For home and garden retailers, the past few years has been a time of great expansion: The industry saw an increase of nearly 10% in total revenue in 2023, and is poised to grow by over $30 million through 2027.
But even in a sector that’s growing at such a rapid pace, mid-market retailers face several obstacles when scaling their success. Seasonal sales peaks and valleys, a crowded marketplace competing for customer loyalty, and limited access to accurate data across sales channels, just to name a few.
In this blog, we’ll explain six unique features of Shopify POS that can help your brand scale and expand.
1. Email capture at checkout to help drive customer loyalty
Huge growth creates huge competition, and getting ahead comes down to fostering deeper relationships with your customers. Learning more about customer preferences is a crucial step to building customer affinity with targeted discounts and inventory allocation.
To that end, Shopify POS allows you to easily retrieve a customer’s email as they check out at your store. With one tap, a customer can request a digital receipt sent straight to their inbox and their information will be saved to make future shopping trips with your brand a seamless process. Plus, they can sign up for future discounts, promotions, and loyalty programs, including trade discounts for frequent, high-value customers like interior designers and decorators.
As your business gathers more customer information like this, Shopify can help you build robust customer profiles to help you get a better understanding of purchasing trends and behaviors at all your locations. Not only will you foster brand loyalty with incredible perks, but you’ll also know which products sell best at which stores so you can stock appropriately for specific customer demographics. Building lifetime value for your customers in this way will lead to continued growth for your business.
2. Multiple retail fulfillment options to clinch sales
Home and garden purchases aren’t always one-size-fits-all. Shoppers looking for items like mattresses, artwork, and delicate glassware or plants want to be sure it fits with their personal aesthetic. So it’s no wonder that seeing, touching, and perusing items in person is such an important part of the buying experience. But it can be challenging for buyers to get those items home right away. Without convenient fulfillment options, you risk losing out on the sale.
With Shopify POS, you can have any item shipped to the customer’s home with the click of a button on your in-store terminal. This makes it more likely that they’ll return to shop with you in the future. You’ll also have the ability to set up endless aisles so you can offer product varieties that aren’t available in that particular location, meaning you never have to tell a customer that what they want is out of stock.
But of course your customers aren’t always going to buy in person—many prefer to shop online. Shopify has options like buy online, pick-up in store (BOPIS) so customers can shop from the comfort of their home but still visit your brick-and-mortar storefronts. This is beneficial on both sides. It gives your customers an opportunity to experience your brand in person, and you can offer more options (and encourage more purchases) beyond what they came to pick up.
Shopify gives you the ability to harmoniously blend online and in-store retail fulfillment to ensure your customers are satisfied, sales are closed, and revenue rolls in to grow your brand.
3. Forecast demand and optimize your inventory
Seasonality is one of the biggest challenges of the home and garden industry. Products like holiday decorations and summer garden furniture experience sales peaks and valleys, so you need a POS that can help you optimize stock levels in your stores and warehouses. Shopify POS offers powerful tools to anticipate demand so you’ll never experience stockouts during peak seasonal periods, nor get stuck with excess stock once the season passes.
But inventory issues don’t only come with seasonality. Many home and garden businesses find that reconciling general inventory across channels is time-consuming and difficult. With Shopify POS, you can rest assured that you’ll always have the most up-to-date inventory data from all your sales channels in one place without having to incorporate third-party software. And it’s quick and simple to use—70% of customers who switched to Shopify POS report spending less time on inventory management because they no longer have to manually count products.
By improving inventory management and avoiding stockouts with Shopify POS, you can create consistency and accuracy that your customers will appreciate whether they’re shopping online or in store, and that will make them want to continue shopping with your brand.
4. Frictionless in-store checkout to save time and satisfy customers
One of the best ways for home and garden brands to differentiate their business is to offer a smooth checkout process. Shopify POS accepts multiple payment options, including contactless and mobile, so customers can purchase exactly the way they want.
Better yet, store staff can always provide exceptional customer service with access to accurate inventory and order information directly from the POS terminal, allowing for a speedy checkout and efficient returns. They can even make sales from anywhere in the store with Shopify POS Go—customers can conveniently purchase the couch they’re sitting on right from that couch without trekking to the checkout point. Or they can have their cart sent directly to their email so they can purchase on their own schedule later, streamlining the checkout process whether it starts or ends in store.
The simplified purchasing, payments, and checkout process with Shopify POS makes for a faster experience and a boost in customer satisfaction—which means a boost for your bottom line.
5. Accurate sales data and inventory reports to give a bird’s-eye view of the business
It’s impossible to grow without a clear and accurate view of your day-to-day operations. Shopify POS provides you with daily sales and financial reports so you can monitor an individual store’s performance or your business as a whole. Additionally, staff performance, sales attributions, and inventory reports provide you with a transparent view of your brand's performance. And in an industry like the home and garden sector, with seasonal peaks and valleys and challenging overhead costs, up-to-date product and inventory reports help you plan out your next moves so you can continue to grow.
Shopify POS gives home and garden brands the critical data and business insights they need to scale their business effectively.
6. Staff training tools to make onboarding fast and easy
A friendly and efficient staff is crucial to the success of a business in a packed market like the home and garden sector. The easy-to-use training tools on Shopify POS will make sure customers get knowledgeable staff members who can provide exceptional service from the day they hit the sales floor. Faster onboarding means businesses can quickly hire and train more staff during peak shopping periods and when new locations open—brands who switched to Shopify POS reported a 90% reduction in staff onboarding time.
You can effortlessly set up staff permissions with unique PINs on the unified Shopify POS platform, meaning you can onboard, offboard, and manage employee permissions in one central location. This will also allow you to monitor staff performance and correctly attribute sales and commissions to each employee, which will help to create a more engaged staff and satisfied shoppers.
And with access to customer profiles through Shopify POS, your team can deliver tailored service across platforms so customers can access critical support whenever they need it. Supportive staff means return customers, which means growing sales for your brand.
