SuperShop's Success Story

Navigating Challenges in Stoke-on-Trent

A 500sq ft. c-store that sells snack food, confectionery, tobacco, e-cigs, soft drinks, news and magazines is made for pure convenience in the centre of Stoke. With fierce local competition from £1 shops and other C-stores as well as a small shop-floor space we wondered how SuperShop was performing so well. Here’s a few of the things we found.

Location, Location, Location

SuperShop’s owners, Charlotte and Ben understand the importance of location despite the challenges of the local economy. They take advantage of the passing foot traffic with eye catching window displays and a large, attractive fascia that ties to the trusted local paper, The Sentinel. They even work with a third-party to provide an electronic advertising screen which promotes local businesses as well as services available in-store such as National Lottery.

SuperShop’s opening times are 8:30am and 5:30pm Monday – Saturday and 10am until 4pm on Sunday. These may seem like limited opening hours, but in a city where the high street gets very quiet after those working have returned home after 5pm, it makes sense. In fact, it’s impressive they are able to achieve so much between these shorter than average opening hours.

Smart Range

As a high-street shop, much of SuperShop’s trade comes from those working in or travelling through the city centre. Knowing this, Charlotte and Ben have consolidated their range to focus entirely on snacking, news and services. You won’t find bread, milk or other staple goods in this shop. What’s more, SuperShop offer a great variety of snacks, with confectionery in all sizes, biscuits, crisps (again in various sizes), chilled drinks and even traditional bagged sweets such as humbugs, fudge and more.

Cutting poor selling products was not just guesswork., Charlotte and Ben used the reports available on their EPoS system to make smart decisions on their range and still consult their BackOffice software on a daily basis to keep track of their sales and make smart business decisions moving forward.

Efficient Customer Service

SuperShop have three of our EPoS systems. With it being such a small store, we questioned why they would need three.

This was a real eye opener to how much footfall they get through the shop on a daily basis. They pride themselves on quick and efficient customer service and as a small c-store, it is vital to get customers in and out as quickly as possible. They also keep the store well-staffed, with both owners and an additional assistant in-store when we visited.

Whilst their location is an important part of their success, their clever product management and great customer service keeps customers coming back. Judge this book by its cover and you might see an unassuming c-store on a challenging high street location, but in the short time we were there we found a smartly run, well presented c-store with two passionate owners at the helm.