Don’t miss these six key areas lawn and garden retailers should evaluate before the spring season.
Lawn and garden retailers are familiar with managing the ups and downs that come with concentrated selling seasons. However, some may need a greater level of control and insight into their business to do so effectively.
As you approach the Spring season, one of your busiest times of the year, we have identified six key areas for you to evaluate so that you have a smooth, successful selling season. Addressing these areas can help you achieve performance improvements while also creating the best possible experience for your customers.
When lawn and garden customers are ready to check out, they expect speedy transactions so they can be on their way. The foundation of an expedited checkout experience is a POS that is intuitive, easy to navigate, and that delivers essential information with context on the screen in front of your staff. Part of the acceleration of transactions isn’t just ringing up the sale, but also the payment and receipt experience. Today, customers expect that you offer multiple payment options, have integrated credit card processing that supports all card payment methods, and provide flexible receipt choices (e.g. email, text, print, or no receipt).
Besides the sales transaction itself, other factors and scenarios can slow down the checkout process. What if you lose your internet connectivity? With cloud-based systems with an offline POS feature, you can seamlessly continue your POS transactions—including offline credit card processing—when the internet is down.
What if a customer has a return in the middle of your busiest time? It doesn’t have to be a lengthy process if your technology allows employees to seamlessly scan multiple customer receipts. Easy-to-use functionality like Quick Find and Return All Eligible Items make it simple for your staff to quickly ring up returns.
Another common scenario in many lawn and garden centers is that your customer brings a few items up to the register and then remembers they also need soil or forgot a must-have plant. Being able to suspend that sale and pick it up later, or even at a different register, means you can quickly resume that transaction when that customer is ready—but in the meantime, other customers aren’t waiting.
These are just a few examples of ways that you can accelerate POS transactions during the spring planting season. If your current POS system isn’t providing you with these capabilities, it might be time to consider a more modern retail management system.
Do you have the right plants on hand when customers want them? Do you have excess inventory of a particular variety that just isn’t selling? Finding the right inventory balance requires sales insights, good data-driven forecasting, and efficient purchasing processes.
A modern, comprehensive RMS technology enables you to effectively manage inventory with less effort. For example, a feature like product ranking is calculated using multiple methods within the product category as well as an overall store rank. Units sold, dollars sold, gross profit dollars, gross profit percent dollars, and transactions are all ranked by category and available for insight into what products are most valuable to you, helping inform your inventory decisions.
How can you increase customer basket sizes, raising incremental dollar per customer sales and moving more inventory? Your RMS technology can help if it offers the flexibility to easily create kits of multiple products that are a natural fit. For instance, you could build a kit made up of a particular flowerpot, plant, and soil, to be sold at a price that could be summed, offered at a percentage off, etc.
When you have a steady flow of customers, you want to be out on the floor helping them, not worrying about whether you need to order more products. RMS functionality, including automatic and suggested reordering and forecasting capabilities, can simplify the inventory management process for you.
Good inventory management is an essential part of increasing profitability while creating the right customer experiences that grow loyalty. Your RMS technology can help you achieve a balanced approach to inventory that takes the guesswork away.
Profit margin is your main measure of profitability, reflecting how much revenue is earned once you deduct the costs of goods sold. It’s a valuable barometer of how much money is going into your pocket. Real-time insight into pricing can help you make the right adjustments so that you aren’t letting good money walk out the door.
If you don’t adjust pricing to achieve your margins or if doing so is a time-consuming effort, consider how you can use automated price maintenance within your RMS to streamline things. Using a desired gross margin approach to automating pricing allows you to set your target margin and have confidence that your retail prices will be calculated correctly every time.
Do you set prices for a customer based on category, manufacturer, or specific SKUs? Customer-based pricing within an RMS allows your cashiers to focus on scanning barcodes and collecting tenders, without having to remember if this customer gets a deal for a particular product because it is automated.
Many lawn and garden centers sell bulk products like sand or dirt that you purchase by the ton and then sell by a 50 lb. bag, cubic yard, etc. This can be complicated depending on how it’s handled at your point of sale. If your RMS supports fractional quantities and bulk items combined with multiple selling units, then you can easily sell those bulk products without worrying about complex pricing strategies or calculations.
