14 Marketable Resume Skills For Retail

The retail industry is the largest private-sector employer, supplying one in four jobs in the US, with plenty of open vacancies available at any time of the year. Recent staff shortages have also accelerated wage growth, even for entry-level hourly roles. 

Still, despite the favorable market conditions, competition remains. To stand out among other applicants you’ll need to demonstrate some solid retail skills on your resume. 

What Skills to Put on Resume For Retail?

Good retail skills for resumes include competencies in sales, customer service, inventory management, and retail technology. To that end, a well-rounded retail resume includes hard and soft skills you’ve acquired on the job, via training, or education. 

Hard Skills For Retail Resume

Hard skills are your core areas of professional competencies. These can include technical skills (such as POS software knowledge) and other functional abilities like knowledge of sales techniques, inventory management, and store operations. 

Examples of hard skills for retail resume

Soft Skills for Retail Resume 

Working in retail assumes a lot of customer integrations. Soft skills like teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and responsiveness are non-negotiable criteria for landing a good retail job. 

Strong people skills can also help you rapidly advance from entry-level retail positions to more senior roles in management, sales, or marketing. For example, Walmart says 75% of its current managers started as hourly retail associates and later advanced to their careers through on-the-job training and personal commitment to excellence. 

Examples of soft skills for retail resume 

14 Resume Skills For Retail to Swipe

You want to demonstrate your ability to serve customers effectively, correctly handle merchandise, and use in-store software to process payments and manage inventory. 

Below are all the core skills needed to excel in the retail sector and different ways to convey them on your resume. 

Sales Techniques 

If you’re after a retail associate role, you must show strong sales skills. These include all the tricks and techniques you’re using to engage casual browsers, assist with product selection, and successfully close a sale. 

The exact techniques can vary a lot depending on the type of product you’re selling. But it often pays off to bring up your abilities in cross-selling, product presentation, objection handling, and needs-based selling. Ideally, you should also pair this with hard proof. 

For example, a compelling entry on your retail resume may look like this: 

Commercial Awareness

How does the company make money? What do customers want now? What will they want next season? Who are the biggest industry influencers? How does this job contribute to the company making a profit? Mid-level retail employees should be able to answer these questions.

That’s why commercial awareness (also known as business acumen) is one of the most important retail management skills for resumes. Employers will try to determine your understanding of the retail landscape in general and their niche in particular. 

Some good words to describe this skill include “sales cycle knowledge and awareness of seasonal trend impacts”, “product placement analysis for optimal visual presentation”, and “understanding the economic factors that influence customer spending”.

Digital Literacy

There was once a time when retail applicants could simply add “computer skills” or “POS” to their resumes and call it a day. That’s no longer the case. Today, retail workers need to showcase more digital literacy skills. They must know how to use a variety of retail and customer service apps, as well as emerging tech solutions like self-service kiosks, cashierless checkout, and more. 

Be sure to showcase that you know how to use in-store technology to your advantage to stand out among other candidates. In particular, highlight any experience you have with: 

Bonus point: Highlight your cyber-awareness. 

As many operating processes are now online, the retail sector has become a prime target for hackers. Show that you know how to stay safe offline by mentioning any specific cyber training you’ve received or best practices you’ve picked up in previous roles. 

Customer Experience (CX) Management

Modern CX is multi-touchpoint. It spans over-the-phone, desktop, and in-store interactions. On average, 8 touchpoints take place before a prospect converts to a paying customer. As a retail employee, you must ensure that every customer has an amazing experience through any touchpoints that you can influence.

In addition to this, modern retail requires that you have a clear understanding of every other touchpoint your company cultivates. For example, store employees must know which messaging (slogans, unique offers, sales pitches) customers typically receive through online channels. This way, you can offer the same consistent experience from end to end. Remember that customer experience extends beyond the sale. It includes post-sale (aftermarket) support, which must be on-brand too! 

Self-Management 

Self-management skills include your ability to stay productive even without a supervisor hawking over your shoulder (which should always be the case!). Every retail employer wants people on their teams who know how to manage their time well, can effectively prioritize tasks, and stay organized even during the busier seasons. 

Communicate your self-management skills by bringing skills like “accountability”, “schedule management”, “task prioritization”, “perseverance”, and “reliability” to your retail resume.  

Merchandising 

Merchandising involves establishing effective visual presentations of sold products. A candidate with strong merchandising skills knows how to monitor stock levels, manage inventory, negotiate with suppliers, and schedule timely replenishment. Additionally, they know where to place items in the store based on a variety of factors. This includes popularity, season, demand, and vendor agreements.

There is also a very creative side to merchandising. Retail employees often get asked to create artful featured product displays to help move stock, as well as improve on-the-shelf product placements. Finally, merchandisers must work with vendors and suppliers. They need to be able to predict store needs and request new products accordingly. 

Inventory Management 

Management of inventory involves monitoring the flow of goods in and out of the retail locations. Sales associates are mostly tasked with monitoring stock levels, receiving new shipments, restocking shelves, and doing inventory audits. 

