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Updated for 2024: 11 Tips To Increase Girl Scout Cookie Booth Sales + Tracking Printable

If you’re going to host a cookie booth, you NEED these tips to increase your Girl Scout cookie booth sales.

Even if you’re an experienced Cookie Mom who has set up Girl Scout cookie booths for years, make sure you download the free printable Girl Scout Cookie Booth Tally Sheets I have for each of the bakeries in this article.

In my years as Cookie Mom for my daughter’s Girl Scout troop, I’ve done (more than?) my fair share of booth sales. I’ve learned from my mistakes – and my accidental successes.

Now it’s time to share my tips to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales when you host your own.

Tips to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales

Some links in this article are affiliate links that may earn me a commission if you purchase through them.

Before we even get to having the best Girl Scout cookie booth ever, make sure you’re set up for success. Girl Scout regulations require two adults present at all times and at least two girls selling.

Now, it’s booth time, and I know you and your girls want to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales this year!

11 Tips for Success to Increase Girl Scout Cookie Booth Sales

9 simple tips to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales

Be sure the booth is convenient for your Girl Scouts and their families.

Ensure that you have enough volunteers from your troop to effectively man your booth dates. Before I sign up for a cookie booth, I send an email to my troop with proposed dates to confirm what works best.

While that doesn’t guarantee dates that work for everyone, at least I know I didn’t schedule during a dance recital or lacrosse game I didn’t know about. Keep your email short, because people don’t read long emails.

This assumes you’ve already received and dealt with your own cookie sales from the initial order. Did you check out my post for tips there with the free Girl Scout cookie thank you and printable?

Be sure the girls know what flavors they are selling this year.

While the Girl Scout cookie flavors don’t change a ton from year to year, there generally are one or two new cookies or no longer available cookies. That’s the case this year, too.

In 2024, neither baker introduced any new cookies, but both are no longer selling the Raspberry Rally Girl Scout cookie they introduced via online sales in 2023. That makes knowing the cookies a little easier this time around.

That said, each girl needs to know what the nine cookies are. And not only do they need to know the names of the cookies, but they need to know what the cookies are like.

If you need a refresher, make sure to read all about the Girl Scout cookie flavors available in 2024.

At a meeting prior to selling cookies, make sure you talk about the different cookie varieties. Include not only what they taste like but also if they are vegan or gluten-free so that they can answer customer questions.

Many troops will also have a box of cookies they purchase – if they have funds available – so that girls can try cookies they might not have tasted before to let them more easily talk about the cookies to customers.

Remind girls of cookie sales etiquette.

Many stores request that girls not enter unless they do so to make a purchase. That often means no bathroom breaks and no warming up in the store.

Prep the girls for this to ensure they’re ready when they get there. Cookie booths in Chicago in early March are often cold, so we have a parent available with a car to serve as a warming station if necessary.

Remind girls of the rules any stores put into place before they arrive and reiterate at the start of your booth if necessary. This may include only approaching customers as they leave a store versus as they enter, not leaving your booth area, etc.

Check to see what rules your council has in place, as different councils have different regulations, as well. Regardless, ensure the girls follow the rules, as it impacts future booth opportunities.

Locally, we’ve had multiple stores decline to participate over the years due to girls not following the rules. This reduces everyone’s opportunity to sell going forward.

Do girls know who customers write checks to? Do they know the cost of each type of cookie and which fit specific dietary concerns?

Can they answer when customers ask how they’ll use the money they raise? And of course, be sure the girls are polite, saying please and thank you with every request and transaction!

Promote your cookie booth before your sale starts.

Make sure your booth is in the cookie finder app by getting approval from your local council to host at that location and time well in advance. Granted, this is a requirement regardless to ensure no two troops anticipate being at the same place at the same time, but it’s a good reminder.

Share when and where you’ll be hosting your cookie booth via social media in the days before your booth, and showcase your girls setting it up to generate more foot traffic to increase your Girl Scout cookie booth sales.

With the proliferation of neighborhood and local communities on Facebook and other platforms, use them to get the word out as much as possible where your council allows it. Don’t rely only on your personal network.

Market your cookie booth during your sales period.

If your council allows, create signs you can place near the road letting potential customers know you have a booth. It can be as simple as “Girl Scout Cookies Available NOW.”

Make sure the lettering is large enough to read and that the sign is sturdy enough to stand up during your sale. Clear it with your booth location, too, as some may not allow signage on their property.

This is a fun project for girls to create, and you can reuse it year after year.

We generally use poster board that we attach to garage sale signs with packing tape to ensure it stays in place even if it’s windy. If we have a sign we really like, we get it laminated before we use it the first time.

The best markers for cookie booth signs are Sharpies, and I love that you can buy Sharpies in so many different colors now. Make sure you get chisel tip markers to easily cover big spaces.

Draw cookies and again, use big letters!

Get creative in your booth design. It’s simple enough to set up a table, but have a meeting where girls design the theme of the booth and create it.

Add tablecloths, artwork, signs, and more. My daughter’s last troop had cookie costumes a mom had sewn that girls wore when selling, and they were a huge hit and helped to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales.

An eye-catching booth draws in more customers who recognize it as a Girl Scout cookie sale and not a different solicitation they may choose to avoid. They also recognize you put in an effort, and many are more likely to support those who they view as going the extra mile.

Use costumes to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales

Somewhat related, make sure you have a cash box to safely hold your money during the booth, and solicit grocery store bags from families in your troop. It makes it easy for customers to use when they buy more than one or two boxes.

Ensure girls are dressed for success.

Remind girls that whenever they represent Girl Scouts, whether selling cookies or not, they need to wear their uniform. Ensure all girls have their vests or sashes when selling.

