7 Tips to Make Your Convenience Store More Profitable

Convenience stores are like the last bus that can take you home late at night, always there when you need them. Found on busy streets, alongside gas stations, and across suburban neighborhoods, these stores provide a quick solution for snack foods, beverages, hot meals, and travel essentials.

Convenience stores are equipped with convenience store supplies, like slushy machines, hot dog grills, or coffee dispensers. They are always there and generally open 24 hours. They enable you to refuel your car and grab various products, such as snack foods, beverages, and refreshments, when you go to your holiday destination or workplace.

The survival of these c-stores depends on the thin profit margin they make on in-store and motor fuel sales. So, all convenience store owners should be careful from the beginning of their business. Hence, choosing the right convenience store supplies and equipment, clever planning, and cautious operating processes are vital for these businesses to avoid consuming their small profitability percentage.

To provide insight into creating a better-performing convenience store, we have gathered 7 tips to increase your profit through in-store sales:

• Plan Elaborately, Spend Smartly
• Create an Attractive Design and Use Your Space Smartly
• Enrich Your Inventory
• Show Them Your Inventory to the Customers
• Eye Level = Buy Level
• Keep Costs Low
• Cleaning
• Enhance Customer Loyalty with Reward Programs

1. Plan Elaborately, Spend Smartly

Convenience stores require substantial investment and time to open and operate. Therefore, to control this complicated procedure, you should have a detailed plan and a balanced budget.

Planning

When considering renovating, taking over, or opening a convenience store, you must start with careful and detailed planning. It would be best if you started with a business plan that includes:

• Location: The advantages and disadvantages of the area you plan to operate, such as a busy road or street, business district, or mall entrance,
• Customer Base: The number of people or cars that pass in front of the store,
• Competition: Any competitor who sells the same products and services in the neighboring location,
• Products and Services to Be Sold: Deciding what to sell depending on the competitors’ inventory,
• Suppliers: Equipping your store with the right convenience store supplies and equipment, 
• Staff: Finding necessary personnel with affordable salaries,
• Monthly Costs: Collect data about the rent, taxes, personnel salaries, bills, and, more importantly, inventory costs.

Financing

You should be careful when spending your money to maximize your initial capital. As you can predict, most of your budget will be paid for the necessary convenience store equipment. You can decrease your initial investment by utilizing the “Price Match” feature to quote the same price as any other supplier would give you. You can divide your payments into small installments through the financing services to pay for your investment as you make money from the needed equipment.

2. Create an Attractive Design and Use Your Space Smartly

There are more than 150,000 convenience stores around the United States, which means you compete with many others. Hence, your first aim should be attracting customers to your convenience store with a sleek design, an illuminated interior, an eye-catching sign, and an organized layout.

The average time travelers or commuters spend in a convenience store is around 3-4 minutes, including the gas refueling. Hence, after bringing your customer into your store, you will have minimal time to show your products to the customers to make the purchase. This can only be achieved with an organized floor plan that enables customers to see all they need and easily find what they want.

In this case, glass door merchandisers are the right convenience store supplies to be added in any market or gas station store to display water bottles, beverages, drinks, beers, and other refreshments. These convenience store supplies keep the beverages and drinks cold, most frequently bought during summer. When the sales of convenience stores experience up to a 17% surge in summer months is taken into consideration, offering cold refreshments to the customers can be said to be a key for boosting sales.

Besides, you can add a nicely lit and designed ice cream freezer or an ice cream maker at the entrance of your store to allure travelers to enjoy their journey with a cold sweet snack. However, all these merchandisers and display freezers occupy ample space in your store. Therefore, you can better utilize your space with countertop glass-door refrigerators and freezers. This will lower your spending while providing an attractive display area at your customers’ eye level.

You can get professional help for design and layout planning to organize the merchandisers and convenience store supplies that contribute to your business. This can be a better option while creating or renewing your layout.

3. Enrich Your Inventory

Another point to keep in mind for more profit in a convenience store is to have a large inventory of products and services to offer customers. Even though motor fuel sales are essential for gas station stores, about 23% of convenience stores’ sales come from food service. Therefore, you should add convenience store supplies to offer hot food, fresh juice, cold snacks, sandwiches, and desserts to grow your sales and profitability.

For instance, convenience stores serving commuters can increase their customer base by offering fresh juice at every time of day with commercial juicers. This commercial kitchen equipment offers a nice view of fresh fruit to attract customers. It also rapidly prepares fresh juice, which is on-trend, especially among office workers.

You can also offer freshly prepared sandwiches on the sandwich and salad prep tables with chilled vegetables and ingredients to maintain their texture and taste. You can even serve toasts by buying a commercial toaster or offer a delicious soup with a soup warmer to keep your sales up during the wintertime. These are the best choices for travelers and commuters to grab their snacks and continue on their way to catch a meeting or reach a destination.

