Whether starting a brand-new pharmacy from scratch or remodeling an existing store into something new and exciting, you'll be facing a long list of items that need to be accomplished. None of these will be any more important than the selection of the retail fixtures you choose to incorporate into your store's front-end section.
While it's known that the greatest income generation in an independent pharmacy comes from the sale of prescription medications, these are items customers will already have on their lists when entering your drugstore. It's the other hundreds or thousands of products you'll be displaying in your front-end merchandising area that will require your special attention if you're to be successful in producing the “add-on” sales to complement your prescription business and carry you over the top in boosting your bottom line.
Impulse Buys
According to the experts, approximately 60% of the sales you'll make from items in your merchandising section represent impulse buys. These are items your customers don't have on their shopping lists and likely don't even know they want to buy until they're confronted with your clever displays designed to attract their attention, convey the prospect of adding a certain item to their purchases and then closing the sale at the checkout counter.
Many drugstore customers may come in specifically with the intention of having a prescription filled and nothing else. That's why locating your prescription drop-off counter at the rear of the store makes sense. Not only does this give your clients the opportunity to walk by displays set up to entice their interest and attention but, if done strategically, properly installed retail fixtures will direct your customers' foot traffic to provide them a route that will allow a view of most of the store's merchandising areas.
Types of Retail Fixtures
While retail fixtures are available in numerous sizes and styles, the types most commonly used for product display in pharmacies include:
- Gondolas, which are double-sided shelves that lend themselves well to creating aisles in the center section of your store. End-caps can be added to the ends of these shelving units to display items to which you want to draw special attention. These shelves can also be butted up against walls in order to create dead-end aisles, which can be useful for maintaining security from would-be shoplifters
- Wall units are one-sided shelves normally fitted against the store's perimeter walls and used for the display of a wide array of products through the use of accessories available in addition to just shelves. These include hooks, hangers, bins, baskets and other attachments that are designed to fit on either pegboard or slat wall panels.
Your Retail Fixtures Define Your Selling Environment
There are many facets of interior pharmacy design to take into consideration, such as floor and wall surfaces, colors, lighting, signage, foot-traffic flow, shelving and various display fixtures. Everything together helps create the mood of your store and the way people feel when they walk in the door and down through the aisles. Shelving ranks high on the list as most important. Think about it. Without the shelves, you'd have one, big open space filled with piles of product! With creatively designed and installed shelving, however, even if the other aspects of your interior design motif aren't the best, you can still have a formidable merchandising area.
When building a new pharmacy, study your shelving requirements up front, at the beginning stages of your project development. Make sure to budget early for your shelving needs, and design your store's layout around the shelves you select rather than the other way around.
