CategoryRetail Advice

Requests from schools, charities, and other local community groups can be a challenging for local small business retailers. They are often made by people who have never shopped with you and may never shop with you.

Guilt is a powerful emotion, and some representing charities and community groups know this. Take a beat and think through how you want to handle such requests in advance of them coming your way. If you have a process you can deal with the requests consistently and with less stress.

Here’s our advice for local small business retailers on handling community group donation requests:

• Manage your philanthropy like any business activity. Decide how much money you’re willing to donate each year, and then stick to that budget.
• Get on the front foot. Write to community groups at the start of the year and ask them to submit a proposal if they’d like your support. This way, you can choose the groups that are a good fit for your business and your community.
• Support the groups that support you. Look for groups that have members who are also your customers. This way, you’re helping both the group and your business.
• Let your shoppers choose. If you offer discount vouchers, you could let customers donate their vouchers to a local group. This is a great way to get your customers involved in your community giving.
• Reward engagement. You could offer a discount to customers who are members of a local group. This would encourage them to shop at your business, and it would also support the group. This is critical advice. There has to be a commercial benefit for your business if you are to be able to help these community groups into the future.
• Educate groups about good engagement. Let groups know that you’re looking for ways to work together to benefit the community. You could ask them to do things like promote your business on their social media pages, or write about you in their newsletters.
• Write about your engagement. Once you’ve chosen the groups you’re going to support, write about it on your website and social media. Don’t be boastful or arrogant, be grateful. This will help to raise awareness of the groups, and it will also show your customers that you’re committed to giving back to the community.

Remember, your giving should serve both your heart and your business. By following these tips, you can make sure that your donations are a valuable investment for both you and your community.

Here are some additional tips:

• Be clear about your expectations. Let groups know what you’re looking for in a partnership, and what you expect from them in return.
• Be professional. Even if you’re dealing with a small community group, it’s important to be professional in your dealings with them.
• Be grateful. When a group partners with you, be sure to thank them for their support.

By following these tips, you can build strong relationships with community groups and make a real difference in your community.

As retailers ourselves for decades, we have learnt first-hand that less is more works when it comes to visual noise in the shop.

Less signs, posters and other visual blocks can impede retail sales. Here’s our practical, no nonsense approach to reducing visual noise in pursuit of sales growth.

If you give your customers too many things to look at inside or outside your business, they will notice less.  Your choices show them what you want them to look at

Less is more. Have less visual noise, less visual pollution, and more will be noticed.

Show your customers what you want them to notice by giving that product, range or display fresh air (visually) around it.

Take a look today, right now, at the visual noise in your shop. It is easy:

Stand at the door of your business facing into the shop and scan around counting the signs you can read and displays you can see.

How many are there?

More messages, more signs = less noticing them.

Yes, less is more.

Here is advice for less visual noise in your business:

1. Edit. Every few days stand at the front of the shop and review your signage and edit the mix.
2. Posters and signs. Do not put up any poster or sign unless it is absolutely necessary.
3. Housekeeping notices. Have all customer notices, such as your exchange policy, discount policy, minimum eftpos charge etc, all in the one unobtrusive place. Neat. Clean.
4. Call to action signs. If you have items on sale or discounted, place them all in the one location, a designated sale location in your business, with simple and professional signage.
5. Product signs. For product signage in-store, be consistent in style and look. Smaller signs next to products will work better than big signs from the ceiling – how often do your shoppers walk in looking up anyway?
6. Colour block. Colour blocked product is more appealing to the eye, it looks less messy, less noisy.
7. The counter.  Again, edit for clarity, edit for focus on the messages that really matter.
8. Be clean. Look for clean sight lines, where your products are the feature. Use products themselves to tell stories.

It is common for retailers to say that shoppers don’t look in the shop. An alternative what to look at this is to say that you are going about trying to catch shopper attention in the wrong way.

Reducing visual noise will improve the experience for your shoppers and for those who work in the business. It will focus everyone on what you decide matters the most right now.

This visual boise advice applied to your front window if you have one. What’s the message? Is it clear? Is it focussed? Is it getting attention on the street? the answers will guide you as to what to do next.

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Thanks to our retail experience, we are able to provide suggestions b beyond the POS software. This is another differentiating factor for us, for which we are sincerely grateful.

Retailers often complain about the cost of accepting payment by cards compared to cash.

The thing is, every method of payment has a cost, including cash. In my experience working with retailers, the cost of cash is higher because of theft. However, it is not easily seen, especially in retail businesses that do not research or teach theft.

Here are some business ideas for addressing the cost of EFTPOS:

1. Promote cash payment – if you want the costs associated with cash of course.
2. Be clear as to the cost of using a card. You could apply a surcharge, which I think is a ridiculous idea though.
3. Price knowing that cards will be used by customers. Build the cost into your pricing model. Keep the bump under 1.5% and it is less likely to be noticed.
4. Lower a cost elsewhere to cover the cost. Shaving a hour of employee rostered time can save you around $30.00, that’s equal to purchases of $3750.00 on a card – depending on the type of card used.
5. Increase sales. While you should be focussed on this anyway, increasing sales helps you address the EFTPOS cost and more in the business.

If you are annoyed/upset/angry about EFTPOS fees, we suggest you look at parts of your business over which you have control and that offer a better return from your physical and emotional attention:

1. Dead stock. A problem not seen is not a problem to too many. In the average indie retail business, dead stock is equal to at least 3% of turnover.
2. Stop running out of stock. Manual process for stock reordering, by retailers and suppliers, regularly result in sell-outs, and, therefore, missed sales. Every time that happens it is a cost to the business. In a retail business I looked at recently, the cost of sell-outs was more than $12,000 in a year, or $6,000 in gross profit, all because of poor re-ordering management.
3. Bloated roster. Some prefer to spend money on people so they have time to themselves for relaxing, golf or to sit in the back office, where no customer purchases from. I often see a bloat cost equal to around 10% of the roster.
4. Wrong trading hours. Some stay open too long while others are not open long enough. Either way has a cost to the business.
5. Being blind to theft. Theft in local indie retail costs on average between 3% and 5% of turnover. Not watching for it, tracking it and mitigating against it has a cost to the business.
6. The wrong product mix. GP% is a key measure of retail business performance. Increasing yours beyond what is traditional for your channel provides you with a buffer. For example, transaction count / sales can decline and you can be okay. Measure GP%. Set a goal. Chase it. The air is cleaner in above average.
7. Ignorance. No, it’s not bliss. There are insights in your software that can guide better decisions, faster decisions, more financially rewarding decisions. Yet, too many in retail don’t want to know. That failure costs them plenty.

The items on the above list are all on the retailer to address. The benefit is that addressing these results in a stronger, leaner and more valuable retail business.