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Portable displays are an excellent alternative to traditional creative displays, colorful banners and other common promotional items when wall or floor space is at a premium or nonexistent. Small business owners are always looking for ways to build sales, but space limitations often thwart their efforts. In this article, we will outline the merits of portable displays and provide information about how they may be used to drive store traffic and increase sales and profitability of your small business.

While traditional displays create visual interest with the use of actual merchandise, they take up considerable space. Each square foot of space that is occupied by a three dimensional display reduces the available space to stock and sell the merchandise by the same amount of area.

Wall displays are good in that they don't take up any floor space. However, they do tend to draw the attention of customers away from the merchandise. Customers find themselves distracted by vivid wall displays which cause them to look back and forth from wall to merchandise instead of helping them focus their attention on things they might like to purchase.

An increasingly popular portable display unit is the inexpensive banner stand. It offers a different way of achieving this goal. Such devices have two very simple pieces to hold your banner in place, and even allow for changing graphics from time to time. The display banner graphic is held in place with a simple tension bar.

Banner stands are a convenient and economical option. Ease of installation and extreme mobility are key attributes. They are even available in a retractable form that rolls up into the base of the stand.

Savvy business owners, the ones who are always looking for the new and best ways to do business, are finding that the use of portable displays can eliminate "dead" space in their stores and more efficiently use that space to create visual interest in products. For some reason, all stores have "dead" spots that can't be used for either merchandising or storage. These are the areas where you can strategically place portable displays to help educate and inform customers as well as spark their interest in special sales and promotions you are having.

In fact, in a recent study by the Institute for Best Business Practices (IBBP), bookstores were asked to use either a traditional wall banner or a portable banner display to market the children's book, "Mr. Orange Visits Europe". Stores that used portable banner displays enjoyed sales of the book that were nearly 23 percent higher than the stores that used the traditional wall banner. It seems, therefore, that portable, retractable bannerstands are not only a great way to use space in your store, but also might help increase your overall sales.