Do your shopping carts have any affect on the success of your grocery store? As a matter of fact, they do. According to recent studies, shops that don't provide their customers with carts have seen substantially slower sales than those that do. Consumers want the convenience of being able to safely and easily gather as many groceries as they want and wheel them to the checkout counter at your store. Read on to learn three shopping cart tips that will make you a better business in the eyes of your customers.

Get the Right Wheels

Shopping carts come with a variety of caster and wheel options. You can get fixed casters in both the front and back of the carts, swivel casters at both the front and the back, or swivel casters in the front and fixed casters in the back. 

For a grocery store where the loads the carts will be expected to carry varies, swivel casters in the front and fixed in the back is the way to go. The swivel casters rotate all the way around, allowing for easy turning in aisles and easy maneuvering around islands. The fixed casters in the back provide enough wheel resistance to prevent the carts from drifting away at the slightest incline in the floor or parking lot.

As for material choices, opt for stainless steel casters with heavy-duty rubber wheels. The rubber wheels will glide smoothly and quietly over your grocery store floors without damaging them, and the stainless steel casters won't rust when the carts are left outside in inclement weather.

Have Child-Friendly Options

Each year, 24,000 children are injured in shopping cart accidents. Since the primary cause of these accidents is falls from the carts, which accounts for 70.4% of the injuries, it makes sense that the best way to limit injuries is to limit the distance children can fall from.

There are plenty of child-friendly shopping carts on the market that you can purchase to limit the risk of shopping cart falls in your grocery store. The designs vary; you can get carts that look like race cars, firetrucks, police cars, or animals. However, all the carts should provide places for children to sit that are somewhat close to the floor.

For customers who can't or won't use these child-friendly carts, make sure that every single other cart in your store has a functioning child-safety belt attached to it. Inspect the belts regularly, and if you find one is broken, remove the cart it's attached to from circulation until you can have it repaired. 

Keep Your Carts Clean

Can you imagine shopping in a store where the shopping cart handles were covered in fecal matter and E. coli? Guess what—the shopping carts at the very store you own are likely a cesspool of all things gross and sickness-inducing.  

As many as 72 percent of shopping carts have fecal matter on their handles at any given time, and up to 50 percent have the dreaded E.coli bacteria on them. Protect your shoppers from being contaminated by investing in a shopping cart sanitation system. 

You can purchase portable sensitization systems that clean a single shopping cart at once or big systems capable of sanitizing 150 carts at a time. The units blast the carts with enough hot water and sanitizer to kill 99 percent of all germs that accumulate on the carts in-between uses. Shoppers who currently shop at stores that offer cart sanitization report being happy with the privilege, noting that the concept was innovative and took some of the worry out of hitting the store with children in tow. 

If an entire shopping cart sanitization unit isn't in your budget right now, keep you shopping cart pick-up area well stocked with complimentary sanitization wipes until you can afford one.

Small things can have a big impact on your business, shopping carts included. Talk to companies like Garland's Inc for more information or assistance.