Gondola shelving has become one of the most popular forms of retail shelving in the modern age, thanks largely to its space-saving qualities, neatness and great flexibility. Retailers of all kinds, from fashion boutiques to convenience stores, can make use of this free standing shelving and multitude of accessories. However, if you decide to invest in gondola units, it’s important to get the most out of them. This means thinking about your layout and displays and making sure that you can arrange your store shelving to deliver the best possible customer experience. Here are a few tips.
Use hangsell displays for space-saving and added neatness
One of the key benefits of gondola displays is that the slatwall, pegboard and grid mesh units can be fitted with an array of metal hangsell accessory shelving fixtures to create contained and organised displays. These accessories include metal hooks and prongs, looped hooks, faceouts, waterfalls, clothing hangrails, picture hooks and specialist brackets that easily clip in and out of the display panels.
Hangsell displays can be used in pretty much all retail environments but are particularly effective when you stock multiple quantities of small or medium-sized goods. Ideal for clothing stores, grocers, pharmacies, electronics stores and hardware stores. You simply load up quantities of each product on a hangsell accessory, which enables you to display more of each item as well as keeping things neat, tidy and easy to find. Plus of course, with these flexible gondola units you can split them so that one section is hangsell and another is conventional shelving.
Give yourself additional shelving space with gondola end bays
End bays are additional, usually slightly slimmer, panels that fit onto the end of double-sided gondola displays to provide additional retail space. They can be used at one or both ends of gondola shelving aisles. These handy shop fittings not only add browsing space to your store, they can also be used as a way to draw customers into aisles they might otherwise ignore. You can utilise end bays to create standalone displays or simply use them as extra display space. They can be brilliant for marketing special promotional merchandise or discounted goods. They typically face towards the store window and the shop counter so you can get creative and try to wow passers-by or entice customers queueing in the store to make additional purchases.
Gondola end bays clip easily onto the end of display units. They are quite small and light so can be removed and stored without problem if you have quieter periods with less stock to display.
Utilise data strips to provide added information
Data strips are a cheap and handy accessory for boosting retail displays. They can be fitted to the lip of shelving, display stands and wire baskets fitted to gondola units to give additional product information, therefore making things easy for customers browsing your store. The strips are thin clear plastic attachments that have a self-adhesive so that they can be easily placed horizontally onto the end of shelving. Labels are then inserted into the strips conveying information such as price, product description or barcode. The great advantage of data strips for retailers is that it enables much clearer product labelling which ultimately means less time spent having to answer routine queries. It also means that you don’t have to spend time and money on individually price tagging every single item in your store.
Make products stand out with visual merchandising
Visual merchandising is a creative display technique where you present your merchandise in a particular way designed to attract customers to the store and to particular product aisles. This can be done in ways such as grouping products in a colour-coded fashion, adding lighting to displays to draw attention towards them, theming products – for example, around a particular season such as Christmas or Easter – to create a showcase image or story, or sometime by using innovative techniques such as displaying products in unusual ways or using contrasting juxtaposition to draw attention and create a talking point.
Because gondola units are so versatile, they are easily incorporated into visual merchandising techniques. You can use the wide array of accessories to assemble visually appealing aisles, window displays or standalone presentations within the store.
Keep your best items at eye level
Although much about retail has changed over the years, one of its oldest clichés remains true – eye level is buy level. Various studies have shown that products placed at or around eye level tend to sell quicker. Obviously this is a height window rather than a precise height as people are differently-sized! Gondola units allow you to place a vast number of items on a single display unit so you should plan your displays around what you want to position around that eye-height space, whether this is using conventional horizontal shelving or hangsell accessories.
Conventional techniques suggest that top-selling products should take up eye-level space, with more specialist goods above this and discounted or cheaper products at a lower height. Many customers in a hurry or casually browsing may omit looking at the higher or lower items. These are the shoppers more likely to be drawn towards best-selling goods so don’t lose out on sales by stacking them where they will be missed.
Use dump bins or baskets to offload surplus stock
Accessories such as acrylic containers and wire baskets are great for making use of the lower regions of gondola shelving and displaying loose items within a contained space. These can either be clipped into the gondola panels or placed on the base shelves of the gondola units. This will help to keep the store looking full and will maximise sales by providing retail space for goods that may otherwise sit on backroom shelves waiting for suitable space on the shop floor.
