An Update On Our Retail Product Sales – Part 2

Our products have arrived!  We now have a decent inventory of foam rollers, polo shirts, water bottles, high quality tapes, orthotics, TENS units, and we are even trying out waterproof sunscreen.  With the distributors that we chose, we have been able to price all of our products at just about double our costs.

We have already set up a few small display racks for our “retail store”.  What have we learned so far from this process?  A lot of time goes into setting up and stocking the store, as well as warehousing the extra inventory.  We have had to make up small price tags for each product, and have to rearrange and restock our displays throughout the day in order to keep them looking good and well stocked.  And this all takes time away from other tasks that our employees can be doing.

Another issue we are trying to work out is how to track inventory.  This has been our biggest obstacle so far (other than the fact that everyone wants something for free!), but we’re considering a few options to make this easier.  Is it enough for the front desk to just write down what is sold on a piece of paper each day?  This didn’t work so well for us in the past.  We are looking into iPhone applications that should make tracking inventory easier.

Our second major issue is how to handle sales tax.  We have to either build the cost of the sales tax into the price that is charged for the product or we have to charge for sales tax separately.  If we charge it to the patient on top of the product price, then the dollar amount of the sale is not nice and “clean”, so we have to keep more change at the front desk.  Also, our billing software is not set up for tracking the sale of retail products and figuring out sales tax collection, so we end up doing it by hand (or we wind up forgetting to collect the tax).  

Since calculating sales tax by hand is a pain and having to hand out change is kind of lame, on top of the fact that I really don’t want to have a cash register or a drawer filled with lots of change at the front desk, I’m leaning towards just including the sales tax in the purchase price of each product.

Oh, and by the way, our best seller so far?  The short length foam rollers (aka “the baby roller”).  I’ll continue to keep you posted on how our “store” is doing…