7 Tips for Opening Your First Retail Outlet

As most of us often purchase from eCommerce platforms, retailers are finding success online, there is still a market for brick and mortar retail shops, as there are many of us who prefer cash and carry, or want to see and try out the items in person before making a purchase.

If you are planning to open a brick and mortar retail business, you should consider the steps listed in this articles as part of your preparation process.

Generate an idea and business plan

The first step to opening a retail business is to define your business plan to define the type of store you want to set up. To get ideas and come up with a business plan, here are some questions you should answer:

• What products will your retail business carry?
• Who is your target market?
• Selling price?
• Who are your competitors?

Answering these questions will give you a direction your want to work towards.

Chose a name and branding for your retail business

With your business direction in mind, you can now work on the naming and branding for your retail shop. 

Naming your retail business

Many business owners have trouble with the naming of their business and will spend days pondering. Here are two points that may help you name your business.

• Simple: Use names that are simple and easy to say. Shopee, Apple, Lazada are easy for your customers to pronounce. If your target customers are English speaking, go for English names instead of other language inspired names.
  Also, your retail brand name should not be too long, which makes it hard for your target audience to remember the full name.

• Unique: Don’t use a name that sounds like your competitors or other established brands as they will ring a bell in your customer’s minds chances are, it will push them towards your competitors.

Branding your retail business

Creating a brand image is important as it gives your business an identity to stand out in the marketplace. Without strong branding, your retail businesses will be easily overshadowed by your competition.

Moreover, branding will be essential to develop a personalized connection with your customers to promote customer loyalty.

Find the right location

Finding the right location for your retail store is important. Even though setting up a business requires quite a substantial capital, you should not find yourself committing to a shop based solely on the rental price.

Instead, shortlist a few available shops within your budget and spend some time in the area surveying the crowd. Look out for the peak periods, the traffic volume during peak and off-peak hours, identify how much of the crowd your target demographic makes up and find out how much traffic passes by your shortlisted shop.

Create a personalized experience for your customers

Doing something that your competitors are not will often help you find success in the retail industry. This is where identifying and understanding your direct competitors will help you. Are your competitors offering free samples to let their customers try their products? If they aren’t, you should start offering tester sample to your customers.

Some other ways you can create a personalized experience for your customers is to get a customer loyalty programme started.

A good POS system will help you with managing your customer loyalty programme by keeping track of the points they accumulated and redeemed. Member discounts will also be automatically applied so you and your staff will not have to worry about missing out discounts for your members.

Your POS system will also keep track of your members’ previous purchases which is helpful if you want to provide suggestions to your customers on what products they may like to try out to add a more personal connection with them.

Market your retail brand

Without marketing, your retail business’s customer acquisition may not reach its full potential. Here are some ways which you may want to consider when marketing your retail business.

• Setting up pop-up stores at events to get people to know about your retail business. If you currently have an online business without a retail shopfront, you could use these pop-up stores to test and see if you should open up a brick and mortar retail store.
• Do social media marketing. Most Singaporeans are social media users, which makes it a great way to get people to discover your retail brand. However, do keep in mind that social media marketing is not a one-hit-wonder, but requires consistent effort to gain a substantial following.
• Email marketing is another channel for you to reach out to your target market. Shopee and Lazada are great examples that have successfully leveraged email marketing. Sending newsletters to your customers keep your brand in their minds, making your brand their go-to.

Build supplier relationships

Have good relationships with multiple suppliers is just as important as marketing your retail business. Especially in trying times like these, where global shortages in supply chains will affect your inventory.

Apart from building good supplier relationships, make sure you keep track of your stock levels and plan stock in cycles in advance to avoid delays and running out of stock. This is where a POS system will help. A POS system like MEGAPOS will help you to keep track and update your inventory with ease. 

MEGAPOS also features a cloud-based backend where you can manage your inventory levels at any time and anywhere. This helps you keep an eye on your stock levels to avoid running out of stocks.

Plan your grand opening

Your opening day for your retail store should be as attention-grabbing as possible. This does not mean that you need to break the bank on your grand opening, but it shouldn’t be too quiet either. 

Reach out to popular social media influencers and social media news channels to draw more people to your shop’s opening. In addition to that, giving our freebies and offering attractive promotions will surely grab the public’s attention.

Conclusion

After the successful set up of your retail outlet, it will take great effort to ensure that your day to day operations run smoothly. So much so that many business owners are overwhelmed with operational tasks that they lose focus on the most important part of running a successful retail business: Creating strategies to sell more.

With a POS system like MEGAPOS, you will be able to centralize your operations into one solution to streamline your operations. This will free up your time to focus on revenue-boosting aspects of your retail business.

If you are interested in getting an enhanced cloud-based POS system for your retail shop, do drop us your contact details below and we will be happy to arrange a free demo with you!