Only 50% of small businesses survive past their fifth year.
Fortunately, you don’t have to leave the fate of your liquor store up to chance. Offering the right spirits, providing a top-shelf customer experience, and investing in your marketing strategy can help your business survive and thrive long past the five-year mark.
But running a successful liquor store isn’t just about selling your selection of spirits to customers. The stores that thrive long-term are built on efficient processes, smart inventory management, consistent staff training, and marketing that keeps customers coming back.
Whether you are opening your first store or looking to sharpen how you run an existing one, this guide walks you through eight practical steps to manage your liquor store more effectively.
There’s a world of difference between running a liquor store and running a successful one. While size and location can factor into a liquor store’s popularity, effective management is the special ingredient that makes it stand out.
So, what are the signs of a well-managed liquor store?
While some of these points seem obvious, making them a reality can be easier said than done.
How do you transform your liquor store from just another place to buy a bottle into something more? Follow these steps to improve the shopping experience, reduce costs, and boost sales.
The first step to managing a liquor store effectively is to keep a close eye on your inventory. Keeping your shelves well-stocked is just one piece of the puzzle... You also need to know your bestselling spirits, seasonal trends, and customer preferences.
Stores that track stock and manage invoices manually usually spend more time on manual data entry than on improving their selection or helping customers. That doesn’t help anyone.
Luckily, there is a solution. A reliable liquor store point of sale (POS) system can give you better inventory visibility and significantly streamline your receiving and auditing processes. With a modern POS system, you can:
Whether you’re working on your liquor store business plan or overhauling your product offerings, we recommend paying your competitors a visit. Take notes on the types of spirits they carry, the sizes of their bottles, and their prices. With this information, you can set your liquor store apart from others in the area by carrying spirits that customers can’t find anywhere else.
For example, if a store down the street carries popular brands at affordable prices, you can differentiate your business by specializing in fine, hard-to-find spirits. If a neighboring store carries a wide range of liquors, mixers, and cocktail accessories, you can stand out by focusing on wine and beer to fill the gap.
Some systems, including Bottle POS, can also rank your inventory automatically so you can instantly see your best-selling bottles (and the ones that need a little help). You’ll also get invaluable insights into your operations, so you can make informed business decisions about which items to stock — and when to stock them.
Related Read: Master Liquor Inventory Management With These Tips & Tricks
One of the first (and most important) decisions you need to make about your small liquor store is what kind of bottles to sell. Put another way, what do you want your store’s reputation to be?
Do you want to be known as an expert in local craft brews, a jack of all trades, a collector of niche whiskeys, or the go-to store for wine recommendations? Instead of stocking a little of everything and hoping for the best, think about what sets your small business apart from the competition.
The obvious place to start is your own passion and expertise. Order unique bottles and use educational signage and displays or your newsletter to capture customers’ interest. But more importantly, closely follow your customers’ preferences.
Use the reports on your POS system to see which specific brands and product categories are the most popular with your customers. You can then start to expand your stock in those areas.
Another crucial factor in how to run a liquor store is keeping checkout lines short. A well-managed checkout process makes for happy customers and happy cashiers. Better yet, it also helps you stay compliant with local liquor laws.
Let’s look at three ways to ensure a checkout experience that’s as smooth as your spirits.
One of the best ways to simplify the checkout process is to label your products with barcodes and invest in a reliable barcode scanner. This eliminates the time-consuming process of manually entering product information and prices, saving your cashiers time and reducing errors.
To get started with barcode-based liquor inventory management, we recommend investing in a POS system that generates barcodes and integrates with a barcode label printer.
Age verification is a mandatory step in the liquor store checkout process, but without the right technology, it can take up valuable time. An age verification scanner is the fastest and most secure way to verify customers’ ages. This tool simply scans customers’ IDs to ensure they are of legal drinking age before your cashier processes the sale.
While the right technology can go a long way in speeding up your checkout lines, your team members have to be on board, too. That’s why it’s critical to provide them with thorough training on how to run your liquor store smoothly and provide customers with friendly, prompt service on the sales floor and at the checkout counter.
Plan regular employee training sessions to make sure they understand how to greet customers, use your POS system, and make excellent product recommendations.
When customers want to find a new business, they look online, even when looking for something local. That’s one of the reasons why it’s vital to maintain an updated and user-friendly site.
To make your website even more helpful, find a POS system that supports e-commerce. Even if you don’t plan to sell online, this will allow you to sync your inventory with your website so people can get a sense of what you offer before they visit.
If your state allows it, you should embrace liquor e-commerce — including pickup and delivery sales. Not only will it help you reach new customers, but it will provide another revenue stream. Even some existing customers who originally shopped in person might prefer the convenience of online sales.
