One of the core aspects of the Via Trading Mission Statement is the notion of continuous improvement and to be a recognized leader in the liquidation industry. We don’t see our role as merely being one whereby we provide merchandise to our customers but also one that provides solutions to enable our customers to grow their sales and profits. In an effort to provide such solutions, we looked across other industries and studied what they did to grow their customer sales/profit in addition to conducting a number of visits to customer stores to understand their particular needs and what we could do to help. What we found were a number of common issues: they all had a variety of merchandise without any significant stand-out in store, cluttered shelves, poor merchandising and out of stock situations. In short, consumers were not being engaged in store.
We also thought about the end consumer and how they interact with merchandise in a store. Consumers today have more opportunities through which to acquire and interact with information – we can even argue that they often have too many messages thrown at them through various media on a daily basis. Organizations typically use a variety of means through which to influence consumer purchase decisions like advertising, but today’s consumers (as a result of the constant influx of advertising messages in their daily lives), have developed shorter attention spans and are now able to switch off. This makes it increasingly difficult for retailers to influence their customers. However, a key area through which retailers are still able to stimulate consumer purchase decisions is at the point of sale (POS) where up to 70% of purchase decisions are made. We determined that our customers’ current ability to influence consumer decisions at the POS level is limited given the lack of resources we saw during out store visits and conversations with retailers.
For these reasons, Via Trading introduced the new FSD Solutions (Floor Standing Display Solutions). These displays offer retailers an effective solution to create greater visibility in store and attract customers through the use of color and key chosen phrases such as “Look” and “Wow.” By engaging the consumer, the display solutions can motivate disinterested consumers into becoming engaged with the product(s), which will lead them to purchase and in turn, increase sales and profits. The display offers additional benefits including the ability to tailor messages to consumers (making the message more pertinent to a particular group of consumers or to a particular product); the facility to cross and up sell (by displaying similar or complementary products next to each other); the capacity to easily merchandise the display (with flexible hooks and display trays) and to quickly note when stocks are low. Furthermore, the displays take up a minimum amount of space whilst providing maximum visual impact.
The FSD Solution is appropriate for an array of different sales channels at a Point of Sale level. Its applications include but are in no way limited to flea markets, yard sales, discount stores, thrift store, wholesalers (to show an assortment or variety of product) and more. It can even be useful for online sellers who do not have a physical store front. They can merchandise their wholesale lots on the display, photograph and show their products attractively to their online consumers. We launched the displays at the ASD Trade Show this August, and rolled out the launch to our regular warehouse and website sales the following week. Customers are just beginning to use the displays and have thus far shown great interest and satisfaction with the preliminary results. We are looking forward to hearing how they do as time progresses.
Miguel Susano, customer of Via Trading since December 2010 purchased a display last week. He states that “It’s very nice, easy and quick to set up and [he is] using it as we speak!” Ty and Melissa, new customers of Via Trading purchased theirs at the ASD Trade Show this August and have just begun merchandising their displays. “Our customers are immediately drawn to the displays and spend more time looking at our cosmetic items than they did before. We’re looking forward to seeing how that translates to sales numbers – stay tuned!”
