Floor Planning it’s a visual representation or retail blueprint of where and how to position your categories. We take a brief look at the function of floor planning, optimizing your approach, and what an effective strategy allows you to achieve at your stores.
In a nutshell, effective and data-driven floor planning has multiple important goals and benefits (both financially and practically)
Create a seamless shopping experience so customers return time and time again.
A floor plan with a data-driven, logical category flow that keeps related departments and categories together will ease the customer shopping experience.
Increase basket sizes.
Positioning high volume categories strategically in your stores and designing your floor plan in such a way that your customers are encouraged to move through more of your store during their daily or weekly shop can increase spend, you end up exposing shoppers to more merchandise.
Reduce clog-ups and congestion during peak shopping hours.
When floor planning is done smartly, your stores won’t seem chaotic or overcrowded during busy hours. With a data-driven floor plan, you can avoid positioning too many high-volume categories too close to one another. A logical category flow both maximizes customer experience and minimizes any irritations.
Grow your categories and improve sales.
A well-thought-out floor plan allows the various product groupings in your stores to grow by allocating each group the space relative to their overall sales contribution. By doing this, you allow each category the opportunity to grow naturally which will, in turn, improve your bottom line.
Re-evaluating your retail data every six months ensures that your store floor plan performs optimally.
Maximize the selling potential of your retail space:
If you want to maximize your sales opportunities, you need first to enhance the customer experience to encourage them to return.
But is it worth it? You only need to look at benefits that speak to the objectives of pleasing your customers and making your stores more money.