The easier you make it to buy, the more likely they are to pull the trigger. However, make sure “easy” doesn’t mean “illegal.” Use an e-commerce platform that is age-gated to prevent underage sales and supports high-risk payment processing.
Great marketing is the key to multiplying your customer base. After all, customers can’t buy from you if they don’t know about your store. Once they do know, you need to attract them into your store. But how do you do that?
First, get the word out. Use the marketing features on your liquor POS system combined with your social media accounts and website to highlight new arrivals, upcoming sales, staff picks, and more.
Second, run lucrative promotions and discounts. Discounts are useful both for boosting sales and moving old stock. Here are a few ideas:
You can even leverage advanced features to implement unique pricing strategies, including dynamic pricing based on demand and seasonality, or offer exclusive discounts to those enrolled in your rewards program.
Bringing in new customers is important — keeping them is the key to long-term success. Why? Because returning customers spend more, build your reputation through reviews and referrals, and help you define your niche. The two keys to customer retention are having a superior collection and effective marketing.
In addition to tracking your customers’ preferences, improve your selection by following liquor industry trends and forming connections with local distilleries and breweries.
Personalized recommendations and marketing are how your store will float to the top of customers’ minds when they’re next ready to buy a bottle. The first step? Create a customer loyalty program.
In exchange for giving you their contact info, loyalty programs reward your customers with points every time they make a purchase. These points can later be redeemed for freebies like a bottle opener or other merch and discounts. Points programs are fun and incentivize customers to stick with your store, but they also allow you to tailor recommendations to your customers.
Here are a few examples of personalized communications you can send to your loyalty members:
Many POS systems let you manage a loyalty program directly from the same system you use to track inventory and ring up customers.
As a liquor store owner, you are constantly faced with tough decisions. How many varieties of whiskey should you stock? How much shelf space should you dedicate to a particular brewery? Do your customers like Chilean reds or bottles from local vineyards?
While you should trust your instincts, making decisions on a hunch alone is risky. Instead, back up your decisions with data-driven insights.
While this might sound space age, your liquor store system generates invaluable data every time you make a sale, receive an invoice, and clock in an employee. Use this data to spot trends, identify bestsellers, and more.
Here are just a few things you can learn from the reports on your POS system:
With these insights, you can make informed decisions on when to replenish stock, which items to put on promotion, which products to discontinue, when to put extra staff on the floor, and more — ensuring maximum profitability.
These reports help simplify your day-to-day and optimize inventory so you can focus on what matters most — providing excellent customer service and expanding your business reach.
Liquor stores have been a staple of communities for years, but that doesn’t mean things never change. The liquor industry is constantly evolving, and customer preferences change with it. The more you update your store to meet their needs, the better.
Periodically refreshing your store layout is a great way to improve the customer experience. But there’s a difference between changing things up for the sake of it and changing things strategically.
Here are some general tips for updating your liquor store layout:
If you’re considering updating your store layout, think of your goals. Do you want to boost sales of top-shelf liquors, improve inventory turnover for multi-packs of beer, or do something else entirely?
Having a goal in mind will help you measure the impact of your changes so you can improve on what works (and throw out what doesn’t).
Next to monthly inventory costs, staffing will be one of your biggest expenses. However, hiring and, more importantly, retaining great staff is essential.
Staff aren’t just there to man registers and stock shelves; they also help answer customers’ questions, create a welcoming atmosphere, and provide recommendations.
Train staff to engage with customers when they come in. As prices rise, people tend to default to cheaper staples unless they feel confident in their purchase. A well-timed recommendation might just tempt a customer to splurge on that nicer bottle.
Your staff also act as your eyes and ears. Hold periodic staff meetings to see if they’ve heard any common points of feedback or noticed any sales trends. Giving staff a chance to voice their opinions (and acting on them) is a great way to keep them invested in your store’s success.
That said, don’t waste money on staff when they truly aren’t needed. Use the activity reports on your liquor store POS to see when your busiest seasons and days of the week are.
Managing a liquor store is no easy task, but by taking a more engaged management approach, you can improve your selection and provide customers with a friendlier shopping experience.
However, it’s hard to focus on improving the management of your store when you’re bogged down writing out invoices and doing manual inventory counts.
That’s why independent liquor stores around the country trust Bottle POS to streamline liquor store management so they can spend more time on their customers and improving their stores.
To learn more about how an industry-specific POS system can help you manage your liquor store — and then take it to the next level — schedule a demo with one of our liquor store specialists today!
Bottle POS was designed to be smart and simple. Instead of having hundreds of features that liquor store owners won't use, we concentrate on the features that really make a difference.
