Reluctant Shoppers: Helping Customers In Retail Stores

Words: 493
Pages: 2

One of the most annoying parts of working as a sales associate at a retail establishment focuses on helping customers. Customers, especially those at discount stores, have very specific traits and ideas about their shopping experience. Workers must learn to handle the assorted types of shoppers and the personalities they bring with their prospective business. By observing customer habits, workers identify shoppers that fall into three distinct groups: bargain hunters, impulse buyers, and reluctant shoppers.
Bargain hunters roam from store to store dedicated to finding a perceived deal or bargain. Once this type of shopper locates the desired deal, the entire shopping experience pacifies the customer regardless of the effort required in the hunt. Bargain hunters enter retail stores that advertise set prices and persistently attempt to hassle or bargain with the staff in an effort to save money. If a store refuses to change the price of the merchandise, a bargain hunter will identify any flaw in the product as a basis for continued haggling over the cost. Stubborn, tenacious, and controlling accurately describe bargain hunters, and these shoppers
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These customers earn the distinction of being the most time-consuming and annoying customers. Reluctant shoppers will ask many questions, use technology to research items, compare prices, read reviews, remove items from packaging, and still not purchase the product. Reluctant shoppers leave the store only to return with the same questions and the same desire to remove items from the packaging for another review of same product. The key to selling merchandise to a reluctant shopper rests with the art of persuasion. Reluctant shoppers need assurance that the merchandise is of acceptable quality, costs are appropriate, and satisfaction guaranteed. Reluctant shoppers pose the greatest challenge to merchandise