If you run a gift shop - whether online or physical - you’re wondering how to increase your sales, expand your client base, and generate more recurring customers. In case you’re looking for how to start a gift shop, we’ve got a post covered there too!
Running a gift shop successfully takes time, effort, and dedication. And yet, it requires something more important: focusing on the right areas.
At Kaivalya.me, we’ve worked with a vast array of gift business owners. Most of them had one thing in common: focusing on the wrong areas.
Knowing what to do first, where to look, and pull it off in time is everything in the gift market. If you won’t do it, someone else will. But don’t stress out! We’re here to help.
Welcome to Kaivalya.me, let’s learn how to run a gift shop successfully - where you must focus!
How To Run A Gift Shop Successfully
1. Novelty Items & Brand Merchandise
Many successful gift stores have a select range of products with their brand name, logo, or other signature marks engraved onto them. This is a trend that’s been taking off the gift market for decades, and it's the way to success if you run a gift shop.
When a customer visits your gift shop, they’ll be impressed seeing your own line of products side by side the other gift items.
Here’s a few cool novelty items and merchandise to run a gift shop:
- Clothing
- Mugs and Cutlery
- Photo Frames
- Bands and Accessories
- Bookmarks
2. Tourist-Centric Gift Shop
Tourists, no matter where in the world, surely land into gift shops! Now, to run a gift shop successfully, you need to satisfy your customer base, and tourists are surely on the list!
Therefore, you must focus on products which tourists seem to want. This could include souvenir items such as models of tourist spots in your city or a mug or clothing with the name of your place sewn into it. Here’s a neat example:
Check out this post from CNN Travel to see more Tourist Gift Ideas.
3. Inventory Cycling
If you’ve kept your gift shop items arranged the exact same way the day your shop opened, it’s going to look pretty stagnant and boring to gift shoppers.
You see, the gift business is always looking for a new and fresh experience. A simple thing as cycling your inventory and rearranging gift shop items can give your customers a fresh vibe and help you run a gift shop successfully!
A great way to do inventory cycling is seasonal rearrangement, putting what the season demands on the forefront! Also, you should know what’s up in the gift market around you and what’s trending. Selling trending items is a deal breaker. We can help you determine your market with our Free Audit and Consultation service.
4. The Essential Items
Gift Shop or not, people will come to any shop if they’ve forgotten or need some essential items. This could be anything from toiletries to chargers!
In fact, you could price these items a notch higher than the market price because the customer will damn sure need it!
Selling essential items also sets a recurring customer base for you. Gift shoppers will come to you not only for buying gifts, but also these essential items and you’d have a healthy, symbiotic relationship that’ll generate some great revenue!
5. Gift Shop Promotion and Marketing
When you run a gift shop, you have a particular end goal in mind, a mission if you will. Maybe you want more people to have access to higher quality gifts, maybe you want to expand your influence over a particular niche in the gift market.
Whatever it is, your gift business will not be able to achieve this until it makes people aware of it. Promotions not only lead more people into your gift shop, they also make people aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing.
With the right promotion and marketing plan in mind, you’ll see an inflow of more customers you can handle! Check out a few marketing ideas in a post by TheBrandBoy. In case you need support, we’re here to help with our Free Audit and Consultation service!
6. Additional Gift Services
If you’re selling gifts, might as well build some compelling services around it which the customer didn’t know they needed until you told them!
This is very popular (and revenue generating) in the gift business. If someone’s bought a gift, offer them to package it! If they’ve packaged it, offer them to attach a card over it! And the cycle goes.
You could do this to an endless array of items, common ones being gift wrapping, coupons and tickets, tour guides (these sell a lot!), chocolates and pastry items among others.
These services not only make you some extra income for each gift you sell, they also help your customer achieve more in a one-stop destination, which the gift market totally loves!
Just remember that it’s fine if you don’t add too many services, but the services which you do choose to provide, you do them well.
7. Gift Market Study
This is the most important pointer to focus on. A study of the gift market dictates everything for your gift shop. Before you run a gift shop, you decide where you’ll open it, what you’ll name it, what you’ll sell, and everything else.
From where do you make all those decisions? Needless to say, it depends on the trends and customers around you. Now, as your gift shop expands and brings in more clients and more revenue, the importance of a quality gift market study only increases.
The gift industry is more dynamic than most people think. New trends pop up every day, and they hit each place at a different time and with a different magnitude. It’s both hard and important to precisely determine the needs of customers in your locality.
The gift market study will allow you to get a clearer view of what you need to sell, what gift products that you’re spending money purchasing are becoming a liability, and what gift items that are total assets you don’t have in your inventory yet! Watch this video that briefs you on market research:
Don’t freak out if you gift market study is new to you, because it isn’t to us at Kaivalya.me, and luckily for you, we’ve got a Free Audit and Consultation service that will get you going in no time!
Bottom Line
And that’s that! The 7 most essential focus points to run a gift shop successfully. Follow each of these properly, and you’re set to see more revenue and more customers.
However, it’s quite a job to get each of these right! For a busy gift business owner like yourself, it’s going to be quite a challenge to pack your customer’s gift while also doing the gift market study, organizing your gift shop while also figuring which additional services to provide, marketing your business while also setting up a line of brand novelty items and merchandise.
And that’s why we’re here! From our years of experience serving gift shop owners like yourself, the one thing we can guarantee you is success. And that’s all that matters.
If you’re interested, we’re covering up a detailed gift market study based on your locality and target customers, a full-fledged promotion and marketing plan that’s easy on your wallet, a robust inventory cycling infrastructure, and consultation on any other hurdle on your way with our Free Audit and Consultation service. That’s all the workload off your desk!
Alrighty, hope you found our post useful! If you did, you’d also be interested in the 15 Best Gift Shop Items To Sell (And They’re Cheap!).
