Key tips and techniques for creating an attractive sales area with effective displays

Even if a product's packaging is well-designed and attractive, it's useless if customers don't pay attention to it. And with so many attractive items in the same store, how do you make certain items stand out from the rest?

One of the best ways to achieve this is to harness the power of effective product presentation, combined with an attractive sales surface. By using carefully chosen tricks and techniques, you can optimize the way shoppers navigate your shelves and view certain items in your store, while asserting your store's overall brand and image. In this article, we explain exactly how to achieve this.

Strategic visual merchandising and an attractive sales surface motivate customers to make specific purchasing decisions.

Visual merchandising is an excellent way to make an immediate impact on customers. The customer journey begins with discovery, using elements such as price cards and price card holders allows you to engage potential buyers in conversation, encouraging them to take a closer look at your products and make certain purchasing decisions.

When used effectively, these marketing aids can also create a unique and attractive atmosphere in your store, playing with the possibilities, from colors and patterns to layout and materials, to create a positive, brand-focused sales surface that's far more likely to convert.

Visual merchandising is just one more tool in your arsenal to create a powerful experience for shoppers. And at the end of the day, that's what people are really looking for in their shopping experience, whether they buy online or in-store.

However, having a physical store allows you to play with a number of different elements to create a totally unique and captivating environment, reflecting your brand's vision and worldview. In addition to tried-and-tested product presentation strategies, your POS and price cards can be used to differentiate you from your competitors and create a unique and exciting sales surface that entices buyers to pick up one of your products.

Price cards and displays are most effective when product names, prices and high-quality images are evenly distributed throughout the display layout.

Coherence plays an important role in human information processing. Without going into the scientific details, when information is ordered and spaced consistently, it is much easier for people to process, making them more likely to react positively to any product message.

To ensure your success, apply consistent spacing and layout patterns across all your screens. This means using the same line spacing between sentences, as well as equal spacing between the different visual elements of your cards, such as images or symbols.

All this allows you to introduce some much-needed "breathing space" into your marketing messages, making them easier (and more enjoyable) to digest. Above all, it helps create a more visually appealing atmosphere that can affirm your brand.

Choosing the right size for a price card or other visual aid is extremely important. Something too big or too small won't have the desired effect. The trick is to balance the size and shape of your price cards with each type of product. For medium-sized products, a small price card should suffice. While a larger price card may attract attention, it actually obscures the view of the actual product.

You also need to consider whether it's best to place the price card in front or behind the product for best effect. Use common sense to find the ideal position, but be aware of the angle from which customers approach the product.

Finally, even if you use a collection of different price cards and point-of-sale displays, try to create unity throughout your store's visual merchandising by using complementary designs, sizes and layouts.

The "golden line" is the most convenient height for the average buyer to reach out and pick up the product. This is around 85 to 150 cm from the ground. If you take nothing else away from this blog (and we know you won't!), remember that most of the products sold in a store are drawn from this golden line.

Whether this is because store owners and managers already adhere to this technique and always place their best items on it, or whether it's simply a psychological effect, is up to you to decide, but whatever the case, it's important to strategically place your products on your store shelves with this in mind.

However, the ease with which a person can reach out and pick up an object at a certain height depends, of course, on their specific height. If you want to be really strategic, take into account the size of your average customers, which can vary according to gender or nationality.

Following the same "principle of convenience", place your recommended items in the center of your shelves or slightly to the right.. It turns out that this is where people's attention is naturally focused. What's more, it's the easiest place to reach (90 % of people are right-handed).

Therefore, in Placing your important products there will increase their visibility and the likelihood that your customers will place these items in their shopping baskets.

For some popular products, customers are likely to seek them out and buy them, wherever they are placed. However, other items are overlooked by everyone. To balance the odds, place your most and least saleable items on the same shelves or surfaces to increase the chances that your hardest-to-sell items will be selected.

An excellent example of this strategy is to arrange products that sell easily at either end of your shelves, while dedicating the central part to less desirable products that you'd like to sell out quickly. These items will borrow some of the credibility of their more popular counterparts, and customers may unconsciously re-evaluate their purchasing decision on this basis.

If you want to test this theory, why not try placing one of your most "difficult" products next to your best sellers and see what happens?