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How well do you know your customers?
The most successful businesses understand their target audience and optimize their operations to best serve them.
As the owner of a thrift store, your community depends on you to offer low-cost options for clothing, home goods, and other supplies. Knowing their priorities helps you make adjustments to increase their loyalty to your business.
Understanding your customers helps you receive better donations, set appropriate prices, and ultimately increase sales at your thrift store.
You might think you don’t have the time, money, or resources to conduct market research — but accessing data and finding insights about customers is easier than you think.
Using the simple methods below, you can make meaningful changes that keep your thrift store’s customers engaged and increase revenue.
Why Understanding Your Customers Matters
Gathering data and observing customers’ buying behavior helps you make more informed decisions about your thrift business. For example, knowing what shoppers buy the most and least of allows you to better communicate to donors what items you’re looking for.
Learning about your customers also helps you improve your marketing strategy. Some may come to your thrift store looking for fashionable finds, others to support sustainable shopping, and others to find low-cost goods for their families. Understanding who your audience is helps you cater to their needs.
How To Learn About Your Customers
Maybe you’ve already learned a lot about your customers by simply observing them. You can tell which sections of your thrift store they frequent the most and what product categories they buy the least of. You also probably have an idea of their general age demographics.
These observations are a great starting point. You can now gain more information from strategic data analysis.
Surveys
One option is to conduct surveys. This gives you a chance to ask customers specific questions and record their responses.
Try asking questions about:
- Their favorite product categories
- How often they visit
- How they heard about you
- Reasons for choosing to shop at your thrift store
Responses to these questions help you get a better idea of why your customers make the choices they do. You can send these surveys via text or email after customers make purchases. To incentivize more customers to take the survey, you might offer a discount voucher to those who submit a response.
Point of Sale (POS) Data
A cloud-based thrift store POS system is another great source of data. You can track each transaction at your store and create reports to observe sales patterns over time. You can then filter this data to understand numbers for product categories or certain periods of time.
Many POS systems also have features for tracking customer purchase histories, allowing you to send them targeted marketing communications.
How To Use Customer Insights
Now that you understand the importance of customer data and how you can access it, let’s take a look at how you can use these insights to make improvements to your thrift business.
1. Improve Donations
Let’s say you sell clothing, shoes, kitchenware, furniture, books, and electronics. You currently have in-store and online advertisements asking for donations of all of these items.
Looking at sales data gathered by your POS system, you see that the majority of your sales come from clothing. You also sell a moderate amount of kitchenware and furniture, but books and electronics are lagging behind.
Based on this data, you may stop asking for books and electronics and focus on items that turn over more quickly. You might even stop accepting these items altogether. Leaning into your thrift store’s strengths helps you speed up sales and better serve your customers’ needs.
Related Read: Thrift Store Donation Pickup: A Beginner’s Guide
2. Adjust Pricing Strategy
Sales data also helps you set the best prices for your products. Let’s say you have two tiers of furniture — a cheaper tier for lower-quality or worn furniture and a more expensive tier for higher-quality furniture that’s in better condition.
If the cheaper tier of furniture is turning over quickly, but you’re having trouble selling items from the more expensive tier, you may be pricing them too high. Lowering the price on these items may help you accelerate sales.
Conversely, if you’re selling out of the higher-quality furniture but the lower-quality items are sitting unsold, you may not be charging enough for the higher-quality items. If you raise these prices slightly, you can get more value out of these pieces while persuading some shoppers to opt for the cheaper furniture items.
Observing trends in buyer behavior helps you make price adjustments that drive sales.
3. Overhaul Merchandising and Store Design
We’ve all been to a store where the item we’re looking for is buried in the back — or not even present on the sales floor. When you pay close attention to what product categories are the most popular at your thrift store, you can arrange your sales floor to maximize sales.
Perhaps many of your shoppers are parents who are buying clothes for their children. If you notice these items are especially popular, try placing a display of children’s clothing front and center, so they’re the first thing customers see when they walk in. This way, customers don’t have to spend too much time searching for what they came to browse.
If you stock a few books, but these items aren’t very popular, you can keep them on the shelf in a back corner of the store. To make sure customers don’t miss them, try a hanging sign indicating books are kept in the back.
4. Boost Marketing
Customer data helps you improve your marketing strategies storewide and on an individual level. When you know the most popular item types and categories, you can advertise these items on your social channels to generate interest.
POS systems with customer relationship management (CRM) features allow you to track an individual customer’s purchase history. When you can see what items they’ve purchased in the past, you can send out personalized marketing messages to keep them engaged.
If a shopper frequently comes to your thrift store to buy clothing, you can send them an email or text message when you receive a large shipment or when you’re running a significant discount. These personalized messages help you keep your customers engaged.
Related Read: 5 Thrift Store Social Media Post Ideas To Inspire You
4. Optimize Staffing
You can also use customer data and sales numbers to optimize your staffing. If you’ve been running your thrift store for a while, you likely have a good idea of its busiest and slowest hours. But with data from a POS system, you can spot subtle patterns.
Tracking sales by time of day and day of the week helps you identify peak sales hours. If you find you’re short-staffed during a busy time or you have plenty of staff during a slow period, you can adjust schedules to better fit your store’s needs.
Related Read: How To Attract Volunteers to Your Thrift Store: 8 Steps
Cater to Your Customers With ThriftCart
Understanding your customers is essential to running a successful thrift store. You can gain insights into their buying behaviors with surveys and data from your POS system.
Look at customer purchase data and sales trends to identify what items are selling the most and when the most sales take place. You can use this data to get better donations, set the right prices, personalize marketing communications, organize your store, and schedule your staff efficiently.
To record this data and visualize it in a way you can understand, you need a POS system.
ThriftCart is a cloud-based POS solution designed specifically for thrift stores. With our software, you can use CRM tools to monitor your customers and reporting features to observe their buying habits. Users also have access to a full suite of thrift-specific features, including inventory management, payment processing, and color-based discounting tools.
To see what ThriftCart can do for your store, schedule a demo today!
