customers can see these items as soon as they enter the store. Use big signs with bright colors that clearly mark what the display contains. This allows customers to have "one-stop shopping" if they've only come in for cold or flu medications.
In addition to placing these items in their own visible and seasonal displays, keep items in their requisite departments in the aisles, too. Putting high volume seasonal items in more than one location makes them that much easier to find -- and place them near or in the checkout aisles' shelving, too.
Change your displays often
Old familiar displays become invisible after a while; the best displays may not be seen by customers who visit your store a lot just because they're too familiar. Moving things around and changing things up a bit with new dynamic, interesting displays will help pique customers' interest, and they'll also be more likely to come back and see what you do next.
Don't forget the front of your store
Use the front of your store to prominently display seasonal items (like the aforementioned cold and flu season supplies) and to introduce new or unusual products. Again, be sure to change your displays on at least a monthly basis. If you introduce new or "quirky" items every month, customers will begin to look forward to coming in so that they can see what you've done to the front of your store this month, and will enjoy looking through new products they haven't seen before. Once they've seen the new products, you can put them in their appropriate departments on standard pharmacy shelving – although it's also a good idea to create easy to access endcaps for popular, high volume items that sell.
Focus on creating displays that showcase so-called "destination" purchases
Chances are, your customers come to your pharmacy to get their needs met: they need their prescriptions, and then they probably also need vitamins, over-the-counter cold medications, cotton swabs, adhesive bandages, hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol, etc.
You may think it's counter-intuitive to take up valuable space by creating displays with these staples, but think again. When you make "must haves" easy to find by creating visible displays of them, you help induce customer loyalty. In addition, pharmacy shelving can arranged in an endless number of configurations, so that you use your space most effectively.
Don't forget about the checkout lanes
Stock the pharmacy shelving in the checkout lanes with last-minute "impulse buys" – cotton swabs, pain relievers, travel sized bottles of shampoo, conditioner, hand sanitizer and body wash, candy, gum, magazines, batteries, and so forth.
Keep it clutter-free
Customers will be overwhelmed if you have an endless sea of endcaps and freestanding displays complete with bright signs when they come into your pharmacy. Instead, keep it clutter-free. Use pharmacy shelving to create freestanding displays, endcaps, etc., for seasonal and/or sale or clearance items, and then place prominent "sale" tags right on the standard retail shelving in the aisles where the products are displayed. Customers will be able to find what they need, without having to step around masses of freestanding pharmacy shelving displays.
