Positioning your products

Retailers have carefully been designing and laying out products to get customers to buy for years. Retail marketers uses terms such as 'capture rate' to detect how much of what is displayed is seen by the customers, and subsequently uses 'conversion rate' to identify how many walk-in customers turn out to become buyers.

Retail anthropology is a big topic in retail marketing. Paco Underhill, the author of Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping tells us that shoppers usually take about 5 to 15 paces before getting ready to do the shopping after entering a store.

Underhill also describes important areas of the retail floor. For example, the area in front of the entrance is called the "decompression" or "transition" zone. A person in a rush will never take notice of anything in this zone.

Underhill also mentions that most people will naturally veer to the right when walking in a retail shop, therefore products that you eagerly intent to sell should be placed on the right-hand side.

The aim of most retailers is to get customers to browse every part of their store, especially right at the back. So a strategy that is used is to place necessity items right at the back of the store so that customers will ultimately be exposed to the whole store when they stroll past.