Every garden center has them.
You know the products. Customers walk past them, pick them up, and put them in their carts without much hesitation. Your staff rarely has to explain what they are or convince someone they need one. They simply make sense to the customer.
These are the products that sell themselves.
That doesn’t mean they don’t need good merchandising or knowledgeable employees. It means something about the product, the timing, the price, or the customer need is already doing much of the selling for you. And paying attention to those products can tell you a lot about what your customers actually want.
What Makes a Product Easy to Sell?
Sometimes it’s obvious. A customer walks in looking for tomato plants in May, and there isn’t much convincing required. Other times, it’s less clear. Maybe a particular potting mix consistently outsells similar products. Maybe one style of planter keeps disappearing from the shelves. Maybe customers repeatedly grab the same gardening tool even though you carry several alternatives.
There is usually a reason.
Price can be part of it, but so can packaging, placement, brand recognition, seasonality, or simply solving a problem customers already have. A product that makes an intimidating gardening task feel easier can have a natural advantage over something that requires more explanation.
That’s worth paying attention to.
When something consistently sells without much effort from your team, ask yourself why. What need is it meeting? Who is buying it? What other products are they buying at the same time?
Write those questions down. The answers can help you make better decisions far beyond that one product.
Give Your Natural Winners Room to Work
Once you’ve identified products that consistently perform, take a look at how you’re merchandising them.
Are they easy to find? Are they surrounded by products that make sense with them? Are you giving them enough inventory during their strongest selling periods?
A great product hidden on the bottom shelf isn’t doing anyone much good.
This is also where it helps to look at the bigger picture. A product might sell quickly on its own, but it becomes even more valuable when it introduces customers to other products. A bag of raised-bed soil might lead someone to tomato plants, fertilizer, trellising, and a new watering system. A popular houseplant might lead to a pot, saucer, soil, and plant food.
Your best products don’t have to sell everything for you. They can open the door to the rest of the sale.
Learn From What Customers Choose
The most interesting thing about products that sell themselves is what they can teach you about your customers.
If one type of plant consistently sells faster than similar varieties, that’s useful information. If customers keep choosing a certain price point, that’s useful too. If a particular product suddenly starts moving much faster than it did last year, don’t just celebrate the sales. Ask what changed.
Customer preferences aren’t static. Neither is your market. The National Gardening Association’s ongoing research into gardening participation, spending, and purchasing behavior is a good reminder of just how much the market can change from year to year.
Your point-of-sale system can help you see those patterns over time. With GreenPoint, garden centers can look at sales and inventory information to understand which products are moving, when they’re moving, and how those products compare with the rest of the business. That gives you something more useful than a hunch when it’s time to make purchasing and merchandising decisions.
You don’t have to reinvent your entire store around every hot product that comes along. Sometimes the smarter move is simply recognizing what is already working and giving it more room to succeed.
The products that sell themselves can be some of your best teachers.
Pay attention to them.
