In times of decreasing store footfall and sales, brand retailers focus on driving L4L strategies. This article advises how to drive sales per ticket.

In the old days, higher average selling prices were a convenient strategy to grow competition. This often worked, even though the number of tickets came down. But over the last few years, many retail managers focussed on monitoring conversion rates and units per ticket when driving same store performances – now we may have to look for new ways to grow L4L sales.

Aldo Brand Store Singapore (Photo: Brand Pilots)

Units Per Ticket

It was this spring at a footwear brand in California, where we witnessed a number of stores generating average units per ticket (UPT) as low as 0.87 (selling on average less than 1 item per customer bon). Online buyers used the brand’s stores to pick up and return online purchases. As a result, some stores became somewhat of a DHL post office, handling inbound & outbound returns, instead of creating great consumer experiences.

Obviously there was a quick way of fixing the reporting (showing net UPT, without the returns), but the reporting doesn’t change the fact that store staff across the retail industry is spending valuable hours on online logistics instead of providing sales service.

Clarks Brand Store New York (Photo: Brand Pilots)

Bricks-&-mortar born retail managers may not like what online business does to their stores efficencies, but it is the future. So it’s better to make sure that store processes become efficient, as store pick-ups & returns are just the beginning of future cross channel challenges.

Cross Channel Challenge

In case you are arriving to cross channel late, picture this: an average premium brand store spends less than 40% of its staff hours on true customer service. One of the many reasons is that there are numerous inefficient merchandise and inbound/outbound processes. Rudolf Bartels, a colleague and good friend is regularly mapping store processes and reports that cross channel processes with some of his brand clients eat up to 30% of store operating hours. Guess where store staff ‘steals’ the required extra hours for cross channel processes? Right – from speaking to the customers.

If you don’t want your customer service hours moved to less than 10% and units per ticket dropping towards 1, you had better start to work on more efficient store processes. A good first step to start is to find out what share of staff cost is spent on speaking with customers today.

About the Author:

Guido is a collector of brand and retail KPIs, benchmarks & best practices. His collection of ‘commonly used’ KPIs exceeded 100 a long time ago and he strongly believes there are more KPIs to discover. So share your KPI thoughts, ask for an opinion and rest assured he will help you, with tips & feedback. You reach him best by email or see more from him here.