As soon as your customer comes through the door is the best place and the area where products will sell best, the further you get into the shop, the less likely things are to sell without direction.
Having your most important and popular ranges at the back of the shop is best. If you know customers are going to be coming to look at that range or products whatever happens, then make them go past every other product on the way. The more products they see, the more chance they have of picking something up and buying.
The most prominent place customers tend to look is from just above the waist to eye level. Less popular products should go lower down, but never lower than 1ft, but your shelves will probably be designed with this anyway.
You should be telling the customer where they should walk, what they should notice on the way, and how they exit. (visually, not verbally
)
All supermarkets will have this strategy if you look, and most chain retailers too. When i walk into my local HMV, the chart singles(most popular area) are in the left corner as soon as i walk in, the till is on the right as i walk in. So people do this:
1) They enter the shop and look for the charts section.
2) They walk over to look at the chart singles and albums like everyone else.
3) When they're done, they can't go back the same way because of the stream of people coming through the door coming to look at the charts also. So they're forced to walk right to the back corner of the shop.
4) Whether they've decided to buy something by now or not, they're at the back of the store and have to zig-zag their way past pretty much everything to get to either the till or the exit.
5) On the way out there's plenty of offers and specials on the way, and when/if they get to the till there's shelves full of smaller items and little add-on type products that they might pick up forgotten they need while they're waiting to be served.
This is just one example, but all good stores make you pass as many products and offers as possible. The more you pass on your way round, the more chance you have of buying.
I love it.
"Visual merchandising - window and in-store displays for retail" by Tony morgan is a decent book for some of this stuff. It's mostly targeted to clothing retail and how to get into being a visual merchandiser as a profession, but has a good section on the kind of thing you're looking for here.
