Retail Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Start a Small Retail Business with Multiple Sales Channels

Starting a small business with several sales channels maximizes your chance of success

In those tender first few years after you start your small business every sale is significant. It’s unfortunate that many entrepreneurs attribute a small start up budget with a single outlet for sales. In the past this may have been true. Few entrepreneurs had enough capital to open even a single store. Two or three stores in different neighborhoods was well beyond most budding entrepreneurs. Today, there is no end to the different sales avenues available to imaginative start up retailers, despite limited budgets.

Channel One: Start a small retail business with a mall kiosk

Don’t let the high cost of starting a bricks and mortar store keep you from making sales to live customers. An attractive kiosk can be purchased for less than a decent used car. Utility and Maintenance costs are also inexpensive. Mobility is an added bonus. If one location fizzles out you can always pick up and move.

Internet options may be less expensive to start up but they also take much longer to be noticed. Depending on your experience, they also take a lot longer to build. A well placed kiosk can be fully operational and generating income the moment you wheel it in the door.

Channel Two: Start a small retail business with an ecommerce site

Once you have your kiosk in place, you’re going to find yourself with a lot of free time between customers. You could spend this time talking to your neighbors or reading the newspaper. You could also boost your future sales potential by starting an online store.

Ecommerce sites can be created quickly but they do take time to fine tune. Once you’ve worked out all the bugs it may still be a while before many customers start to notice your small retail business. There’s no reason you can’t handle an ecommerce site from a notebook at your kiosk.

If you merely started an ecommerce site, you would have to wait months until your site was noticed or pay for expensive advertisements. Instead of sitting in your basement, frantically checking your server log, you could be positioned at your kiosk with an opportunity to speak face to face about your products, and hopefully sell some of them.

Not only can you continue making money while you start your ecommerce site but you also get a chance to promote it at practically no extra cost. Stamp your small business website address on your kiosk, shopping bags and reciepts. Be sure to mention the site to everyone that stops by your kiosk. Even offer a chance to browse, or beta test, your ecommerce site from your notebook.

Channel Three: Start a small retail business selling products on E-bay

E-bay and Pay-Pal take a hefty chunk out of your profit margin but E-bay still has some redeeming qualities. Almost any product you put onto their website will be noticed. In addition, once you’ve completed several transactions successfully your seller profile will indicate that you can be trusted. It takes a long time to build up trust for your ecommerce site. Like your kiosk, you can advertise your ecommerce site at no charge.

Unlike your kiosk and online store, your products can be sold on eBay with practically no startup cost. Also, there are a lot of savvy internet shopers that make online transactions exclusively through auctions. By opening up this third channel your potential customer base skyrockets!

A Retail Clothing Store Business Plan – Customer Analysis

Your retail clothing store’s business plan requires a well-thought out customer analysis which describes what type of customers will make your store succeed.

Not Too Broad, Not Too Narrow

When choosing your customer target markets, make sure that they are neither too broad nor too narrow. The broader a target market, the more expensive and difficult to reach it and sell to it. For example, if the target market is simply “Residents of the Tri-state Area” this will tell you and readers little about the most effective means of reaching them.

Think further about who the most profitable customers within these broader markets will be and whether there are distinct groups of profitable customers worth mentioning. Profitable here refers to the total revenue that a certain customer will bring in through clothing purchases over a certain period, the customer’s likelihood to remain loyal and keep purchasing after that period, and the cost of achieving that customer through marketing and sales work.

If customer groups are too small, readers will be concerned that there isn’t enough potential revenue from the target markets for the store to show a profit. Remember that readers will not believe that you can ever achieve 100% of a market. You have to show that you will be able to break even with much smaller market shares, especially in the early days of your store.

Three or Four Segments Is Good Enough

To prove the excellence of your store’s potential, you may be tempted to write a list of target markets segments that you can target. Resist this temptation, and clearly show your focus on three or four segments at most for the short-term. If the amount of revenues that you can achieve from these groups seems limited over time, then you can go on to describe some future target markets, labeled as such, to detail the next steps the company can take when the original targets are tapped out.

Customer Values

For customers in each segment you describe, write about their specific reasons to buy from your store based on their values. Show the difference between each segment, because if two segments have the same values and needs, they could probably be lumped together as one. Don’t detail your promotion methods and product line again here as a way of explanation – those are covered elsewhere in your plan. Do be clear as to why each group listed is a good target for your clothing store.

Retail Business Accounting Software

Imagine your favorite little retail shop. Think of how many people come in and out of that business establishment in an hour. Now think of the number of people that look at the shop’s products. Take into consideration the variety of products they buy, as well as the amounts they buy.

If you think about it, such numbers could reach hundreds, or maybe even thousands, during busy days. And the figures could double or triple easily if you take into account every single purchase made at the store.

To assist the owners and accountants of such retail businesses, computer techies and number wizards have come up with a great idea: retail business accounting software.

What is retail business accounting software? This kind of business accounting software has been specifically designed to make the numbers game much easier for business owners and accountants to play. For retail businesses, it is important to keep track of the shop’s stock and how many products are being sold. By identifying these factors, businesses are able to determine which products are the most profitable and which ones are draining them of resources. With retail business accounting software, processing these important figures becomes fairly easy.

Especially integrated into the program itself are important business criteria that are taken into consideration by the retail industry. All a person has to do is key in the required figures as well as other information or business data. Retail business accounting software does the rest of the work. The next thing that the user of the software needs to do is simply understand the statistics that have been summarized for him by the software. There is no need to manually tally laborious computations.

If you are interested in using retail business accounting software for your own retail business or for the company that you are working for, you can easily find one of these through the internet.