How to Run a Smarter Home Goods Store

As a home goods retailer, there’s a lot on your plate each and every day. Between staff, inventory, reporting and so much more, you have your hands full. It can be hard to find the time to pull back from your daily tasks and give some thought to where you’re going and how to get there.

Luckily, we’ve done the hard part for you. We’ve put together a quick guide that uncovers best practices that can be applied across your business. We cover topics including:

• Inventory management
• Demand forecasting
• Customer loyalty
• How Lightspeed powers businesses like yours
• Multichannel operations
• Efficient tech solutions

Keep reading to learn the tricks of the trade that’ll help you level up your regular operations and get closer to your goals.

Managing home goods inventory

Managing home goods inventory comes with its own, unique challenges. With such a wide variety of products—from large furniture pieces to small accessories—it’s hard to keep track of it all. Balancing your stock levels isn’t easy, either. Overstocking ties up cash flow and takes up valuable space, while understocking leads to lost sales, and dissatisfied customers.

Seasonal inventory transitions where you’re updating stock for the holidays can add complexity as well. You’re quickly adding many new items to shelves, all while trying your best to avoid excess stock at the end of the season. Add in the need to track multiple product variations, like color, material or finish and managing stock becomes one of your most difficult tasks.

Home goods retailers such as yourself can’t expect to master this alone. The right tools are essential to help you streamline inventory management and avoid costly mistakes.

Effective management helps you maintain the perfect balance of stock, and ensures customers always find what they’re looking for.

Best practices for better inventory management

Handwritten spreadsheets won’t cut it any longer for home goods retailers managing complex inventories. Take a look at the following tools you can find in smart inventory management software, including Lightspeed’s POS system.

1. Reorder points and low stock alerts
Set reorder points for each product to ensure you’re always adequately stocked on them. Lightspeed helps you set these thresholds and automatically sends low stock alerts when it’s time to restock, so you can avoid missed sales or excess inventory.

2. Composite products
Many home goods like furniture and cookware sets are made up of multiple components that you may sell separately or together in many variations. With Lightspeed’s composite product feature, you can easily bundle items together to sell while tracking each component’s individual stock levels—ensuring you never run out of key pieces.

3. Bulk editing tools
Managing thousands of products? Bulk editing tools make updating pricing and stock levels quicker and easier, helping you save precious time, stay organized and ensure inventory is always under control.

4. Built-in purchase orders
Lightspeed’s built-in purchase ordering simplifies the process of ordering new stock and ensures accuracy in your system. Generate purchase orders based on stock levels, sales data and supplier lead times right from your POS.

Predicting sales

Accurately forecasting demand for your homewares store can be tricky. With a rapidly changing market, shifting customer preferences and variables outside of your control, predicting what will sell and when can feel impossible.

For example, outdoor furniture might sell like hotcakes in the spring and summer, but demand drops as soon as temperatures cool—and the weather forecast isn’t always reliable either. Similarly, demand for holiday decor spikes around a very specific time of year, but other product sales are not as easy to predict.

The risks for poor forecasting are high. Overstocking leads to wasted space and discounts to clear out old goods, while understocking means lost sales and frustrated customers who may turn to your competitors. Without the ability to predict and track demand accurately, home goods retailers will likely struggle to maintain the right kind of stock, and the right amount of it.

Best practices for forecasting demand

You may not be able to predict the future exactly, but there are certainly tools you can use to better understand what your customers are looking for. To effectively forecast demand and stay ahead of seasonal trends, follow our best practices for home goods retailers.

Leverage historical sales
Lightspeed offers robust reporting tools to help retailers analyze their historical sales trends. This data provides valuable insights into what products have sold well in previous seasons and during specific promotions. By understanding past patterns, you can predict which items are more likely to be in demand in the future.

Track seasonal trends
Seasonal demand fluctuations are crucial to inventory planning. When you analyze past sales data, you can identify patterns in customer preferences and product sales during specific times of the year.

By tracking these trends and categorizing products by season, you can be better prepared for high-demand periods with lists of seasonal stock ready to go. Then, adjusting your stock levels ahead of time ensures that you’re ready to meet customer demand without over or under stocking.

Monitor real time data
Lightspeed provides real-time sales tracking, so you can quickly adjust your orders based on live data. You can also take this data on the go with the ability to access your POS from your mobile device. This allows you to stay agile, responding to sudden changes in customer behavior or unexpected demand for certain products.

Keeping customers engaged

How do you engage customers long term and encourage loyalty in the home goods space? With so many options available to consumers, it’s not easy to stand out from competitors. And truly sticking out from the rest requires more than just offering great products.

Customer loyalty goes beyond sales. It’s about creating an ongoing relationship through thoughtful communication, personalized offers and consistent engagement. However, tracking all these touchpoints and personalizing service can quickly become overwhelming.

