20 Retail Design Tips To Boost Your Sales

Eighty percent of sensory information human receives through their brains are from visuals.

It is the way how people perceive everything. So, evidently, visuals are the most captivating way to grab attention.

The more you get better at visually captivating your target audience with higher relevance and the potential gain for them, the faster you will grow.

Retailers utilize stimulating and aesthetically crafted designs for their stores.

It goes further with making strategic adjustments to direct your customer visually toward the purchase.

So, if you are a retailer, and looking forward to designing your store to get maximum foot traffic and conversions, here are the best tips to go for.

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Boost your sales with these retail design suggestions:

Bringing A Focal Point In Your Displays

You might want to bring attention to everything in your retail store. Surely, that’s a tempting idea and even feels like an obvious attempt at design.

However, if you would ask experienced designers, they would disagree with this. Some tried and tested designs advocate the idea of bringing a focal point to your design.

It is more effective if you have a central focal point in your store displays. That will help you draw the attention of more people.

Whether you are planning for wall racks, window displays, or new fixtures in your store, make sure to design it considering one focal point.

The idea is to catch the attention of the buyers right in and then get them hooked up. It would naturally make them curious to check other products once they’re in.

Pro Tip: Try to create a focal point in all of your displays, preferably at an eye level.

Creating the Decompression Zone

The “decompression zone” is the first area or space your prospective customers enter when they enter your store.

The first five to fifteen feet of the space in your store is considered to be the “decompression zone” or the threshold area.

It also depends upon the size of your store as well. It is basically the first time a customer experiences your store’s overall vibe.

Here, the prospective buyer can judge your store or the first impression.

So it becomes more critical how you design this particular area in terms of well-coordination of lighting, display items, fixtures, color scheme, and space.

This is your chance to create the first impression on your prospective customer to make them involved and invested in your store.

Having Proper Spacing In Your Store

People tend to appreciate more if you have enough space in your store.

With proper spacing and a minimalistic approach, your store becomes more inviting to the customers.

Consumer Behaviours expert Paco Underhill states a common behavior coined as the “butt-brush effect” in customers, especially women.

It discovers the fact that customers avoid stores where they might get brushed by another customer.

This is so powerful that it can prevent customers from entering the stores or aisles even if they are quite interested in the product.

Customers just don’t like to get bumped by people, even at the store entrance.

So to avoid this, you can free the tight spots or congested areas of your store. Better to approach a more minimalist design.

Tip: Make your store light, airy, spacious, and very well-curated to make it feel more welcoming for the customers.

Designing A Shopper’s Walk Path

You can utilize the furniture, fixtures, displays, racks, and other items in the store to create a path for the prospective customer to walk through.

There are many advantages to creating a walking path for shoppers :

You will have better space management in your store
To declutter your store.
To create a tour for your shoppers.
It increases the chances of purchases
It creates more exposure to your maximum items.

In a nutshell, customers have more access to all of your products and display items in your store.

It also helps you develop a general store layout and optimize the space in the best way possible.

If you do your job well in creating a shopper’s walk path in your store, the customer will continue walking to your store towards the end.

It surely increases the chances and the number of purchases in your store.

On the other hand, if you design the shopper walk path strategically, it helps control the flow and movement of foot traffic in your store.

Pro Tip: Focus more on creating a circular counterclockwise path to make customers walk back to the front of the store again.

Incorporate An Effective Visual Merchandising

Visual merchandising is a key component in the retail design of your store and directly affects the foot traffic and sales of your business.

You need to represent your brand in very clear, precise, easy-to-understand, able, and easy-to-shop conditions.

The least confusing your shop visually appears the more chances of sales your store will have.

You need merchandise the store design in either or a different set of factors such as by size, price, category, etc.

You can create clusters of similar products or certain kinds of items. You can also create color-coordinated branding in your store.

Everything needs to be well-organized and strategically placed to draw customers in and amplify the sales potential.

Visually Appealing Shopfront

One of the best ways to drive maximum foot traffic and grab the attention of the walkers is to up your game in designing your shopfront.

It must be something so unique and refreshing that people have to address your shop, even if only for the gaze.

Most likely, a chance is if you get them hooked, they will invest enough to get a peek at you. It takes only very few seconds for customers to walk towards your storefront.

So you need to come up with some unique, visually eye-grabbing, and also relevant elements for your shopfront.

Make The Design Easy For The Eyes

One of the most common mistakes for shop owners when they are concerned about retail design, is to overdo it.

Design is all about creating an attractive pattern to make it visually compelling, so it becomes pleasing to the eyes.

So, you also need to see you don’t overcrowd the design elements in your store. You have to let a design breathe into your store which resonates with your brand identity.

Also, try to take a more minimalistic approach in the placement and color scheme of the design as well.

Make sure the store signage is not too complicated to understand and also not too crowded the store.

Focus on a certain set of colors, preferably the branding colors in your store.

Offering A Immersive Shopping Experience

A great retail design offers an immersive experience that regulates how your prospective buyers overall feel about the shop.

It is about what feelings you want to evoke in your customers when they roam around your store.

There are many factors to consider, such as :

Brand Identity of your store
Your target customers
Aesthetic value
Optimization to increase sales

You have to think whether you want to give a modern and clean design look or you want to make it creative.

