Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Real strategies from Market 24 store managers who’ve done it – and what actually works on the floor.
If you run a gas station convenience store, you already know that a well-organized floor sells more product. But knowing how your floor is performing – what’s moving, what’s dead weight, and where you’re leaving margin on the table – is a different challenge altogether. That’s exactly where Petrosoft’s CStoreOffice changes the game.
At Market 24, we’ve been using Petrosoft across our locations to manage planograms, merchandise categories, and inventory reorder points. What follows is a practical breakdown of how we use the floorset tools inside CStoreOffice, with real tips from our store managers who live in the system every day.
Start With Your Category Structure – Before You Touch the Floor
The biggest mistake operators make is walking the floor before they’ve set up their category tree in CStoreOffice. Your category structure drives everything: reporting, reorder triggers, planogram logic, and margin visibility. Get it wrong upfront and you’ll be fighting the system for months.
In CStoreOffice, navigate to the Merchandise module and build out your category hierarchy before linking any products. At Market 24, we use a three-tier structure:
- Department (e.g., Beverages, Snacks, General Merchandise)
- Category (e.g., Carbonated Soft Drinks, Energy Drinks, Salty Snacks)
- Subcategory (e.g., 20oz PET, 16oz Energy, Chips)
This structure mirrors how your physical cooler doors and gondola sections are laid out – which makes planogram assignments much cleaner down the line.
PRO TIP – Market 24 Store General Manager
“Set up your categories to match the physical sections of your store, not your vendor’s invoice structure. It sounds obvious, but most operators copy vendor category names and then can’t reconcile their shelf performance to their system reports. Map to your floor first.”
Build Planograms That Reflect Real Shopper Flow
CStoreOffice includes a planogram builder that lets you map out your fixtures – cooler doors, gondola runs, endcaps, and counter space – and assign SKUs to specific positions. This isn’t just a pretty picture. When a planogram position is tied to a SKU, your velocity data flows back to that position. You can see which shelf slot is underperforming, not just which product.
Setting up a planogram in CStoreOffice:
- Go to Merchandising > Planograms and select New Planogram.
- Choose your fixture type (cooler, gondola, endcap, etc.) and set dimensions.
- Assign products to positions by scanning barcodes or searching by SKU.
- Set facing counts per position – this feeds your reorder quantity logic.
- Publish the planogram and assign it to a specific store or set of stores.
At Market 24, we reset our major planograms twice a year – spring and fall – aligned with Pepsi and Coca-Cola resets. But we review position velocity data monthly and make micro-adjustments in the system, even if we don’t physically move product. This keeps our reports accurate.
PRO TIP – Market 24 Store Manager, Craft Location
“When you set up your cooler planogram, put your highest-velocity cold vault items in the positions closest to the register path. Then mirror that in CStoreOffice. When your data matches your floor, your reorder points become reliable. Right now our Red Bull and Monster sections basically manage themselves.”
Link Your Pricing and Promotions Directly to Floorset Positions
One of the most underused features in CStoreOffice is the ability to tie promotional pricing directly to planogram positions, not just SKUs. This matters because in a c-store, the same product can be in multiple locations – a 20oz Coke might be in your cold vault, a warm floor stack near the door, and a counter cooler. Each location can carry a different promotional price and a different movement rate.
In the Promotions module, when you create a price rule, you can associate it with a planogram position or a display location. This lets you run a floor display promotion (e.g., 2 for $3 on a chip endcap) while keeping the regular planogram price on the gondola.
PRO TIP – Market 24 Store Manager, Centre Ave. Station
“We always set up our promotional pricing in Petrosoft before we build the physical display – not after. If the promo isn’t live in the system when the display goes up, your cashiers are manually overriding prices all day and you lose your data integrity. Set it in the system first, confirm it’s active, then build the floor display.”
Configure Reorder Points Based on Position Velocity, Not Just Units Sold
This is where Petrosoft really separates itself from basic POS inventory systems. CStoreOffice lets you set reorder points at the planogram position level, using velocity data – units sold per day by position – rather than just cumulative SKU movement.
