14 June 2020
From the JoinPAY archive. Information reflects the original publication date.
August – September in our country are so-called vegetable months. Gardeners harvest, make preparations for the winter or sell their products. Those who do not have their own farms buy vegetables and fruits at "summer prices".
Competition in the fruit and vegetable market during these periods is quite high. Many sellers come from the CIS countries to Russia specifically for the purpose of selling, and everyone wants to sell maximum since the product is quite specific and perishable.
If you are the owner of a vegetable stall or your retail store has a fruit department, you are more interested than anyone else in minimizing the loss of perishables and increase the turnover in the store.
The main difficulty here is not only in the sale, but also in the fact that the demand for fresh vegetables and fruits is low, since people collect carrots, onions, herbs and even apples in their gardens and dachas. This is why it is so important to analyze your product range and suppliers in order not to fall into this category.
Competition and suppliers
Flooding of chain retailers in Russian cities has discouraged a significant part of consumers from markets. The reason is no longer the walking distance of stores, but the association of the vegetable market with the product and weight cheating. But as it turned out, retailers have their own drawback in vegetable departments – fruits from Asia taste and look like plastic, and the unnatural color of some vegetables makes you think.
A small retail store will be able to compete between these two giants if the assortment of fruit products consists of really high-quality products at affordable prices. For this you need to find a supplier that meets your requirements, but the problem may be that farmers and distributors are not interested in selling small quantities, as required by a traditional retail store at home.
Having found a good supplier, the stage of preparation and presentation begins. Storage of fruits and vegetables is a separate story, no one will return to you if you ever buy frozen potatoes or cucumbers. It is better to conduct three-stage quality control:
- When purchasing products (especially if you go for the purchase yourself).
- When delivering, there is already a rule of trust, but check.
- When placing the product on the shelves (ask the sellers to additionally examine all fruits and vegetables).
When choosing a supplier, it is important not to miss the product purchase deadline and send the order to suppliers on time. For your convenience, JoinPay already offers the functionality of automatically sending orders to the supplier and, as a result, deliveries are always on time.
Layout and tricks
Customers choose with their eyes, they need to give them this opportunity and show the product in all its glory – fruits and vegetables are laid out in heaps and neat piles, often sorting by color and size. A good example can be seen at sellers in the Eastern market. Containers for fruit should always be clean and whole, so as not to spoil the picture.
Many supermarkets also use tricks when laying out in the vegetable departments. For example, fruits are washed and rubbed to the shine, and sometimes sprinkled with water, despite the fact that this way the products will start to rot faster. All this is done to associate with freshness, the buyer sees a shiny, wet surface and the brain is already beginning to signal "buy".
Another trick spied at supermarkets is the location of the vegetable department.
Research in the field of customer willpower has shown that it is necessary to give a person something that is "good", for example, to buy useful vegetables and fruits for the family table, and then customers begin to go beyond the scope of diligent purchases and take more unhealthy products.
Conclusion: place these departments at the beginning of the store, and customers will buy all the accompanying items themselves by the end.
Assortment and prices
When forming the assortment, do not forget about marketing tricks, for example, red apples are sold consistently higher in the fall, and green apples in the spring – all this is connected with our psychology. After the winter and autumn periods, we lack freshness and vitamins, and it is these colors that cause the necessary associations.
When forming the assortment, special attention should be paid to the so-called exotic. If bananas, pineapples and mangoes are firmly established in our country, then, for example, they still take lychee and rambutan with caution, which they avoid simply out of ignorance. More demand for exotic fruits falls before the holidays, buyers are looking for something "such" on their table and sweep the exclusive off the shelves.
You will not be able to set a high mark-up for this segment. As we have already said, competition is high and it is not only network operators and markets, but also cottagers, gardeners and etc. By keeping prices at an acceptable level for fresh fruits and vegetables, you can create an image of the store. Word-of-mouth marketing will create advertising for you, and customers will follow the products, and at the same time buy other products.
By the way, you can use the JoinPAY Smart Cash Register to track demand and seasonality for fruits and vegetables. The profit report will show which positions are in demand and after how many days they will end. This way you will always be able to keep your assortment under control, and regular customers will not go to competitors.
Packaging
Not all customers are ready to buy vegetables and fruits packed. It all depends on the level of trust in your point of sale, and do not forget about the principle of buyers to choose with their eyes. Pre-packing the product there is a certain risk that it will remain on the shelf. However, there is a positive feature of pre-packing: the product you are already packed makes a consumer take more than he could do it himself.
There are several tricks to successfully sell pre-packaged products:
- Pack products of exclusive and superior quality – for example, the exotic mangoes or European strawberries will not tolerate careless relationships.
- The size of the packaging should be convenient for the buyer, it is unlikely that someone will want to carry from the store a 50 kg potato bag.
- Packaging should be as fresh as possible, customers have become more cautious add purchases to shopping cart and check all dates and deadlines more carefully
Not so long ago, fruit sets in beautiful boxes became popular. Cardboard boxes and craft packages are a priori associated with the word "ECO". Competent filling and beautiful delivery increase the price tag for such sets. You can mix the content or offer your customers to choose the composition themselves, and you can present it as a gift set.
Conclusion
You can make a profit on the sale of vegetables and fruits if you follow certain rules, the main of which is freshness and quality. No customer will return to you if the product does not meet their expectations. You can increase sales if you correctly build the assortment and track the seasonality, and the JoinPAY Smart Cash Register will always help you with this.