There are a finite number of hours in the day. That doesn’t help when you’re working on a limited budget to operate your store. How you spend these resources matters.

Retail productivity is a measurement that helps you uncover how well you’re spending these resources. It can identify areas of improvement to boost profitability, assist with staff retention, and help make smarter business decisions—but only if you know how to measure it. 

Ahead, learn the retail productivity metrics you can use to analyze efficiency in your store, with six bonus tips to extract more value from your resources.

What is retail productivity? 

Retail productivity measures how effectively a business uses its resources, including staff, time, and money. You can maximize revenue and reduce technical costs by using resources effectively—both of which help operate a more profitable retail business.

What is retail productivity used for?

Measure store performance

Most retailers default to top-line revenue figures to assess store performance. Your New York location might bring in $50,000 in sales every year, but if you’re spending a quarter of that on staff costs and the technical infrastructure to power your store, your sales numbers likely are not as good as they seem on the surface.

Retail productivity metrics such as sales labor cost, however, let you compare your investment against the financial performance of a store. You might learn that stores with less “shiny” figures are actually the most lucrative.

Improve operational efficiency

Because the cost of doing business is rising, retailers who can squeeze the most value out of every investment are better positioned to withstand economic changes.

Take it from Oak + Fort, an apparel retailer that migrated to Shopify in an attempt to unify order data from multiple sales channels. “One of our greatest areas of efficiency improvement is the management of omnichannel orders,” says Jennifer Pearson, the brand’s head of technology and ecommerce. “We were able to cut down a three-step process to one action. 

“This change has reduced approximately 50 hours per week in headquartered staff time, approximately 40 hours per week with customer experience teams, and approximately 10 hours per week from IT support. Across our 42 retail locations, we’re also saving approximately 80 hours per week of shop floor employee time.” 

Increase employee engagement

It’s easy for retail staff to become disengaged when they’re sitting twiddling their thumbs. Similarly, if they’re rushed off their feet every shift, they can quickly become burnt out. Both are challenges that contribute to retail’s high staff turnover rates.

Retail productivity aims to strike a balance. It can help employees feel stimulated and challenged when you’re trying to squeeze the most value out of their time. And when you’re measuring retail productivity based on individual data (such as sales by staff at the register), you can offer the extra level of recognition that 28% of employers want from their manager. 

How to measure retail productivity

There isn’t a single metric you can use to calculate how productive your retail business is. Instead it takes a holistic approach using metrics such as the following:

• Sales per labor hour (SPLH): The total revenue generated divided by the total labor hours worked. A high SPLH indicates that staff are productive—they’re optimizing their time well to sell to customers. 
• Sales by staff at the register: The total revenue generated divided by the number of staff operating the point-of-sale (POS) system. This metric lets you identify top performers and balance staff rotations with demand. If you have upward of 70 daily sales by staff at the register on a Saturday but only 15 on a weekday, perhaps you need to reshuffle your rotations to have more weekday staff active on busy weekends. 
• Items per transaction (IPT): If customers tend to purchase more items per transaction, they’re likely satisfied with the experience given in-store. Locations with a lower IPT should be high priority for upsell and cross-selling strategies to bump up this metric. 
• Sales per labor cost: Sales divided by how much you’ve spent on labor. This metric can inform budgets and prevent overspending on salaries in comparison to revenue. 
• Sales per staff employed: A three-person store that drives 250 in daily sales is more productive than one that employs five associates with the same daily sales total. You’re getting the same output with fewer resources, indicating that the employees’ time is better spent. 

How to improve retail productivity

Unify POS data

Many retailers struggle with disconnected systems that create operational complexity and drain productivity. This traditional approach poses significant challenges—from fragmented data and high maintenance costs to time wasted managing multiple systems.

Shopify takes a different approach as the only Commerce Operating System with natively unified ecommerce and POS solutions. Rather than connecting separate systems, Shopify provides a single platform where all retail operations naturally work together. This architectural advantage means inventory, order, and customer data flow seamlessly through your business, enabling better productivity and faster decision-making.

Take the Western-wear retail brand Tecovas, for example. Known for its mantra of offering “radical hospitality,” Tecovas uses Shopify’s POS UI extensions to access data stored in unified customer profiles and personalize the shopping experience. 

Sales associates reference these unified profiles to learn more about the customer. For example, they can see each shopper’s purchase history to recommend future products. Associates can also upsell more expensive merchandise or cross-sell related items, and track customers’ loyalty points across both online and retail channels.