As customer expectations rise, home goods stores need to find ways to meet these demands to truly thrive. Whether it’s online, in-store or both, providing a personalized, memorable experience is essential for keeping customers loyal and turning them into repeat buyers.

Best practices for increasing customer loyalty

To connect with your customer base and keep them coming back, you’re going to have to be strategic with your approach. Discover the best practices for engaging customers, and encouraging loyalty in home goods retail.

Leverage your customer data
Lightspeed’s customer management tools allow you to collect detailed customer data to create profiles with their purchase history and shopping preferences. You can use this information to send targeted marketing messages, create tailored promotions and give personalized product recommendations.

Create loyalty programs
Reward your best customers with a loyalty program that encourages repeat business. Create a new program from directly within your POS with Lightspeed, or integrate with an existing one. Track purchases and reward customers for their loyalty through points, discounts or exclusive offers.

Engage with customers through multiple channels
Connect with customers consistently across various touchpoints, whether it’s through email, social media or in-store interactions. Keep track of your customers’ preferences and interactions to learn how to reach them where they are. By understanding their preferred communication methods, you can personalize your outreach and stay top of mind, building lasting relationships with your customers.

Collect feedback and implement changes
Gathering customer feedback is essential for your growth. Collect reviews and conduct surveys for small rewards to gain insights into the customer experience. Then, act on this feedback to improve your offerings and show customers that their opinions do make an impact.

Learn how Lightspeed powers businesses like yours

See how other retailers in your industry are using Lightspeed to boost efficiency, improve operations and grow.

Opulence of Southern Pines saves time and reduces errors with Lightspeed

Opulence of Southern Pines is a luxury bed and bath retailer known for its charming style and unique selection. They’ve cultivated a loyal customer base with their exceptional product selection. However, to continue their success, they recognized the need for improved inventory management across their stores.

Tanda Jarest, Owner at Opulence of Southern Pines, decided to make the switch over to Lightspeed for its “intuitive and user-friendly” platform, she says. The set up was quick and easy with the help of the onboarding team, and training her staff has been just as effortless. “I can start an employee on it in the morning, and by the afternoon they’re running it,” she says. She especially appreciates the features that keep her connected, save her staff time and support her multi-location operations.

“My favorite feature is the inventory control…if my team needs something from another store, they’ll do a stock transfer, the other store gets it, they pull the merchandise, and it arrives within a week. It runs very smoothly.”

Tanda Jarest, Owner, Opulence of Southern Pines

Since implementing Lightspeed, Opulence of Southern Pines has experienced significant operational improvements. Entering new inventory into the system, which previously took 2-3 days to complete, can now be done in a matter of minutes, thanks to streamlined processes and the ability to export and bulk-edit information.

What’s more, the recent launch of a new loyalty program is helping Tanda foster deeper customer relationships, promoting repeat business and enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

How Lightspeed powers Opulence of Southern Pines
Lightspeed Payments reduced Opulence of Southern Pines’ transaction errors by 100% by eliminating the need to manually key-in purchase amounts. Lightspeed allows all three stores to manage their inventory seamlessly, enabling quick stock transfers and real-time updates across locations.

Lightspeed is helping with their customer engagement, too. Tanda can now access and engage with her customer base “in the click of a button,” which has been especially useful for her new loyalty program.

Rutherford’s Design saves $8,000+ a year with Lightspeed Payments

Rutherford’s Design is a multifaceted design studio and retail showroom specializing in a layered and unexpected approach to interior design. They’ve been in the interior design industry for over thirty years. While business was doing well, the technology was in serious need of an upgrade.

Rutherford’s Design made the switch to Lightspeed, which allowed the business to improve operations while reducing processing fees.

“We definitely saved money, and there were no hidden fees like other payment processing companies,” says Steffanie Evans, Owner at Rutherford’s Design.

Because Lightspeed Payments offers a flat processing rate, Rutherford’s has more predictability with fees, and there’s no need to haggle over unexpected fees or charges.

“Lightspeed Payments truly helped Rutherford’s streamline our payment processing system and made my business more streamlined and efficient.”

Steffanie Evans, Owner, Rutherford’s Designs

Since Rutherford’s is both a retail store and interior design firm, the business manages a lot of data. Thanks to Lightspeed, staying on top of all that data is now seamless and efficient. As Steffanie puts it, “Lightspeed enables us to hold all our information in one place. I have team members managing various clients and projects, and now we can easily see what’s going on—whether a deposit’s been made, work is completed or a sale is pending.”

How Lightspeed powers Rutherford’s Designs

Rutherford’s Design saves over $8,000 annually with Lightspeed Payments, eliminating high and unpredictable fees from their previous payment processor. Lightspeed POS replaced a 30-year-old setup prone to daily crashes, so the team now has a more dependable system. What’s more, client profiles, purchase orders and sales are all stored in one platform so the team can access crucial info from anywhere.

