Tutorial: adding new products to your shop

It’s important to develop your sustainable shop on an ongoing basis. As a retailer, you can’t rest on your laurels and take your success for granted!

That’s why I’d like to talk about adding new products to your shop.

Promoting sales, in the broadest sense of the term, is an excellent way to ensure that your customers keep coming back to your shop. Offering new products is an integral part of this.

In this article, I offer some advice on how to add new products to your range.

Why should you add new products to your shop?

To start with, let’s look at the reasons why it’s a good idea to regularly add new products to your range.

Firstly, your customers like new products. Life is all about change! Even if your customers are unlikely to be interested in hyper consumerism (so much the better!), it’s always nice to find something new in your favourite sustainable shop :)

Secondly, developing your product range helps you to see whether new products can provide a higher profit margin or a higher volume of sales. Remember: just because an existing product works well, it doesn’t mean that a new product couldn’t work even better!

To be more specific, let’s imagine that you sell an organic deodorant in your personal hygiene department. You sell €100 worth per month and the profit margin is fine. That’s good, but be aware that there may be a similar product which is even better suited to your customers’ expectations (for example, our natural vegan deodorant) and you could sell €300 worth of this product per month with a higher profit margin.

Lastly, your competitors are certainly adding products to their own range. As a result, you run the risk of being “outdone” by these competitors who will provide a range which responds better to your customers’ expectations.

How do you add a new product to your range?

In this section, I will explain the step-by-step process to ensure that new products create sales and satisfied customers!

Choosing a new product to sell

To begin with, you need to choose the new product you’re going to promote. It may seem trivial and obvious, but this step is probably the most important!

Here are some ideas on how to identify winning products.

Firstly, listen to your customers. They often share their opinions spontaneously at the checkout or during conversations in the aisles: I encourage you to listen carefully to what they say, because they will often have ideas about new products.

Talk to your sales team. If you’re not in regular contact with your customers yourself, ask your employees for their own ideas, along with ideas from customers.

You can also visit the shops of your competition to see what new products they are selling and whether or not they are doing well.

Lastly, browse the catalogues of your wholesale suppliers and Kami Store, which offers a list of our key products: in our case, we make your job much easier by clearly indicating the products which our customers order most often. It’s a sort of real-time indicator of the market’s expectations: an excellent way to choose a new product, with a good chance that your customers will like it!

Here are two other ways in which we can work together:

• you can suggest new brands or products to be added to our offering at any time, via info@kamistore.com
• follow the brands we already have in stock, via our Instagram account where you’ll find out about new product releases and innovations to offer your customers!

Communicate effectively about the new product

You’ve chosen your new product and now you want to ensure its success!

To do this, you’ll need to develop a communications strategy to promote your new product to your existing and potential customers.

Nowadays, nothing (or almost nothing) can be done without social media. If you have a Facebook page, an Instagram account or a presence on other social media, now is the time to prepare a series of 3 or 4 posts.

Each of these posts should feature a key benefit of the new product (and should also announce that it’s now available in store).

For an easy way to create attractive and appealing posts, try Canva.com!

If you create a newsletter for your community, remember to talk about your new products in it as well.

Don’t forget to teach your team about the new product.

Any good salesperson will tell you: selling a product requires real work. Your team needs to like the product and must want to sell it. To do this, your team needs to know all about it and, most importantly of all, your team must be convinced of the benefits it will provide the customer who buys it.

Your employees can then talk about the new product to customers who may not have seen it in the shop.

Remember to add the new product to your website, if you have one, with photos and a description.

Lastly, if it’s relevant for the product, you can create a short video tutorial in which you demonstrate how to use the product and share this video online.

In this way, your product has every chance of attracting your customers’ attention. All you need to do now is to display it prominently in your shop; this is the subject of the next section!

Display the new product prominently to boost sales!

There’s one last step when it comes to successfully launching your new product: displaying it in your shop.

Above all, a new product is an opportunity to create an event! For example, you could plan a morning event to introduce customers to the product, with a small display and someone from your team on hand to advise customers about the new product.

Then, over a period of 2 to 3 weeks, create a display area for the new product, with a small poster to explain its key benefits and even an introductory price (10% off to encourage customers to try the product).

Lastly, if the product is successful, remember to put it in an accessible and visible place in the aisles of your shop so that it’s separated from other similar products: leave room for the star of the show! :)

In conclusion, adding a new product to your product range is an important decision which can be implemented in a few minutes. By preparing in advance, planning the different stages of the launch and communicating actively, you greatly increase the chances of your customers embracing this new product and seeing it as a new “must-have” part of their weekly shopping!