5 Reasons Hookah Customers Leave Without Buying Anything

Every smoke shop is its own world with different challenges, advantages, staff, layouts, locations, and overall vibes. Each of these details plays a role in shaping the perfect shopping experience for hookah enthusiasts. After traveling across the country and visiting hundreds of stores from coast to coast, I’ve noticed some clear patterns. These are the biggest issues customers face when trying to buy anything, especially shisha, in retail smoke shops.

This is by far the most common reason hookah customers walk into a shop and leave without buying anything. If you do not have prices displayed on your hookahs, shisha, or coals, you are losing sales every single day. Younger customers grew up in a digital world and often feel uncomfortable asking staff for prices repeatedly. Take the guesswork out of the experience and clearly price your inventory so customers know exactly what they are spending before they reach the counter.

Here’s another sales killer: a customer browses your flavor selection only to find that half of it is expired. From that moment on, every jar on your shelf becomes suspect, and the customer assumes that real hookah smokers do not shop at your store. If you are struggling to move old shisha, check out this article on how to manage your inventory and liquidate outdated products before they drive customers away.

If this is the problem you need to re-order asap. Your shisha has not been replenished in months. All of the best selling flavors like mint, blueberry and watermelon have sold; so now your customers come in to pick through a few left over boxes of expired cappuccino and a dusty box of banana and then leave because you don’t have the most popular flavors on the shelf.  Then you tell yourself that hookah doesn’t sell….but the real problem is that you didn’t restock the fast-selling items. 

There is so much inventory crammed into one shelf or display case that the customer feels like they are making a mess as they dig through the products. After moving around a few items, most customers will fall back to a casual browse of the top layer and probably not find anything they are looking for. Keep your extra stock out of sight so you can display a clean, neat, and easy-to-shop hookah experience.

So many customers in the hookah space have a real passion for the category. They enjoy talking about the different brands, flavors, mixes, processes and techniques with fellow hookah enthusiasts. Unfortunately, half of the time, they are met by staff that has no interest, no experience, or no knowledge of the products; so when the customer gets a few one-word answers to their questions, they figure it’s time to go and find someone who knows more about hookah.

Are you guilty of any of these retailer mistakes? It’s OK, all you need to do is decide to make a change and see if the results get better. If you try one or two things and see an improvement, let us know. We would love to hear what you did and the positive results.