Customers at Nisa Local Bellshill in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, are snapping up the store’s new Elf Bar and Lost Mary Christmas gift boxes. The shop is encouraging customers to ‘build your own’ gift box with any five Lost Mary vapes for £28.99, or any 10 Elf Bar vapes for £53. A social media post about the deal, which includes photos of filled gift boxes, has racked up over 900 comments and over 100 shares and the store has sold an impressive 40 boxes in its first 24 hours through both in-store sales and online orders via Snappy Shopper.
When Convenience Store caught up with owner Daniall Nadeem, he had already made a healthy profit of over £600 despite opting not to add a heavy mark-up for the gift boxes. “I was advised to sell the Lost Mary box for £30 and the Elf Bar box for £60, but the way I looked at it was, regardless of how much I charge for the box, I’m still never going to make the same amount of money that I am on a vape,” he said. Instead, he adopted lower price points with the goal of simply increasing volume sales.
Elf Bar vapes are sold at £5.99 each in store or on promotion at two for £10, so with the Elf Bar gift box at £53, customers are only paying £3 extra for the gift box, explained Daniall. “We’re charging £3 for a box that cost us £2,” he says. “But we’re making the money on the vapes and getting people to try new flavours.”
Lost Mary is also sold in store at £5.99 each or two for £10. “The Lost Mary gift box has five vapes in it, so we actually make full margin on one vape,” says Daniall. “So where we would be selling the other four for £5 each, we’re selling one for £5.99, plus we’re making an extra pound on the box.”
However, he claimed that some of his peers were missing a trick because they were failing to tap into the boxes’ potential. “I’ve had a lot of retailers say ‘we can’t be bothered with the boxes, it’s a waste of time,’” he says.
“What I keep trying to explain to other retailers is: the money is not in the box. That’s where a lot of stores are getting confused. You’re not just selling the box, you’re selling the box with the product. In what other transaction are you going to sell 10 vapes at once? For us that would be really rare. The most we’d normally sell in one transaction is maybe four. This is a tool for advertising to get the customer to buy more.
“Where you’re making the money is you’re buying one vape for three pounds and selling it for six pounds. You’re doubling your money on the vape, so why would you not want to sell more vapes? The game is not the box, the box is the tool. The game is the vapes.”
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