Training and Comission Selling for Shop Employees

Last Updated: August 22, 2009

Training

When you hire a new employee, they will have no experience of working for you; they may have worked in similar environments, but they will still need teaching about your shop and products.

One of the best ways to bring new employees into their job is to give them a brief introduction to the business (maybe over the course of the first few hours of employment), explaining what you sell, how your business works, and any other duties that the employee may have.

“The quickest way for an employee to learn is by doing the job…”

The quickest way to learn about the job is for them to actually do it, but make sure you (or other employees) are there to offer help if it is needed.

Part of the learning process is to teach the employee about your customer service, how you deal with and help customers. For example: do you offer assistance to each customer while they browse, or let them come to you for help when they are ready ?

Commission

You may consider giving your employees commission for the products that they sell, in order to encourage higher and more expensive sales. For example: Paying an employee 2% of every item that they sell.

Commission will encourage employees to try harder to sell, but may cause problems if they are inexperienced; as they may try too hard to make sales and make customers feel pressured.

If you consider commission selling, you need to look at whether it will benefit your business. If you sell higher priced products (e.g. Electrical items or expensive clothing) then commission selling will be much more effective than if you sell fast moving cheap products (e.g. Food and drink.)

It is also important to remember that without expensive computer systems it will be hard to accurately and honestly log which employee is selling what products.