Operating multiple sales channels

Managing various sales channels can be particularly challenging for homeware retailers. When you’re selling online, in-store, through social media and more, you need a unified strategy to keep operations efficient and cohesive. With such a large range of products, it’s easy for your inventory to get out of sync when it’s sold through multiple channels.

The complexity deepens when your customers engage with multiple platforms. For example, a shopper might browse products on your website, buy them on social media and then pick them up in-store. You can imagine that this often leads to issues with stock levels and fulfillment. It can also be difficult to maintain consistent branding and messaging across various touchpoints.

Running all these different channels can be time consuming and prone to errors—clogging up your workflows and negatively affecting the customer experience. Home goods retailers who successfully operate on various sales channels use smart solutions to manage it all easier.

Best practices for multi-channel operations

If you want to thrive in multi-channel retail, you’re going to need seamless integration across your platforms. Find out what the best practices are for getting all your channels to work together more smoothly.

1. Synced commerce
The best way to sell both in-store and online is with synced inventory that updates in real time. Lightspeed offers just that with ecommerce that connects directly to your stores. Build a new site with templates, make one from scratch or connect to your existing one. Then, sell in-store or online seamlessly with synced inventory across channels. This way, you never have to worry about stock or sales being inaccurate.

2. Selling across the web
It may have been hard to manage sales on multiple online platforms before, but with the help of a system like Lightspeed’s, it can be so much easier. Lightspeed empowers you to sell all across the web with one centralized dashboard to manage it all. Connect Lightspeed with your social media and marketplaces to bring everything together and simplify your multi-channel sales.

3. Offer flexible shopping options
If you’re already operating many sales channels and are looking for more ways to meet customer expectations, consider adding more ways for them to shop your products. BOPIS (buy-online-pickup-in-store) and click-and-collect gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and have since become industry standard options in retail. Adding more shopping options makes it easier for customers to shop your products, creating more opportunities for revenue growth.

Trusting your tech

Home goods retailers like yourself have a lot going on. From daily operations to inventory management to running promotions and more, there are a lot of moving parts. And with such a high volume of manual labor involved, it’s no surprise that you sometimes experience mistakes and inefficiencies. However, this can have more of a negative impact on your business than just creating more work for yourself. Inaccurate stock counts, slow order fulfillment and inconsistent customer experiences can lead to lost sales and hurt your reputation.

Even if you’ve found the perfect rhythm and everything is running smoothly, something as simple as an issue with your payments processing can derail everything, leading to abandoned carts and missed sales.

Homewares retailers need technology to help them manage all the different aspects of their business and increase efficiency. But they also need to be able to trust it to help them run their business.

Best practices for using technology to increase efficiency

Staying competitive in a digital-first world means outsourcing manual tasks with technology where possible. Here’s what you can do with Lightspeed to save time and make work flow, and be able to count on it, too.

Automate routine tasks
Use Lightspeed to automate key processes like inventory updates, order processing and stock replenishment. This kind of automation reduces human error, accelerates your order fulfillment and ensures real-time accuracy across your entire operation.

Find optimizations
Leverage Lightspeed’s in-depth analytics to optimize everything from pricing strategies to stock levels to employee schedules. With real-time data, you can make more informed decisions that align with demand trends, improving profitability and customer experience.

Expand your capabilities with integrations
Lightspeed integrates seamlessly with tons of popular applications and tools that you may already be using. Discover more integrations that expand your capabilities with tools to improve your search rankings, manage your workforce, boost loyalty and much more.

Simplify payment processing
Lightspeed’s unified POS and payments platform helps retailers access everything in one, connected system. With Lightspeed Payments, retailers can accept all kinds of payment methods including all major credit and debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Learn more about Lightspeed Payments.

Lightspeed’s solutions for home goods retailers

Through reading this guide, you’ve come to learn about many of the different ways that Lightspeed empowers retailers with data-driven solutions for running a homewares business. Lightspeed supports businesses like yours all over the world with powerful tools, automations, integrations and more.

With built-in, advanced inventory management, home goods retailers can simplify the way they count and replenish stock, with tools for optimizing levels and forecasting demand. And, with loyalty capabilities, homeware retailers can create detailed customer profiles to target them more effectively, and create reward programs that actually work. What’s more, Lightspeed’s multi-channel capabilities make it easier than ever to run from various locations, sell all over the web and manage it all in one, simple platform.

Transform your operations, boost efficiency and maximize revenue with Lightspeed. When you’re ready to take the leap, you’ll receive dedicated support from day one with 24/7 customer service and 1:1 training.

Learn more about our solutions for homewares retailers.