Guest Column: 4 Ways To Capture Higher Value Sales & 2 Ways To Lose Them

By Scott Carter, Locate™ Cross-channel Inventory Broker and Chris Sarne, MICROS-Retail

Many retailers have delayed purchasing merchandise, limited their inventories, and risked disappointing shoppers with stock outs in an effort to control overhead costs. These hard choices are coupled with the hope that the inventory on hand will sell quickly at full value or near full value. Merchandise that must be marked down for faster sale — or deeply discounted to sell at all — derails these expectations.

As a retailer, you need to implement a process that makes purchasing easy and avoids two fundamental ways to lose sales.

First, stop your customers when they're buying. Once the customer says "yes," you want them to keep saying "yes" — yes I want these items, yes I want them now, yes here is my payment, yes I'll shop here again. Every time you interrupt that flow, you give the customer a chance to reconsider the purchase. Whether it's long lines, lengthy manual forms, or a need to switch from the current sales location to a different one (such as a kiosk, phone, or service desk), you're creating barriers to "yes."

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