Most convenience stores are run like mini supermarkets — packed with range that barely moves. C-Store Boost shows what every centimetre of shelf actually earns, so you can cut the dead stock, free up space, and grow the categories that genuinely pay.
Six butters, ten cheeses, three metres of wine. Every shelf full, most of it barely selling — cash tied up in stock, no room to move.
Keep the sellers, cut the rest. Room opens up for food-to-go, bakery and promotions — and the shop feels bright, clean and easy to shop.
The old thinking says more range, more stock, more sales. In a convenience store, it usually means the opposite.
Customers don't shop convenience the way they shop a superstore. They come in for a small number of missions — food for tonight, food to go, a top-up, a treat, a distress buy. Stocking six butters doesn't sell more butter. It just spreads the same sales thinner, ties up cash, fills the shop with slow stock, and steals space from the things that would actually grow.
Margin tells you what a product makes. Yield tells you what its space makes — and space is the thing you're actually short of. It's one simple sum, run across every category in the store.
Weekly cash margin ÷ centimetres of shelf
= what that space earns
Rank every category by that number and the picture is instant: the space-hogs that barely pay sink to the bottom, and the cramped winners you should be growing rise to the top.
Cut duplicated, slow-moving range and free the cash that's sat on your shelves gathering dust. Less stock, same sales.
Fewer lines means fewer orders to place, fewer deliveries to check in, less facing-up, less date-checking, and less to write off. The saving grows with every line you cut.
Reallocate freed space to the categories that actually pay — food-to-go, food-for-tonight, in-store bakery, chilled meals and treats.
Stop squeezing offers into corners. A leaner range leaves real room for the promotions and seasonal lines that pull people in.
Clear out the slow stock and the whole store opens up — cleaner, easier to shop, and far more inviting than shelves crammed to the ceiling.
No more guessing or gut feel. Every range and space call is backed by what the shelf is genuinely earning, in pounds per centimetre per week.
You need one thing to start: a sales report from your till. No tape measure, no special equipment, no training.
In your till or EPOS system, run a sales report covering the last 12 weeks and save it as a CSV file. Twelve weeks smooths out the odd quiet or busy week, so the picture is a fair reflection of how your shop really sells. Any till system works — the file just needs a row per product with its category, price, cost and units sold.
Your CSV has column headings, and so does C-Store Boost. On this screen you simply pick, from a drop-down, the heading in your file that matches each one the tool needs — the column that holds your selling price, the one with your cost, and so on. The tool guesses most of them for you; you just check they're right and carry on.
In the demo this is already matched up for you — just tap Continue.
This is the only bit you do on your feet, and it's just counting. Walk the shop and for each category answer two questions: how many bays does it fill (a bay is one full section of shelving between the uprights, about a metre wide), and how many shelves high those bays are. Tap the numbers in. That's it — the tool works out the space for you. No tape measure, no sums.
Example: wine fills 3 bays, 5 shelves high → you type 3 and 5. Done.
Instantly, every category is ranked by what it earns per centimetre of shelf each week. The tool flags what's over-ranged and eating space, shows where you're leaving money on the table, and tells you in plain English where to cut and where to grow. Turn on the wastage option to see chilled and fresh lines in their true light once write-offs are counted.
This is the actual output from the sample shop built into the tool — a 67-line convenience store, 12 weeks of sales. Every category ranked by what its shelf space earns per week, with the tool's own advice underneath.
| # | Category | £ marg/wk | £/cm/wk | Yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Soft drinks · 6 lines | £514 | £1.28 | High |
| 2 | Sandwiches / wraps · 4 lines | £381 | £1.27 | High |
| 3 | Food-to-go (hot) · 3 lines | £309 | £1.03 | High |
| 4 | Single confectionery · 5 lines | £175 | £0.58 | Mid |
| 5 | Crisps / snacks · 4 lines | £98 | £0.25 | Low |
| 6 | Beer / cider · 4 lines | £93 | £0.19 | Low |
| 7 | Red wine · 8 lines | £85 | £0.17 | Low |
| 8 | White wine · 7 lines | £70 | £0.14 | Low |
| 9 | Distress: healthcare · 4 lines | £24 | £0.08 | Low |
| 10 | Cheese · 9 lines | £29 | £0.07 | Low |
| 11 | Milk · 3 lines | £27 | £0.07 | Low |
| 12 | Chilled ready meals · 4 lines | £29 | £0.06 | Low |
| 13 | Butter / margarine · 6 lines | £8 | £0.02 | Low |
Cheese (9 lines), red wine (8), white wine (7) and butter (6) are the shop's worst-yielding space — some earning under 10p per centimetre a week, against £1.28 for soft drinks. You don't need six butters and nine cheeses to be convenient. Keep the two or three best sellers in each, drop the rest, and free up whole bays of shelf. Fewer lines also means fewer orders, fewer deliveries to check in, and far less waste to handle.
Soft drinks, sandwiches and hot food-to-go earn six to eighteen times more per centimetre than the wine and dairy. Move the freed shelf here — plus in-store bakery and a proper promotions bay — and the same floor space earns far more. This is where extra facings turn straight into margin.
Cutting the bottom categories barely dents total sales — they were contributing very little — but recovers a large chunk of shelf, a pile of tied-up stock, and hours of handling every week. The shop ends up leaner, brighter and easier to shop, with its best space working hardest.
Launch the tool now with built-in sample data, or download it to keep and run on a real export. No sign-up, nothing to install.
C-Store-Boost.html to your device.