Another area of opportunity is promotions, which may apply to all customers, only customers in your loyalty program, or require a coupon to receive the promotion. Common promotions strategies like buy one/get one free (BOGO), bundles, total discount, limited quantity discount, and others should require minimal effort to implement and be easy to apply at the point of sale. A modern RMS can support promotions based on a set of rules for what products purchased qualify for a promotion and what products are eligible for discounting. Leveraging these capabilities can promote add-on sales and grow customer basket size without creating challenges for you or your staff.
Any one of the areas discussed above are easy ways to help you grow your lawn and garden center profits.
Maximizing the productivity of all your employees, whether seasoned or seasonal, is critical to the success of your lawn and garden retail business. This starts with easy onboarding and helpful learning tools. When you have a seasonal worker swell, every day early that you bring them onto your payroll for training means money out of your pocket.
An RMS that delivers a modern user interface with intuitive navigation and simplified workflows can set you up for successful, efficient onboarding. Combine that with guided learning tools and your new employees can be productive and ready to sell in a fraction of the time traditionally required.
Epicor customer Luke Venable, General Manager at Forest Lake Greenhouses, commented, “With Epicor Propello, new staff is productive faster than we ever thought possible. Instead of working registers, our most knowledgeable people are now on the sales floor, answering customers’ questions and driving sales. That is huge for our business.”
Another factor in employee productivity is mobility. With the proper mobile tools, your employees can perform customer checkouts anywhere in the garden center. Not only do you have the POS functionality, you also have the ability to lookup product and inventory information, complete price checks, allow manager alerts and overrides, and more. The flexibility that comes with mobile truly empowers employees to be as productive as possible from anywhere, while giving you easy access to the data you need to operate your business 24/7.
Having real-time insights into your lawn and garden business supports agility and takes the guesswork out of decision making. Centralized, accurate data is a core component of analytics and reporting—dashboards, alerts, audit trails, historical snapshots, budget analysis, and various reports with scheduled delivery are all tools that, when available, can help you make smart and timely business decisions.
Whether you are looking to view inventory, track sales compared to previous years, or evaluate the success of a rebate program, if that information isn’t available at your fingertips, then you are working too hard. When you combine key reports like end-of-day sales, rebates, inventory valuation, price exceptions, and category with embedded analytics, you’ll be able to easily understand average sales and gross margin dollars. These insights, in turn, help you make the data- driven decisions needed to propel your business forward.
Growing customer loyalty starts with delivering a good customer experience—this personalized attention is a key advantage independent lawn and garden retailers have over big box retailers—including having expert staff that can provide efficient and accurate responses to customers’ questions. Although part of this comes from staff knowledge and experience, being able to access the right answers when needed is equally important. Your RMS should enable you to quickly find product, pricing, and inventory information when customers need it.
Our customer, Rachel Bond, Owner of Pine Hills Nursery, summed up the value of this capability: “We pride ourselves on our customer service. Having stock and sales information in Epicor Propello has enhanced the quality of the customer experience we offer. Our team used to spend a lot of time running around our large site checking on products for customers. Now they can see what we have in an instant.”
Beyond the Q&A experience, customer and loyalty management capabilities embedded in your RMS can also help increase customer participation, enabling you to run a more effective program more easily. You want to quickly capture new customers, apply rewards to their transactions, and track their activities—all in a way that requires minimal effort from both shoppers and staff.
The flexibility to segment your customers based any number of criteria—such as members of a class you gave, or recipients of specific promotional efforts, helps you to engage in a more targeted way with your customer base as you build loyalty.
Most of our lawn and garden retailers tell us they see a sizable portion of their sales from those customers in their loyalty programs.
Assess the six key areas discussed here to see where your improvement opportunities lie. In some cases, slight tweaks to help close gaps can pay huge dividends. For larger operational challenges, replacing your outdated technology or lightweight POS with a modern RMS may be the key to helping your lawn and garden retail business flourish this spring.
Learn more about how Epicor Propello can make every day easier for lawn and garden retailers.
