In today’s garden centres, the café has become much more than somewhere to eat. It brings customers on site throughout the year, increases dwell time, and often leads to purchases they hadn’t planned to make.
A customer who arrives for breakfast may leave with compost, a houseplant, or a gift. Another comes for bedding plants and stays for lunch. Every visit to your café has the potential to increase the value of a customer’s entire visit, meaning its impact extends far beyond what’s on the menu.
The problem is that many garden centres can’t see the full impact their café has on retail sales because those parts of the business are often managed separately. If your retail and hospitality systems aren’t connected, it’s difficult to understand the complete customer journey or identify opportunities to increase spend.
So, how do you stop treating your café as a separate revenue stream and start using it to drive spend across your whole garden centre?
Understand how customers move through your business
Before you can increase spend, you need to be able to measure it accurately.
If your café was added after the rest of the business was established, there’s a good chance hospitality and retail have ended up running on different systems, or on software that only partially connects the two.
On paper, that might not seem like an issue. You can see café sales, retail sales, and how each department is performing. But what you can’t easily see is how one part of the business is influencing another.
Did customers who visited the café spend more in-store? Which promotions encouraged shoppers to move between departments? What’s the average value of a customer visit across the whole site? When your retail and hospitality data sits in separate places, those questions are much more difficult to answer.
A connected system brings those insights together in one place. You can see exactly how customers are moving through your garden centre, which departments they’re combining, and what’s driving total spend – in real time, without spending hours pulling reports together. And once you can see it, you can start to influence it.
Encourage customers to spend across your site
Growing revenue doesn’t always mean attracting more customers. One of the most effective ways to grow revenue is increasing the value of the customers already walking through your doors.
Once you understand how customers engage with different areas of your business, you can start influencing that behaviour in ways that increase spend across your entire site. That might mean sending targeted offers to café customers, encouraging them to explore the shop floor. Or bundling seasonal products with café promotions to promote new ranges. You can even see which events are generating the greatest return by measuring their impact on both food and retail sales.
When retail and hospitality are connected, every visit becomes another opportunity to increase spend.
Turn insight into growth with OpSuite
The most successful garden centres don’t just use hospitality to generate food and drink sales. They use it to increase customer value across the entire business.
That starts with having one complete view of how customers move between retail and hospitality. When you can see the full picture, you can make better decisions, run more effective promotions, and measure what really increases customer spend.
That’s exactly what OpSuite is designed to help you do. Built specifically for garden centres, it brings retail and hospitality together in a single system, giving you greater visibility across your business and helping you get more value from every customer visit.
Want to find out more about how OpSuite helps you drive more revenue? Get in touch