Your brand may be about children; then, you may want to make it more colorful, vibrant, and kid-friendly.

The idea is to give them a reflection of your product and the brand in the very design of your store.

Your aim is to create an impression with your retail design on your prospective customer.

Go for The Larger Than Life

You must entertain the idea of taking a larger-than-life approach to grab people’s attention.

You have to go for the larger retail displays to bring the focus of your prospective customer into the store.

You can place these items in the center of your store or even the front of the store to get drive people in.

There are larger-size fixtures, display items, and other decoratives to represent your brand.

These larger-than-life displays or items must represent the product or the brand identity of your store.

Slowing Down Your Customers

To boost sales, you need to limit the merchandising options in your store, so people don’t hurry past them.

You want customers to be focussing on all of your products, but for that, so you need to make your customers slow.

Apart from limiting your products, you can also give them a visual break to give them a pause on particular items.

You can use signage and other display items to create these visual speed bumps. It helps prospective customers to determine different products.

A lot of retailers use “merchandise outposts,” which are placed beside your product aisles. It does not just give them visual breaks but also promotes impulse buying.

You should also be creating a grouping of products at eye level to catch the attention of the customers.

The high-demand products can be chosen for eye-level placement and others at the bottom.

Tip: You must keep changing the placements, grouping, and patterns of products weekly or regularly to see what works best.

Animate Your Store Design Using Displays

Display items, signage, and other decorative products can be used to demonstrate a particular section or grouping of products.

It can represent how you can use the product or how it is beneficial. It can be cut-out, an explanatory board, or any sort of branded signage for the product demonstration or promotion.

The idea is to “show and sell” and make customers know the product in and out. It doesn’t only attract customers visually to the section but also works as a sales pitch.

Such displays also help prospective customers guide them to desirable store sections.

For example, a child will know where is the ice cream or chocolate section or even a particular kid-based product and brand.

It also breaks the monotony in your store design and develops an entertainment quotient for customers.

You have to basically use displays as focal points to either draw customers’ attention to a particular product or convince them to sell it.

Use Lighting To Create an Ambience

Lighting is a game-changer factor in the visual representation of your retail store. It plays an integral part in building an atmosphere.

You can play with interior lighting in your store to cultivate an ambiance that complements your existing retail design.

It enhances the display of your products. It makes every corner of your store visible and highlighted.

With selecting and customized lighting, you can decide what kind of ambiance you would want to have in your store.

It depends upon your brand, the product, and personal preferences as well.

For e.g., a fashion retail store will focus on having bright but warm lighting, not very sharp, to create a classy look for your product and store.

It also affects the overall experience of the shopper. Remember that bad lighting can make your store look boring even with good retail design.

Choosing The Right Store Layout

Choosing the right store layout plays an integral role in the efficiency and design control of your store.

It also impacts the overall experience of a customer in your store and eventually on your sales as well.

According to design experts, 50 percent of your sales floor never gets seen by prospective buyers.

Your aim is to create and manage the shop floor for maximum shopping efficiency and experience for shoppers.

It is essential to exercise this control over your sales floor. It depends on how you strategically place the items in your store, including furniture and fixtures.

There are different types of layouts to choose from where you can find three primary options to look for –

Grid Layout
Loop Layout
Free Flow Layout

Grid Layout: You will see this layout predominantly used in grocery stores where there are fixtures on the walls.

Shoppers know that they are supposed to pick up the cart from the entry point and walk down to the aisles to pick up the desired items.

Loop Layout: The loop layout features a primary aisle that circles around the store like a race track. It gives the maximum exposure to the products.

This particular kind of layout you see mostly in the larger stores.

Free Flow Layout: This kind of layout is totally flexible and open to change or customize accordingly.

The shopper will be guided in the store through different selected spots wherever fixtures are placed.

Place QR Codes In The Store

Placing QR Codes in the store was always added more accessibility and convenience, but now is the best time when the world is following social distancing.

So QR codes now have made their significance even much stronger as it proves to be a hygienic step for the store amongst shoppers.

It allows people to scan the codes and pay the amount for the product remotely. It minimizes direct face-to-face interactions with customers and staff.

The QR codes on the posters and displays also help to get more information about it just by scanning it.

Reducing the Payment Time

The last stop for any customer at your store is the billing counter.

Till then, your prospective customer reaches the billing queue, decides his stuff to buy, and gets through the shopping experience very well.

If you ensure a convenient, fast, and easy experience at their last stop, they will likely visit you again.

And if not, the long waiting queues at the cash counter can even discredit the overall great purchase experience.

On the other hand, you need to design the placement and positioning of the purchase counter to maximize the sale.

You need to make sure the queuing path is convenient and smooth to move. Also, try different ideas to keep them busy while they are in the queue.

Using the Pyramid Principle Of Design

The pyramid principle in design tells you to place the tallest item in the center of the store and place other items around it.

The human eye is built to notice the tallest item first and then sub-consciously move to smaller items.

In this way, you can actually guide the audience visually and highlight the items which you want first to get attention.

It also becomes easy to bring attention from the shoppers to the center of your store, representing the primary product or prospect of the store.