Product placement in a shop: where to put what you want to sell

No customer sees your whole shop. They see one strip half a meter wide, at their eye level, for a few seconds, and then decide whether there is something there for them. Everything else, the bottom shelf, the corner behind the door, the right-hand wall you are so proud of, is background noise. Product placement in a shop is not interior design. It is managing attention, and it pays to take it seriously.

Where should each product go in the shop so it sells more?

The short answer: put what you most want to sell at eye level, not at the height that is easiest for you to stock. Put what defines your shop in the first steps from the entrance, before the customer even decides whether they have time to look around. Put what is small, cheap and obvious, with no decision needed, by the register. And all of this changes when you have no shelves at all, just one stall with a single line of sight: there, the order in which the customer comes across things matters more than their height.

The eye-level shelf sells more, and not because it is easy on the eyes

In 1994, the field experiments of Xavier Drèze, Stephen Hoch and Mary Purk in supermarket chains were published. They tested what happens when you move a product up or down the shelf compared with simply giving it more space across. Their study, published in the Journal of Retailing, found that a product's vertical position, at eye level, down by the floor or up beyond easy reach, affects its sales far more than how much space it gets across. It is a conclusion that sounds obvious once you say it, yet most shop owners arrange shelves by what is convenient to store, not by what this study shows.

What does this mean for your shop? Check what sits at eye level on each shelf right now. If it is the product that is easiest for you to stock and not the one that pays you most to sell, you have a quarter of an hour of work there that can change the result without changing stock or spending a single shekel.

The first steps from the entrance decide whether they look any further

Researcher Paco Underhill, who wrote the book Why We Buy about shopping behavior, coined the term decompression zone: the first area inside a shop's entrance, where the customer is still adjusting to the light, the noise and the pace of the new place they have walked into. At this stage they do not read signs, compare prices or study a promotion tag. They are just getting their bearings, and anything placed there needs to register without them even trying to read it.

Many shops get exactly this wrong: they cram the end-of-season pile or the hardest-to-sell goods right at the entrance, the worst place to show something that needs a decision. What does work there is something that registers instantly without effort: the most eye-catching product, the most colorful, or the one most associated with your shop, not the product you most need to clear. If you have a corner like that which has long been full of discount signs, that is exactly the place to start rethinking.

The quarter meter by the register is worth more than any other shelf in the shop

The queue for the register is the last moment the customer still has their wallet out, before their attention moves to a conversation, the credit card or the child pulling them home. That is exactly why this space is worth more than a space of similar size elsewhere in the shop: the customer has already decided to buy, they are just waiting. A small, cheap product by the register does not need to convince anyone. It just needs to be seen.

Say you have fifty customers a day, and one in ten picks up another small item at eight shekels on the way to the register. That is five extra sales a day, forty shekels a day, and in a shop open six days a week, a little over a thousand shekels a month, with no extra advertising and no new stock, just from moving what you already have to the right place. Put your real numbers in place of the numbers here and see whether it is worth a quarter meter of counter to you.

An end cap, small-shop version

In chains it is called an end cap: the display at the end of the aisle, not inside it, visible from two directions without searching. The study by Larson, Bradlow and Fader on shopping paths in a supermarket found that end caps are "hot" zones that most shoppers pass through, while the middle of inner aisles is a "cold" zone that many customers never reach. That is exactly why an end cap is worth more than a space of similar size in the middle of the shelf.

A small shop has no aisles, but it has exactly the same principle at its own scale. The table on the path between the entrance and the register, the window corner, the end of a shelf you can see from both directions without turning around: every surface like that is a display end, the small version of the end cap, and it is worth treating as one. One or two products, not a pile, changed every few weeks so that an eye that has already seen it once does not skip it next time. A week before a holiday eve, that is exactly the place for a small table with chocolate boxes wrapped as gifts, or with Hanukkah candles in different sizes. Do not squeeze them in between the regular shelves. Give them their own surface that everyone who walks in sees without searching.

Product placement is not just height. It is also neighbors

A customer buying notebooks will not go looking for pens at the other end of the shop, and a customer buying Hanukkah candles will not go looking for candle holders next to the fridges. If two products are naturally bought together, put them close to each other, even if they belong to different categories in your head. It also works the other way: if you have an expensive product that needs a considered decision, do not put it right next to a cheap impulse product. The neighbor drags down its image. And if the pricing of that expensive product bothers you more than its placement, there is a separate article on floor prices and negotiating without losing margin.

The simplest way to check neighbors is to ask yourself, for each product on the shelf: what did the customer who bought this buy last time, and where is it now in relation to it? If the answer is "at the other end of the shop", there is an opportunity there that costs nothing but the time it takes to move two products.

A market stall has no heights, only order

A stall has no top shelf or bottom shelf. It has one surface that is all in view at once, and sometimes even within one arm's reach. The eye-level rule hardly applies because everything sits at a similar height. What does decide is the order: what is in the first line of sight of someone approaching from the direction most of the foot traffic comes from, and what is at the end the eye reaches last, before the customer has already decided or moved on.

The study on shopping paths by Larson, Bradlow and Fader, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, found that shoppers do not scan a space at random but move along a fairly predictable path that focuses mainly on the edges of the space. Even with no shelves at all, the sequence in which a customer comes across products follows a pattern, and you can plan around it: the product that most identifies you where the eye lands first, and the product that pays you most to sell where the customer reaches after they have already stopped, not before. If you are now weighing up which register to put on the stall itself, there is a separate article on matching a register to a stall or a cart.

What to check this week, without buying anything new

You do not need a budget for merchandising advice to get started. Stand for a moment at the entrance to your shop as if you were a first-time customer, and see what jumps out within three seconds. Check what sits at eye level on each shelf and ask whether it is the product that pays you most there. Check what is by the register and ask whether it is small and cheap enough that nobody stops to think about it. Then move two things, not ten, and compare week against week. Too big a change at once blurs which moves really worked.

To know whether a move worked, you need to compare sales of the same product before and after, not a gut feeling. If the system you sell through keeps sales data by product over time (in KupaLi you see it in the reports), this comparison takes two minutes instead of a guess.