Why does this matter? Because a product sold from a cold vault moves differently than the same product sold from a warm floor stack. Your reorder trigger should reflect that difference, or you’ll consistently be over-ordering slow positions and under-ordering fast ones.
Setting reorder triggers in CStoreOffice:
- Navigate to Inventory > Reorder Settings.
- Select a SKU and choose Position-Based Reorder (rather than aggregate).
- Set a minimum on-hand threshold per position based on your delivery schedule.
- Enable auto-PO generation or set it to alert-only, depending on your vendor relationship.
PRO TIP – Market 24 Store Manager, Airport Road Location
“For our top 30 cold vault SKUs, we’ve set reorder points based on a 3-day velocity average, not a weekly average. C-store demand can spike hard on weekends or around local events. If your reorder trigger is based on weekly averages, you’ll stockout on a Friday night. Run the velocity report in Petrosoft for your top movers and recalibrate your triggers quarterly – at minimum.”
Use the Floorset Audit Tool to Keep the System Honest
The best planogram in CStoreOffice is useless if the floor doesn’t match it. Petrosoft includes an audit workflow that lets a manager or shift lead walk the floor with a tablet or mobile device and verify that products are in their assigned positions and facing counts are met.
At Market 24, we run a quick floorset audit every Monday morning before the first major delivery of the week. It takes about 20 minutes and catches any drift from the previous week – product repositioned by a stocker who didn’t follow the planogram, empty positions that didn’t trigger a reorder, or vendor-placed product sitting outside its assigned location.
When discrepancies are flagged in the audit, CStoreOffice logs them and you can resolve them by either adjusting the system planogram or correcting the floor. Either way, the system and the floor stay aligned, which keeps your velocity data clean.
PRO TIP – Market 24 Store Manager, Highland Park Location
“Train every stocker to open CStoreOffice on the store tablet before they fill a section, not after. The planogram is there – use it. We had a big drop in our energy drink velocity numbers for two months before we realized a vendor rep had shifted some SKUs out of their assigned slots. The audit caught it on the next pass.”
Leverage the Reporting Suite to Tie Floorset Decisions to Margin
All the setup work above pays off when you start pulling reports. CStoreOffice has a solid reporting suite that lets you analyze floorset performance across several dimensions:
- Category velocity by time of day – useful for deciding where endcap space should go for morning vs. afternoon shoppers.
- Margin by planogram position – see which shelf slots are generating the most gross profit, not just the most unit movement.
- Out-of-stock frequency by position – identifies which positions are chronically understocked relative to demand.
- Promotional lift by display location – compares velocity during a promo to baseline for the same position.
At Market 24, our district manager reviews a floorset performance report with each store manager monthly. We look at margin per square foot by category section and use that to make decisions about reallocating floor space in the next reset cycle.
PRO TIP – Market 24 Store Manager, Downtown Location
“Pull your margin-by-position report before your next major reset, not after. Most operators design their floor based on what they think sells best. The data usually tells a different story – especially for general merchandise and health & beauty sections where impulse buys drive more margin than operators realize. We moved our phone accessories from a back corner to a counter endcap based on the data and saw a 40% lift inside 30 days.”
Bottom Line
Petrosoft CStoreOffice gives c-store operators a real infrastructure for merchandising – not just a POS with an inventory bolt-on. But the system is only as good as the effort you put into setting it up correctly: category structure first, planograms tied to the physical floor, pricing linked to positions, and reorder triggers calibrated to actual velocity.
At Market 24, we treat CStoreOffice as the operational backbone of every store. The managers who’ve invested the time to set it up properly are the ones who spend less time firefighting stockouts and more time managing the business. That’s the real payoff.
If you’re evaluating Petrosoft for your locations, start with one store, build it out fully, and run it for 90 days before you roll out to the chain. The learning curve is manageable – and the data you get back is worth every hour of setup.