Retail managers, in turn, handle more strategic initiatives like stock forecasting, deadstock minimization, and vendor/supplier negotiation. In both cases, attention to detail is crucial as you need to maintain high data integrity. Strong analytical skills — at both levels — are also advantageous as you can use these to identify opportunities for improvement and thus set yourself apart as a candidate for promotion. 

Customer Loyalty Management 

Loyal customers have a positive impact on retailers’ financial performance — and oftentimes on your earnings too! Many retailers are offering employee bonuses for signing new customers to the loyalty scheme or improving customer lifetime value on managed accounts. 

Showcase your skills in hitting those targets by bringing up experience with lead nurturing, customer success management, product bundling, and other loyalty management tactics on your resume. 

Communication

Communication is the most in-demand soft skill retail employers seek among candidates. It’s hardly surprising, given that most work is either customer-facing or requires close coordination with other people. 

In both cases, your abilities in clear communication, active listening, and rapport development can give you an edge over other applicants. Showcase that you can deal with challenging customers without compromising your own goals in sales numbers or CSAT levels. Also, bring up your favorable personality traits like sociability, respectfulness, a good sense of humor, patience, and openness. 

Store Management

If you’re after a supervisor or management position, your resume must clearly communicate your store management skills. These include experiences with staff supervision, shift scheduling, profitability management, visual merchandising, and compliance.

Additionally, it always pays to speak about your abilities in customer service oversight. Ideally, you should provide quick examples of how you’re ensuring that people on your team deliver a positive shopping experience. A related resume entry can do like this: 

Problem-Solving

You are out of a popular product and customers are frustrated. A worker hasn’t shown up, and you don’t have the coverage you need to open the store. You just received a shipment you ordered, but everything is the wrong color. What do you do in these situations?

Retail professionals encounter these challenges regularly. When they do, they don’t panic. Instead, they engage their problem-solving skills like analytical thinking, collaboration, and critical thinking to come up with productive solutions to the problems. 

Emotional Intelligence 

It’s no secret that some of the best-sellers are great at reading people —- and that’s one element of high emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence includes your ability to recognize emotions in yourself and others, and then manage those appropriately. 

People with high emotional intelligence are even-tempered and always in control of their behaviors. Even better, they may understand how emotions fuel certain customer actions and adapt their responses accordingly. 

The best way to communicate this retail skill on your resume is by using the following words to describe yourself: 

• Empathic 
• Adaptable
• Self-aware
• Collaborative 
• Proactive
• Introspective 
• Personable 

Reporting and Analytics 

Much of the successful sales strategy boils down to your ability to interpret data, spot trends, draw logical conclusions, and convey the findings to others. Having strong analytical skills means that you can track and interpret key metrics around sales targets, stock turnover, and customer behaviors. Moreover, you’re leveraging this data to come up with better ideas for merchandising, inventory management, promotions, and overall store operations.  

If you also have experience with specific business intelligence (BI) tools, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, or workforce management solutions, bring these up on your resume. 

Organizational Skills 

Most retail jobs are fast-paced. You have to be an expert in time and task management to thrive in this industry. Moreover, your ability to be organized doesn’t just impact your own productivity. It can also impact your coworkers as teamwork is also crucial for successful retail operations. 

Hence, most employers are looking for candidates with solid organizational skills. So be sure to sprinkle in keywords like “delegation”, “administration”, “task management”, “responsiveness”, and “multi-tasking” when describing your duties. 

How to Best Present Your Retail Skills on a Resume

The standard resume length is one page. This means you need to be strategic about how you’re presenting the information. To make your retail skills stand out, use the following tips. 

Match Your Align Your Retail Skills With Employer Needs

Should you include all of the above resume skills examples in your resume? Of course not! In fact, you may not even consider every category listed above. Instead, start with the skills you have. Next, consider the needs of the employer. 

Read their job listings carefully. Learn what is in demand in your specific niche. For example, luxury fashion boutiques and home improvement stores require rather different competencies from candidates.  Then, include the specific skills that are most likely to impress the hiring manager. This will ensure that your resume is relevant and that it contains the right skills and keywords.

Put Your Most Marketable Retail Skills Upfront 

Because there are many different job types and seniority levels within the industry, it’s important to state your area of proficiency straight away. How? Add an impactful resume summary in the header area, complemented by a featured list of retail skills. 

We have plenty of free templates for resumes that support such a layout. So pick one and start populating it with some of the skills from this list! 

Contextualize Your Skills to Show Your Impacts 

The best retail resumes convey exactly how you’re using your skillset to deliver on the employer’s expectation. When possible, try to show the impact you’ve made by using metrics and hard numbers when describing your skills. 

For example, you can contextualize your strong inventory management skills by sharing average inventory turnover rates or average stockout rates if you were in a management position. Or numbers like order accuracy rate or average lead time if you were in an associate position. 

Final Tip: Don’t Forget About a Cover Letter 

A cover letter gives you extra room to speak about your retail skills and accomplishments persuasively. So be sure to save some extras for it to avoid repeating yourself too much. You can learn how to do this by checking our store manager cover letter example and retail manager cover letter example next!