Are you planning to open a retail store? No matter what are the products you want to deal with, you want your retail store professional that would attract more customers towards it. Successfully opening a retail store can be a satisfying experience. But opening a brick and mortar store needs several arrangements and preparations. It takes a lot of hard work and determined efforts to establish a successful retail store irrespective of its size. Some of the things need to be planned for setting up a retail store. Following are the steps that are to be included in your retail opening checklist: 

• Legal requirements: It necessitates the fulfilment of various legal requirements. Whether your store is big or small, you have to plan the legal structure for the establishment of the store.
• Funding: One of the fundamental decisions is about the funding for your store, whether you would opt for a business loan or for personal savings to finance your operations.
• Business Plan: A business plan is important to be formulated. Core elements of a business plan are the products you are going to sell, the location of your store, the target market, prices of the product, profit margins, competition in the same area, etc. A complete business plan would help in starting your store conveniently. Once you determine what you are going to sell, you should decide whom you want to sell. After that, you should start looking for a location and examining legal requirements.
• Name of the store: It is important to decide on a good store name that would establish an identity in the mind of your customers and is easily recognizable. The decision about the name of the store should be taken carefully. It should be simple, unique, and relevant. You should make sure that the name you choose is not already taken by any other business. Proper research should be done while deciding the name of your store.
• Licenses: Before opening a retail store, you have to obtain the required license. This license allows you to run your store in a particular place, area, city, or state.
• Promotion and marketing: You have to decide about the promotional means and marketing strategies. You have to identify the marketing channels that would be favorable for your store, like online marketing or social media marketing, traditional marketing methods, etc. Marketing is a crucial component of making your retail store successful.
• Management tools: You need to decide the tools that you would use for managing your store like accounting software, etc.
• Opening of the store: You can plan a big opening for your store. You need not spend extravagantly on the grand opening rather than you can just reach out to the normal outlets and advertise the opening of your store. You can also take the help of media coverage.

After starting your retail operations, you must maintain a daily store opening checklist for managing your day to day activities for making your store run successfully.