With more than 40,000 electronics repair businesses in the United States alone, it’s a competitive industry – but it can be a very lucrative one as well when you’re able to diversify and ultimately increase your revenue streams. After all, the less reliant you are on one specific source of revenue, the better.
As a company that’s partnered with more than 500 independent repair shops across the country, we’re familiar with their needs and invested in their success. That’s why we’ve gone ahead and compiled this handy list of techniques and strategies you can use to increase repair shop revenue.
1. Become a retail destination
It’s no secret that many repair shops supplement their revenue by selling electronics themselves as well as their accessories. The trick is doing it well – taking advantage of that storefront space to stock items that are useful to your customers and make it easy for you to upsell.
Of course, when you’re stocking items, you have a lot more to think about – especially inventory space, inventory turnover, and merchandising. You don’t want to be stuck with a cluttered store, and you don’t want to be stuck with inventory you can’t sell, so you’ll need to do some pre-planning to do this effectively.
So before you get into this – or if you’re already in it but see room for improvement – ask yourself some questions:
- Do customers often ask for items you’re not currently selling?
- How much space do you have available for retail merchandise?
- How will you handle pricing and inventory?
- Which items have enough organic demand that people might come to your store looking for them specifically?
- What relationships can you leverage to get the products you need?
- Do you want to sell online?
The answers to these questions will help you determine the direction and volume of your budding retail business.
2. Offer dropshipping
There are literally thousands of different models of phones, so your store is naturally going to carry accessories only for the most popular ones. But that doesn’t mean you can’t serve customers who have older phones or more unusual models.
Enter dropshipping. Instead of you holding all that extra inventory, just let a supplier handle it! You take the order and the payment, and the supplier handles fulfillment. It’s a handy way to expand the footprint of a small storefront and build out your online presence. There are plenty of tools and store integrations online that simplify the process for both you and your customers.
3. Refine your online presence
It might seem like a poor use of resources to commit to online sales, but dropshipping may be a good way for you to test those waters without spending too much capital. If it goes well and you have the time, space and personnel to handle shipping some orders directly from the store, you can work that into your repertoire too.
More broadly, it’s often worth spending some money on a professional web designer, especially if you’re located in a competitive area or lacking for walk-in customers. Your website doesn’t necessarily need information about every product you sell; it just needs to be clean, clear, and comprehensible – and it should be well integrated with your store.
For instance, giving people the ability to schedule a repair appointment is a must – it conveys a host of benefits. For one, it gives your website an action item that visitors can be funneled into; if someone is visiting a repair shop’s site, they’re probably looking to get a repair done – and the easier you make that process for them, the likelier they are to visit your shop. But it also gives you as the business owner a view into your upcoming workflow as well as your parts and staffing needs.
4. Do buybacks, trade-ins, and pre-owned sales
There’s a reason that a lot of cell providers and major retailers offer trade-in programs: put simply, consumers like them. After all, what’s not to like about the opportunity to trade in your old device for a brand-new one at a discount? The same goes for buy-backs – especially considering that the vast majority of people have multiple old phones just lying around the house.
Those old phones represent an opportunity for electronics repair businesses. Not only can you repair and resell them (making sure to set an appropriate pricing structure for both the trade-ins and the resale), you can also break them down for parts when you need to. And if you happen to end up with too much inventory of pre-owned devices, you can sell them online even if you don’t have your own storefront set up.
Price-conscious customers will appreciate both the ability to trade in their old devices and the option to buy lower-cost used devices. You might even lure in customers who wouldn’t have come in otherwise.
5. Sell device protection
Naturally, the people who come to a repair shop are likely to need repairs again at some point. Whether it’s because they have rambunctious kids, their work exposes their devices to risk, they’re clumsy, or they’re just plain unlucky – accidents happen, and they’re often conscious of that. It only takes one incident that forces you to pay hundreds of dollars for a repair or replacement to make you intimately familiar with the value of device protection.
However, most protection plans are a bad deal for consumers. After all, the likelihood that you’ll break one specific device is a lot lower than the likelihood that you’ll break something valuable over the course of time. And, of course, buying a protection plan for everything you own is prohibitively expensive and complicated. The AKKO Plan addresses that by covering a phone plus up to 25 other items – from computer and electronics to music gear to sports equipment and more – all for $15 a month, with deductibles topping out at $99. That’s a deal unmatched by any other protection provider.
The AKKO Plan is so good, it practically sells itself – making it an ideal add-on for customers regardless of whether they’re in your store for repairs or for a new device. Our terms are simple and straightforward, and we pay our partners $25 for every AKKO Plan they sell (and $20 for our phone-only plans).
You can get started selling our plans in mere minutes – almost instantly adding a new revenue stream. Better yet, when customers buy AKKO plans at your store, we’ll refer them right back to you whenever they need repairs. And with our new partner platform, we’ve made managing your AKKO sales easier than ever.
So what are you waiting for? Sign on as an AKKO partner and start earning today!