These techniques directly impact retail productivity because retail associates don’t need to waste precious time learning about anonymous visitors—a complete history is available instantly in Tecovas’ POS system.

Give employee autonomy

Standard operating procedures help retail stores run smoothly. But what happens when you need to go off course? Productivity can get slowed down when staff need to ask for manager’s approval on every small decision. 

Autonomy gives retail staff the freedom to make their own decisions. Here’s what that might look like in practice:

• Designing a window display or visual merchandising stand
• Choosing to give an unhappy customer a 10% discount on their next order if they think it will recover the service
• Recommending products they think a customer would like, rather than blanket pushing a high margin product

To benefit from employee autonomy, invest in a solid retail staff training program. Reinforce your values, ethics, and standards—employees can refer back to these to make decisions that are in line with what your business stands for. 

Automate routine tasks

Productivity is about extracting the most value from your resources. Automation accelerates this idea by removing manual and repetitive tasks from your workload. Software can take care of them, leaving your retail staff more time to focus on other higher impact tasks. 

Examples of retail tasks you can automate include:

• Marketing: Whether it’s a post-purchase feedback survey or invitation to join an event you’re hosting in-store, the best marketing is personalized. Shopify can automate this process by unifying your first-party data into a centralized customer profile. Then take advantage of Shopify’s dynamic segmentation to trigger marketing campaigns based on behaviors your customers show.
• Inventory management: Apps like Stocky can save time replenishing stock. For example, you can use detailed reports to set reorder points for each SKU. The app will use this data, combined with the vendor’s typical lead time, to automatically create purchase orders when inventory quantities dip below your predetermined thresholds. 
• Order processing: Omnichannel retailers have orders coming in from multiple channels: an ecommerce website, a selection of retail stores, social media. Shopify automatically unifies this data into a single order management system. You can configure workflows in this system that send orders to a particular fulfillment center—like the one closest to your customer or the warehouse with the most inventory on hand, for example. 

💡Pro tip: Automation is most effective with a unified commerce operating system. Because Shopify's architecture natively connects all aspects of your business, workflows run in real-time without the need for complex integrations or middleware. This means faster, more reliable automation that scales with your business.

Implement a mobile POS solution

Traditional POS systems were fixed to a checkout desk. Whether your retail staff wanted to complete an order, check inventory quantities, or retrieve customer data—it all had to happen at the checkout desk. Problems arise, however, when the checkout desk is busy. People are waiting in line to pay for their order, and staff have to wait their turn to use the POS system.

Mobile POS (mPOS) solutions fix these issues. Staff can complete POS tasks from anywhere in-store—meaning even if there is a lengthy checkout queue, there’s no need to wait. They can use their smartphone, or a handheld POS device, to check out customers and reference data.

Adopt digital signage

Retail signage is an important component of any retail store. It tells both in-store shoppers and passersby about any deals or promotions, as well as highlighting product features and pricing. But the time retail staff spend creating this signage can quickly add up. 

Digital signage can keep displays fresh without draining resources—notably your staff’s time and physical resources (i.e., paper). For example:

• Digital price tags: Adjust product prices using market trends, historical sales data, and consumer demand. Retail staff won’t need to reprint pricing tickets when the digital display updates automatically. 
• Interactive screens: Let customers interact with products without assistance from a sales associate. A boutique store could use smart mirrors to overlay a 3D product model on a livestream of the customer’s body, for example. 
• QR codes: Place these barcode-style images beside products in store. There’s no need to redesign signage—just update your online store with any key messaging, prices, or shipping details and keep the QR code the same. 

Balance retail schedules with demand

Retail productivity can suffer when employees don’t have enough to do. When you balance retail rotations with shopping demand, however, you can fix this challenge and ensure you’re only eating into your labor budget when there’s a good chance you’ll make sales.

Shopify apps such as Dor can track foot traffic and show your busiest or slowest days. If you find that Tuesdays have the least footfall, for instance, perhaps you only need one cashier and one store manager on shift. Saturdays might be the busiest, for which you’ll need two store managers, two cashiers, and three sales associates to handle the rush. 

💡Pro tip: Use workforce management apps like EasyTeam or Gusto. Both integrate with Shopify POS so you can schedule rotations, let staff clock in and out, and export their contracted hours to your accounting software for payroll. 

Boost retail productivity with a unified commerce platform

Retail productivity is a great measurement of store performance. When you’re squeezing every last inch of value out of your time, labor, or financial investment, you can operate a more profitable business.

The best part: If you’re already using Shopify’s unified commerce platform, you’ve already got the data you need to measure and improve store productivity.