Reflection Of A Retail Store

Managing a store is fundamental component of any retail store. Whether this is a brick and mortar store or an e-commerce platform, the store manager or e-commerce manager is responsible for achieving sales targets. Having worked in a fast fashion clothing retail store for almost 18 months and as a former assistant store manager in training. I have experienced the importance of a brick and mortar retail store. Upon reflection besides learning basic retail skills in selling and operating day-to-day store business, the most fundamental learnings where about effective communication, teamwork and leadership, scheduling and costs.

Effective communication with head office as well as within the store itself is critical for a retail store because it can have

The most important factor I had to keep in mind was to keep costs in control, as different employees had different wages I had to make sure that during times of low sales I would use less expensive employees. From scheduling I also learned about tremendous opportunities. The company created a challenge for all stores in The Netherlands to increase the conversion rate. The fundamental problem in our store was not enough employees were actively selling. They were to focused on fulfilling merchandise, online orders or other daily tasks. Therefore, to free up time I re-scheduled the whole schedule, there used to be three different shifts as the store was open from 10 am until 8pm. Nevertheless, I created a fourth shift starting at 7 am, this would allow two employees on each floor to start clear all the merchandise and fulfil all online orders for that day before the store opened. By doing so the other employees could focus on selling, in order to do so we provided selling workshops for all employees. This was piloted for 6 months in our store, due to an on average increase of 6% in sales each month it was rolled out