7 Tips for Merchandising with Wholesale Products

Running a brick-and-mortar retail business in the Digital Age can be incredibly challenging. When more and more people are turning to the Internet and retail giants like Amazon to source the products they need, you’re working to get buyers to come into a physical store.

There’s good news – more people are patronizing smaller establishments these days, whether they’re “showrooming” (a process of window shopping before buying online) or they’re interested in supporting local businesses.

So, while you should definitely have a website to showcase your products, or use Amazon’s platform for greater reach, you can definitely run a successful physical store. The trick is to know how to merchandise the wholesale products you buy.

1. Target Male Shoppers

Dubbed “the menaissance” by Forbes, the growing trend of men shopping cannot be ignored in your merchandising of wholesale products. Forbes reports that men are outspending women by 13% today, so you need to focus on products that appeal to this demographic. No, that doesn’t mean you need a huge assortment of power tools or outdoor grills. Instead, focus on displaying menswear prominently in your store.

Image via: Forbes

2. Know Your Customers

It’s becoming more and more important for retail store owners to personalize the shopping experience of their patrons in order to get them in the door. That means you need to know your audience. Dig deep – what’s your niche? Who’s your target customer? What are the various segments of the market that you serve? With this information, you can buy wholesale products that appeal to your ideal customer and then highlight those products throughout your store, on your website, and in your marketing collateral.

3. Market Your Merchandise Front and Center

The entire point of merchandising is to make sure that your customers are able to find what they want, but to put the focus on the products that matter the most to you, the retailer, as well. Maybe you’re running a limited time special and want to make sure that those wholesale products sell well and quickly.

Perhaps you’ve invested in wholesale products that you are going to bundle together to provide more value and need to make sure that your customers find them. Put your most important items front and center – use floor displays to highlight these products. Build a display in your shop window, or stack several items near the cash register. The point is that any item you need to sell quickly or bring to your customers’ attention must be highly visible. Put it front and center.

4. Endcap Key Stock in Your Store

Looking for a way to merchandise wholesale products to ensure that they catch the attention of your customers without giving up too much floor or shelf space for a limited product run? The answer just might be to endcap those products. Endcaps can provide dramatic visibility when used correctly.

You’ll need to make sure to use signage to call attention to the product, and to ensure that your most important items are on primary endcaps. Rear endcaps can be useful, but remember that most of your customers’ focus will be on your front endcaps. However, endcaps are really only useful with products that can be stacked, or that can be displayed in rows (boxes, bottles and the like). They’re not really ideal for things like clothing unless you can remove the shelves and use pegs to hang your items.

5. Use Signage to Direct Your Customers

If your store carries a wide range of items and you want to direct your customers to those wholesale products, you can use signage to achieve that goal. Hang a large sign from the ceiling tiles to grab attention and draw your customers toward that area. Use other signage throughout the store to direct attention toward the area in which your wholesale products are displayed.

6. Cross-Sell with Merchandising

Cross-selling is a crucial consideration for all retail businesses. Is your customer buying a pair of running shoes? You’ll probably suggest they buy an extra pair of laces, or maybe some athletic socks. Is your customer buying dress shoes? They’ll need some polish with those.

Cross-selling allows you to bolster profitability while offering additional value to your customers, creating a win-win scenario. You can accomplish this in a number of ways, but one of the best is to merchandise items correctly. For instance, let’s say you run an electronics store and sell not just smartphones, but also accessories.

While it’s probably not possible to merchandise all of your accessories with the phones you sell, you could definitely merchandise some of your more popular accessories such as headphones right beside the cellphones they’re designed to work with. This delivers automatic cross-selling capabilities. When done correctly, you can actually lead your customer from the primary purchase (the phone) to nearby accessories, and then to other accessories merchandised on an adjacent fixture, ensuring that they’re able to find exactly what they need with minimum hassle and fuss.

7. Stock Products At the Cash Wrap

Your merchandising doesn’t only need to take place on the sales floor. Your cash wrap is a vital consideration, and it should be used for more than just impulse buys. You can create strategic displays near or even at your cash wrap that highlight wholesale products that you’re using as in-store specials or incentives, or that have been deeply discounted.

While space might be limited at the cash wrap, this is a prime place for you to highlight the products that you want your customers to pay the most attention to. Remember that every single customer that buys from you has to visit this area of the store, so items displayed here see significantly more attention than those in many other areas of the store.

With these tips, you should be able to successfully merchandise your wholesale products, grab your customers’ attention, and build your profitability and success.

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