Spa retail is a tricky balancing act. Carry the right inventory, at the right quantity, using the right amount of cash flow and turn a profit. The Spa Director needs to juggle their retail efforts without getting overwhelmed. After all, retail is just one facet of the entire spa business. To make it easier, SpaSoft’s inventory, reporting and retail tools provide the actionable information a spa director needs to effectively manage that segment of the business — in a few minutes each week. By leveraging these tools, spas can see their retail results tick up almost immediately.
Promotional Products are an extremely popular method to not only drive retail sales, but also attract new and returning clients to the spa for treatments and services. Some of the most popular promotions include free gift with purchase and discounted product with treatment. BOGO (buy one get one) is an effective promotion when you need to move inventory that may be aging and you can link a promotional product to a particular service or even another product.
Closely monitoring inventory and sales reports is the best way to notice the clues that indicate how to optimize your inventory. SpaSoft provides reporting on product status, retail sales analysis, top selling products as well as slow moving products. Because retail products can swing from hot to cold very quickly, it’s important to monitor those reports on a regular basis to ensure that both reorders and mark downs are happening in a timely manner.
Many spas create a theme for their retail, whether they’re looking to offer guests a way to extend their spa visit to their home or to tie in the retail experience to the products offered. Staying on trend with products can be a full-time job in itself. It pays to read the industry and consumer publications, lifestyle and wellness blogs and keep up with the latest celebrity endorsements.
Spas can tie their services to retail by using SpaSoft ’s recommended products. A therapist can recommend products to their clients and then add these products into SpaSoft which links directly to a guest’s point of sale check. During checkout, SpaSoft prompts staff to offer the recommended products – great for guest service as well as boosting retail sales.
While everyone loves products that fly off the shelves all by themselves, it’s wise to invest effort into training and encouraging your staff as sales people. One method is to set retail sales targets for both therapists and receptionists. SpaSoft will help you track progress to those sales goals. You can further incent your staff by offering retail commissions. SpaSoft has a variety of commission structures built in and also allows you to set up scalable commission tiers and easily run commission reports.
Using the point of sale system should be easy for your staff. A bar code scanner makes check-out faster and reduces errors by ensuring the system has the right price. SpaSoft can handle the UPC code on the product or labels that you print from SpaSoft . Both options are compatible with the bar code scanners.
It’s important not to just rely on the system inventory counts, but to supplement the information in the system with monthly or quarterly physical counts. How often you should do a physical count is related to how much retail business you do and how often you turn over your inventory. You can use SpaSoft ’s Product Status and History to monitor retail price, cost, stock on hand and more for each of your products. The Purchase Order functionality is a great way to stay organized with all of your supplier orders and shipments and stock is automatically updated when you receive products in SpaSoft .
Retail is such a big part of a thriving spa. With focused effort using tools like those provided in SpaSoft , spas have the opportunity to grow their spa revenue and maximize their retail space.
Contact SpaSoft to learn more about how to maximize your spa retail operations.