Think about the retail shelving in your store for a minute. It certainly holds your products efficiently and neatly, right? It can do so much more, though. With the right retail shelving, you can actually optimize your store's layout, make it easy for customers to shop, and boost your sales.
The right retail shelving can help you optimize your store layout
- Gondola shelving creates your store layout's "infrastructure"
Have you thought about going to the trouble of having actual physical construction work done to your store to create your floor layout? Don't. In most cases, gondola shelving is sturdy, stationary, and utilitarian enough to "construct" most if not all of the floor layout for you, with no extra expense.
It is sturdy, but allows you to change your floor layout whenever you wish
Gondola shelving looks sturdy and immobile, but it's not. You can quickly and easily reconfigure your floor layout by reassembling gondola wall units, endcaps, islands and runs into new configurations quickly and easily, whenever you need to. For example, even though a standard layout may work well most of the time, you may want to open up space to create a specific display for a new, hot, or best-selling item. Gondola shelving lets you do that.
- Other retail shelving options provide interesting counterpoints that "lead" customers around your store
Put displays at the ends of aisles to give customers something to focus on and be drawn to. Construct your store layout so that new departments (with their own visually enticing displays) are immediately adjacent to the ends of aisles so that customers will be drawn to those, too.
Strategically placed displays of this type – such as tabletop, movable slatted gondola units, slatwall, or endcap – keep customers' attention so that they are subtly guided around the store from one display to the next, from one department to the next. They will never miss anything you have to offer, because they will see everything.
Make sure you set up display "breaks" within aisles, too
Long aisles of uninterrupted product cause people to "zone out" so that they often do not even see what's there. You can get around this problem by setting up small displays in the middle of particularly long aisles so that you create a visual "break." These breaks allow customers to pause and take in not only the display itself, but the products actually offered in the aisle.
Creating an optimal store layout
- Guide your customers to the right
When you set your gondola shelving up, make sure the traffic patterns you establish guide your customers to the right. When customers first enter the store, they will look left, and then go right; the foot traffic "path" you create should generally go counterclockwise in a circular pattern around the store.
- Make sure customers can see every department from the "footpath" you construct
Ideally, the footpath you construct through the store with your gondola shelving layout will allow your customers to see every department at a glance from it. Set up this way, customers can quickly break away from the central footpath to look at interesting display or browse, and then rejoin traffic when they're ready to continue on.
It's not difficult to create a store layout that is going to make your customers' shopping experiences easier and more enjoyable. In fact, you don't have to do much if any construction at all to make that happen. Instead, use gondola shelving as your store layout mainstay to create the actual, formal layout "infrastructure." Then, use other retail shelving and fixtures to create elements that will showcase much-needed displays and features.
