I hope that you will stop by every Monday my weekly blog either here or at www.specialty-shop-retailing.com, and also that you will subscribe to my free podcasts.  It is my pleasure to help my fellow retailers in every way I can, and I think that whether you are a seasoned veteran or a newbie, there will be ideas that you will find useful in my book, Specialty Shop Retailing: Everything You Need to Know to Run Your Own Store.  

Happy Retailing!

Carol Schroeder

I usually advise retailers looking for merchandising to imagine their typical customer walking through the front door of the shop.  Is the shopper male or female? Under 20, over 40, or perhaps over 60?  What income level does the customer fit into?

This exercise helps you select items that have the right sense of style, and the right range of prices, for your target demographic. It also helps you select the background music for the store, and where you advertise. We would not, for example, play hip hop in our shop (although I do enjoy the rhyme) or advertise regularly in the student newspapers here in Madison.

My second day in retailing was terrible. The customer who bought a Danish chair (back then we sold furniture) on our first day returned it, resulting in a negative sales figure for day number two. I was devastated.

Since that time I’ve learned that returns are just a part of the retail landscape, and if you accept them as such life will be less stressful. Customers consider the opportunity to change their mind to be an essential right, and will take their business elsewhere if you adhere to a customer-hostile return policy.

What would be considered a customer-friendly policy? One of the most common policies is to accept a return within 30 days for a refund with a cash register or gift receipt. At our store we allow for returns beyond that time, or without a receipt, for credit only. Others allow only for exchange or credit no matter what the time involved.

Now that the last trick-or-treaters have long since headed home, with visions of candy corn dancing through their heads, it’s time for visions of sugarplums to start taking their place.  For many specialty retailers, the start of November means the start of the holiday season.  

You need to be thinking of the holidays now even if you are not going to put your Christmas merchandise on display yet (and customer do complain that it comes out earlier every year, even though the timing for most stores hasn’t changed much over the past decade or so).   Here is a check-list you may find helpful:

As we head into the holiday season, we need to have faith in the fact that shoppers will soon be coming into our stores, money in hand, to make our cash registers jingle happily with sale after sale. (I’ve been in retailing since back when registers actually did ring when the cash drawer opened, but that fine tradition seems to be lost in this era of beeping POS systems.)

There is a book making its debut next week that should make comforting night-time reading for all retailers: Shoptimism: Why The American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What, by Lee Eisenberg.  Described as “an entertaining guided tour through the parallel worlds of selling and buying,” Eisenberg’s book explores how marketing, retailing, advertising, and consumer-research forces take aim at the American buyer, then delves into to the psychology of buying.

Shoppers with dogs may be willing to leave them outside while they browse in your store, especially if you provide a bowl of water and a place to tie the leash. But shoppers with children are going to bring them in.  Ready or not, here they come!

The shopping experience will be more pleasant for you, and your customers, if you have a few distractions on hand for the little ones.  A big basket of books appropriate for a variety of ages will keep some children occupied.  Toddlers might enjoy playing with sturdy wooden or plastic toys, although you will need to clean these before sharing with other visiting children.

The most important welcome sign you hang in front of your store may not say “welcome.”  According to the 2008 census figures, about 18% of all U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home.  And that does’t take into account foreign visitors who are in the U.S.

How are you using your Facebook fan page?

You don’t need to do much advertising if your store is located across the street from the famous Wall Drug in South Dakota.  Wall Drug does that for you, promoting their famous “free ice water” and 5¢ coffee to anyone traversing the state’s highways.

A recent study by the digital division of the National Retail Federation showed that over half the consumers queried occasionally used video to research products.