The Ultimate Guide for Grocery Store Merchandising Ideas
Chances are unless you’ve spent the better part of your life living under a rock, you’ve been inside a supermarket. And if you’re like me and you feel like you spend too many hours of your week inside a grocery store, you might be saying to yourself, if I’ve seen one, I’ve seen them all. Well, that’s not necessarily true, but there is a reason why you get a familiar feeling no matter which type of supermarket you enter.
In a recent article featured in Business Insider, by 2023, grocery store sales are expected to exceed $38 billion.
As you could probably imagine, given those staggering numbers, companies spend millions of dollars on obtaining market research based on consumer preferences and utilizing that information to layout their supermarket in a specific manner that ensures higher net profits.
Now, as a consumer, it might surprise you to think that the layout of a store can play a significant factor in purchasing decisions. In fact, these companies are banking (excuse the pun) on that very fact.
For retailers, when we discuss supermarket store layout, only a fraction of the overall solution is successful merchandising.
In this article, we will outline the ultimate guide for grocery store merchandising ideas:
- Improve ROI with Smarter Product Releases
- Supermarket Design Strategy that Entices Sales
- Leverage Cross-Merchandising with Your Displays
- Go Back to the Basics: The 5 Rs of Merchandising
As a grocery store shelving manufacturer that produces retail gondola shelving for supermarkets, we will highlight the critical aspects retailers can leverage to properly merchandise your high-selling products and tips for practical grocery store layout and design.
Improve ROI with Smarter Product Resets
For the majority of supermarkets, resets are critical in meeting the ever-changing demand of consumers.
The process of manually resetting the category placement on shelves can be time-consuming (think vitamins, soda, and beauty items). Still, if done correctly, it will have a significant impact on your merchandising strategy.
From a practical standpoint, we all know that overnight is the ideal time to conduct shelving resets as your store is either closed or has less foot traffic in the middle of the night.
One tool that can be extremely helpful during a product reset is a planogram. A planogram is a visual representation of how a gondola shelving section should look in your supermarket with a product designed to increase sales.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, “why do I need to purchase a tool to tell me what I already know? Eye-level is the buy-level.”
And though that is undoubtedly true, planograms do an outstanding job by helping brands develop a profitable reset strategy. They also allow them to make their presentation on gondola shelves consistent across retailers easily.
Here is an interesting stat, did you know the average person spends only 41 minutes inside a grocery store?
Retailers need to make it easy for shoppers to identify their favorite products and walk away with that brand in their cart.
Supermarket Design Strategy that Entices Sales
I’m sure you’ve all heard of this line, “milk is displayed at the furthest part of the entrance so that shoppers will walk the entire store.”
And yes, that is, without question, a true statement as most grocery stores display milk at the furthest point to the front entrance.
From a merchandising design perspective, when laying out your grocery store, it’s imperative to highlight the areas that yield the most profitable items in your store.
In a grocery store environment, that means areas such as the bakery, frozen meats, deli counter, and prepared foods, unlike milk and butter, are all located near the front entrance so that those departments are frequented by consumers first.
This is why the design of your supermarket is so important.
Often, these items have over a 60% profit margin for grocery store owners and represent a significant amount of sales each day.
Many retail displays should be included in a grocery store layout outside of the most important such as gondola shelving, end caps, and sales counters.
One of the most effective store displays any supermarket can utilize is four-sided displayers.
These units are perfect for merchandising impulse items near and around checkout counters and accept any gondola shelf.
What makes them effective is you can order them on casters, thus making them a mobile display unit that can easily be moved based on your store’s needs.
Leverage Cross-Merchandising with your Displays
Cross-merchandising in retail is the concept of placing complementary products together on a retail display to entice impulse sales.
If you’ve been in retail for a while, you might conclude that consumers purchase solutions, not products. For example, in a liquor store environment, think red solo cups and ping pong balls for a specific game youngsters enjoy playing.
There are plenty of examples of grocery store cross-merchandising opportunities—wine and cheese, chips and dip, ice cream cones and sprinkles near ice cream, etc.
Most supermarkets do an excellent job with cross-merchandising, but like everything else, there is always room for improvement.
Luckily, numerous retail shelving displays allow retailers to accomplish a proper cross-merchandising strategy easily.
We all know how vital end caps are to the overall merchandising strategy of a grocery store. These attention-grabbing displays are often prime real estate for supermarkets looking to display a specific product they feel consumers will purchase.
Naturally, end caps displays are an ideal opportunity to promote cross-merchandising.
With display accessories such as grid end panels, retailers can merchandise similar products with grid hooks along the side of the end unit so that shoppers can easily place impulse items into their shopping cart.
The 5 Rs of Merchandising
And if you find that it’s getting too complicated – remember to go back to the basics.
A good merchandising strategy is built on simplicity: present the right product to the right people at the right time in the right way at the right price.
- The Right Product
- The Right People
- The Right Time
- The Right Way
- The Right Price
Are you looking for high-quality, easy-to-assemble store fixtures for your supermarket?
Having high-quality retail fixtures is the backbone of creating a successful merchandising strategy.
Storflex knows that business can be challenging, so we make getting the grocery store shelving you require simple. Contact us today to get started.