How to manage high volume billing and reduce queues during peak shopping hours

3 areas to improve the peak-hour shopping experience

Just like your brand experience circles around your customers, here are three key areas revolving around your customer's journey to improve your busy hours.

1. Before the customer walks in

Prevention is better than cure, they say. Managing peak-hour chaos begins long before your customer steps into the store. Streamlining your merchandising, product arrangement, and store layout helps distribute traffic and reduce pressure on your billing counter.

• Organizing store layout for flow: Define a one-way customer flow with separate entry and exit points. Ensure the checkout counter is placed in front of a wide aisle in the store. Crowded entrances are a huge put-off for impulsive shoppers to enter your store
• Bundling fast moving products as combos: High-demand products can be packed together, like shampoo and conditioner, diapers and wet wipes, bread and spreads. Not just that, placing them in the right areas and packaging them so they're easier to carry eases the experience even more.
• Pre-pack loose items: Depending on the customer buying behavior, pre-weigh and package loose products like grains, spices, and baked goods in labeled wrappers. For products that need to be loose, like fruits and vegetables, implement a weighing scale-based barcoding system for hassle-free shopping.

2. When the customer is in-store

This is where peak-hour stress becomes most visible. A right plan for systems, staff, and setup ensures customers leave happy.

• Setup express counters: Customers with less than five products in their cart or impulsive shoppers looking to pick up a few items quickly can have separate counters to skip the long queues with larger orders.
• Barcode every product batch-wise: Keep the system fool-proof, reducing the load for staff to type an item, choose the batch, select the price, and apply offers. By using a batch-wise barcoding method, every product can be scanned and moved to the cart—no keyboard, no mouse, just a display and barcode to complete the checkout.
• Simplify payment collection: Accept all possible payment modes such as UPI, cash, cards, coupons, and loyalty redemption with integrated POS systems. This reduces checkout time and avoids delays that come while checking faulty transaction modes. Moreover, it lowers the chances of malpractice and incorrect entries by the billing staff. Having a separate billing counter and payment collection counter also moves queue traffic effectively.

3. After the customer leaves the store

Looking beyond the counter, forward-thinking retailers are reducing peak-hour pressure by giving customers the right tools to plan their next trip better, skip queues, and personalize their shopping. These small innovations go a long way in preventing checkout bottlenecks.

• Enabling an online ordering system: Let customers place orders through your WhatsApp channels, your own ecommerce app or website, or through aggregators, from their home or while inside the store. This reduces time spent wandering the aisles, or can eliminate even walking into the store for shopping—a smaller crowd to handle but no loss in sales.
• Introduce quiet hour slots: Announce special offers during your lean business hours for customers to pre-book based on their convenient time. Especially for monthly shoppers, where it is not just a mundane task but a family getaway, these slots enable a peaceful experience for both you and customers.
• Re-imagine the delivery: After checkout, customers spend most of their time collecting their products, arranging them in their bags, and moving to their vehicles before they make way for others to enter. Once their bill is ready, provide an option for them to deliver their order to their home or for them to pick it up later. This gives ample time for your staff to pack and deliver it, letting that workforce handle other customer engagement activities during checkout.

In short, lowering operational complexity by simplifying processes, systems, and staff work reduces peak-hour stress holistically. All you have to do before fixing the issues behind your peak-hour sales is take a step back, analyze the root causes of it, and address those systematically. Or, you could just get help from a proven solution like Gofrugal ERP to address all your billing hassles and focus on growing the business.