Overcoming Challenges in Mattress Retail: Price Wars, Shipping, and More

If you sell mattresses for a living, no one needs to tell you how close your profit margin relates to your success on the sales floor. Whether you’re the head of a franchise, a private retailer, or a manager, you’re always looking for ways to cut costs and increase interest in your products.

Of course, this is hard to do with competitors and a changing marketplace always working against you. Add high employee turnover, increasing returns, and jockeying with online retailers. Before you know it, you’re having trouble sleeping at night (and it’s not because of your mattress, that’s for sure). What’s a poor retailer to do?

Simple: change the way you do business. You need a system to prove to customers that you’re what they’ve been looking for, empower your staff, and reduce returns. The REVEAL Mattress Recommendation system by XSENSOR will help you do just that, using science and data to replace gimmicks and empty promises. It’s already proven itself in retail establishments worldwide, and it can also work for you.

But before we discuss that, let’s take a closer look at the ideal mattress shopping experience and its challenges.

Creating the Ideal Mattress Shopping Experience

The ideal mattress shopping experience starts with understanding where historically effective retail strategies and new technology intersect. Making a sale requires a combination of persistence without looking like you’re putting in the effort because that only comes off as salesy. However, when you use the right systems on your sales floor, you provide:

• Consistent quality customer experience;
• Hands-on experience customers cannot get online;
• Increased customer purchase confidence;
• Increase in market share over online retailers;
• Improved store reputation and credibility;
• More referral business;
• Manufacturers that sponsor or subsidize purchases; and
• Measurable performance reports.

If you’re like most people in the mattress industry, the above is a dream scenario. But with all the challenges clawing at the door, it sometimes feels impossible to imagine that day.

Challenges of Mattress Retail

Mattress retail comes with plenty of sales challenges. The following are just a few of the biggest.

Price Wars

Part of the problem with mattress sales is that, much like anything on the market, prices can turn off customers before they even give your product a fair shake. Sure, your mattress might be the wonder cure their back has been seeking for the last five years, but they’ll never know if they get a sudden case of sticker shock and leave.

Unfortunately, mattresses that make a difference in good health and sleep are expensive – frequently over $5,000. This means you need a system to prove to customers that those products are at least worth a look-see. (Spoiler alert: that exists, and if you’re not using it, you’re losing people unnecessarily.)

Additional Costs

Additional costs such as shipping and delivery also cramp your style. People balk at paying such prices, yet you can’t offer them up for free if you can’t wrap them into the cost of the mattress. And you can’t do that because you’re having a hard enough time getting people to agree to buy them in the first place!

Turnover

Unreliable mattress sales mean retail sales associates (RSAs) are not seeing success at your store, so they leave. This turnover makes it even harder to teach your RSAs how to sell effectively, leaving you with a broken system that doesn’t attract good talent. Even the ones that stay lack faith in your sales system, so they take a freelance approach… which doesn’t work either.

Manufacturer Disconnect

Many of your products aren’t supported or sponsored by the manufacturer, which makes it harder for customers to get good deals on them and for you to make them appealing.

Competition for Floor Space

The sheer amount of money you spend to host each potential product on your floor can undermine your profits. It can also mean you don’t have enough room to keep all the products you want on hand.

Differentiation From Online Retailers

Online retailers are gaining ground in the market. Ease of purchase and the benefits of online reviews work against brick-and-mortar shops. Until you determine how to differentiate yourself in your physical location, price competition and the simplicity of online shopping will eat away at your profits.

Customer Skepticism

Consumers know that mattress RSAs work on commission. They’re more than aware that your livelihood is tied to their “yes.” That means they’re more suspicious, and you can’t blame them.

The problem is, it’s hard to say what product will work when you’ve just met someone, don’t sleep with them at night, and rely on reporting what happens when the person is pretty out of it.

A mattress recommendation system solves the problem. Using sensors to create a sleep profile, complete with visualizations of how an individual’s body contacts their mattress at night, you can overcome every challenge above and stand out in the marketplace.

XSENSOR’S REVEAL Mattress Recommendation System to the Rescue

If you’re getting a little frightened just reading the above list, take heart: overcoming all these challenges and hitting that ideal mattress experience is possible. All you have to do is embrace the REVEAL Mattress Recommendation system from XSENSOR.

You no longer must rely on your persuasive powers to convince customers that this product will work for them. Consumers are savvy and skeptical and don’t want to take your word for it, especially when you have that used car salesman vibe.

Instead, they want reliability. Science, data, and technology are what move the needle these days.

The REVEAL system offers just that. It uses science-backed, sensor-based, individualized pressure mapping to create a one-of-a-kind diagnostic that shows customers exactly what their bodies need… no convincing is required. If you’re looking for a genuine solution that will withstand the test of time, REVEAL By XSENSOR is here for you.