Apart from these, pizza, deli, and pastry products can also be offered. However, these products are to be served tasty, and thus, they should be kept in proper places. For example, pizza slices should be kept in pizza warmers to maintain warmth and taste, while some deli and dessert foods require refrigerated displays to keep their best condition.

In addition to these food products, coffee brewers and coffee machines are crucial to increasing convenience stores’ sales. Coffee is the most consumed drink across the country. Therefore, offering a newly brewed, tasty, high-quality coffee will always attract customers to your convenience store and boost your sales of other foods and snacks.

4. Show Them Your Inventory to the Customers

As the time the customers spend in a convenience store is limited, it is crucial to present all you have in your inventory as organized on racks or appropriate convenience store supplies and equipment. This will, of course, contribute to your profitability by increasing your sales. Nonetheless, it is also possible to save money while buying these products by selecting the most suitable ones with the right features and less energy consumption.

Food warmers

These convenience store supplies provide an attractive food display while preserving the heat of the soups or other meals so that customers can enjoy them warm. Nacho warmers, popcorn poppers, or other heated food merchandisers are all convenience store supplies that will contribute to your business.

Hot dog steamers, grills

In many movies, the film star stops before a convenience store and buys a hot dog to continue his dangerous chase. So it would help if you also offer delicious hot dogs to your customers by keeping them in a healthy and proper place, such as a hot dog steamer.

Coffee Machines, Hot Drink, and Beverage dispensers

You should include the necessary convenience store supplies in your store to keep customers regular. The right equipment will always present a standard taste and fast service to maximize customer satisfaction. While coffee machines offer freshly brewed and smelly coffee, beverage machines and water dispensers will rapidly provide passersby with a refreshing cup of juice, water, or a Coke.

5. Eye Level = Buy Level

People tend to prefer products that are placed at their eye level. Hence, you should keep the highly profitable products at this level to boost your sales. Additionally, you should organize your layout to allow the customers to walk around and see all the products inside.

Convenience stores make a good amount of turnover from impulse sales. Therefore, you should place the frequently asked products, candies, confectionery, gums, and specialties next to your serving counter to increase customers’ immediate buying. You can use countertop merchandisers to display beer, water, or other drinks and food display warmers to enable customers to make last-minute purchases.

6. Keep Costs Low

As convenience stores have thin profit margins on their sales, they have to minimize costs and maximize sales to survive and expand their businesses. As an operator of a convenience store, you should follow a strict and rigid cost-planning and monitoring routine. Therefore, you are advised to:   

• Buy only the necessary convenience store supplies,
• Prefer energy-saving equipment,
• Get financing if you have a limited amount of financial resources.
• Decrease costs by saving space, energy, and personnel with innovative and versatile equipment,
• Keep maintaining equipment to prevent break-downs,
• Prefer vendors with good customer service,
• Prevent product waste with commercial refrigerators, merchandisers, refrigerated display cases, and food warmers.

7. Cleaning

Cleaning is always a top priority for all food-serving businesses as it is crucial to prevent cross-contamination of diseases and the dissemination of bacteria and microbes. During the global pandemic, customers highly regarded cleaning and sanitation. Therefore, all convenience stores must maintain a clean and sanitized store with a frequent cleaning routine.  

You should start by keeping everything clean: the floor, bathroom, cashier, counter, servicing areas, glass doors, and racks—basically everywhere in the store. Therefore, you should have all the relevant cleaning tools and products in your storage to keep it continuous. While mops and sanitizers are needed to clean the floor, cleaning towels are significant for transparent merchandisers and clean food-contact areas.

Convenience stores with gas stations are visited mainly by travelers stopping by for the bathrooms. Thus, you should keep the toilets clean to attract more customers to your convenience store. Additionally, you are recommended to install hand dryers and provide full soap dispensers and paper towel dispensers to maintain hygiene.

8. Use Technology to Your Advantage

Integrating the right technology can streamline your store’s operations and improve profitability. Investing in a modern POS system helps you track sales, manage inventory, and even monitor customer buying patterns. Additionally, offering mobile payment options, self-checkout kiosks, or loyalty programs through apps can enhance customer convenience and encourage repeat visits. Staying updated with digital solutions can also give you a competitive edge over nearby stores.

9. Train and Motivate Your Staff

Your employees are the face of your business. Well-trained and motivated staff can improve customer satisfaction, drive sales, and create a welcoming environment. Invest time training your team about product knowledge, upselling techniques, and excellent customer service skills. Reward top-performing employees and foster a positive workplace culture to maintain a motivated team contributing to the store’s success.

Conclusion   

In conclusion, convenience stores are among the leading businesses selling fuel, food products, and drinks to millions daily. Nevertheless, they conduct their business on a thin line of profitability, just cents away from losses. These cents of profits add up to provide a living income for a family or a more significant profit to create more jobs with new stores.

The owners and managers should carefully plan and conduct their investments and operations. Selecting the right convenience store supplies is key to directly influencing sales, energy bills, and food waste.