Send a reminder email to parents the night before. In the past, if a girl forgot, we borrowed a vest from a girl working an earlier shift to ensure she had a uniform.

Remind girls about the weather, too. Forty degrees and sun is cold but not awful until you stand it in for two hours.

Girl have been happier when they have snowpants, boots, hats, and other winter gear to wear rather than just their coats. Often, they don’t wear them at the start but then put them on later in the shift.

I also bring carpet squares for girls to stand on that you can easily get from any carpet store. This helps prevent their feet from getting as cold, and you may want to bring along the packets of hand and foot warmers.

Create appropriate shifts.

This is more about ensuring the girls have a good experience than figuring out how to increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales, but happy girls mean more sales. Depending on your troop size, you may have more or fewer girls working your cookie booth.

With younger girls, I scheduled shifts to last no more than an hour. After an hour, they lost their focus and were done.

Sometimes that meant we ended a booth early, but I’d rather end the booth early and have girls who want to sell in future years.  This is their experience, not mine!

Older girls can handle longer shifts, but I still keep them at a cap of two hours to respect their and their parents’ schedules. In cold weather climates, this is particularly key to ensure girls stay safe and warm.

In larger troops, shifts may be shorter. Scheduling more than three – maximum four – girls at a booth is a recipe for trouble.

When girls don’t have a task, they get bored or silly or both. If you’re lucky, your site location may have multiple entrances so you can staff a table at each entrance (provided the store allows this) to get more girls involved and also help increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales.

If I have more girls wanting to volunteer than fit in the shifts available, I shorten the shift length.

Assign jobs to girls.

The tasks of selling cookies at a booth are simple. Solicit customers. Determine what they want to purchase. Provide the product. Collect payment. Provide change.

In my experience, girls don’t do a great job of divvying things up themselves. One girl will simply step back and disappear. Another will try to take over and not let others participate.

When we host a booth, all girls not otherwise engaged solicit customers. One girl determines what a customer wants and provides those cookies.

Another girl collects the money and provides change. The third girl uses the Girl Scout cookie booth tally sheet to write down each purchase.

Throughout the shift, jobs move around so everyone has a chance to do every job. They’re happy, and I’m happy.

Let them choose who does what job to start, but ensure each girl gets a chance to do the job she wants to do.

Download the cookie sales app.

More and more often, customers say, “Oh, I would buy some, but I don’t have any cash on me.” Often, they mean it.

You can use the Digital Cookie Mobile App to make credit purchases to customers, which helps increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales. Note that whichever girl’s account the sale is under receives credit for the online sales, so be sure to account for that when crediting cookie sales online later.

Verify with your council to ensure they use this, as not all do. Thankfully, it’s becoming more and more common.

Some councils also let you use Venmo or PayPal or other electronic payment methods. Make sure you check with your council first and follow their rules.

Solicit donations.

Granted, some councils do not allow troops to solicit donations of boxes to troops or your chosen charity. In the past, our troops donated cookies to a local food pantry and brought them to a Ronald McDonald house.

Customers who may not want cookies in their house are often happy to provide funds to donate cookies to others. We’ve found many potential customers will simply give cash, which we use to purchase cookies for the chosen charity.

Remind girls they can (politely) ask customers who state that they are on a diet, etc if they would be willing to donate cookies to that chosen charity.

As part of our booth design, we always include a prominent mention of the organization that receives the cookies customers donate and have a (sealed) donation box with a slot clearly marked cookie donations.

This allows customers to quickly donate when girls are busy elsewhere and also helps track the donations we receive to accurately get those boxes to our chosen charity. Again, some councils prohibit this, so be sure your council allows this practice to help increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales.

Track your sales.

Girls get credit for their cookies sold, and this includes booth sales. It’s so easy to get lost in the craziness, but this cookie booth tally sheet help track my Girl Scout cookie order.

Yes, these are updated for 2024 cookie options! Click here for the ABC Bakers cookie booth tally sheet and click here for the Little Brownie Bakers cookie booth tally sheet.

(Do you miss that ABC Bakers s’mores cookie? Learn how to make it with this copycat Girl Scout s’mores cookie recipe.)

I set up the majority of my tracking before the booth starts. The night before, I print out a new copy for each location and write down the date and location, plus the shift times and girls working each shift.

Before I leave my house, I add the number of boxes of each type of cookie we have to sell. Make sure double check numbers during setup!

Girl Scout cookie booth sales tracking free printable

The girls just need to track donations and cookie sales for their shift. For each box sold, add a hash mark.

Be sure girls know how to do the hash marks in groups of five for easy counting later. This includes tracking any donations you receive.

When girls wrote down $2 then scratched it out and wrote $5, they often made mistakes. Instead, simply add a hash mark for each dollar donated, and you can count at the end.

Once the cookie booth ends, tally the totals and count how many boxes you have remaining. I have yet to have a booth where my cookie booth tally sheet matched actual sales exactly.

That said, I can usually figure out where a girl forgot to mark a box sold.

This cookie booth tally sheet is a great place to start, and it reminds me which girls to credit for how many sales. I enter the information into a spreadsheet so I can then easily credit girls with the appropriate cookie sales.

Best of all, I then have this information for future years. I use this to plan how many boxes I should have on hand for each booth.

What are your best tips to help increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales?

Don’t forget to check out my post sharing how to organize Girl Scout cookies when you get them that includes another set of great free printables.

9 tips to easily increase Girl Scout cookie booth sales

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  1. […] I picked up the cookies from my daughter’s troop today – two SUV loads – this morning and within an hour and a half, I had them back to my house and sorted into boxes sold by girl, donated boxes that we drop at the local food pantry, and boxes we have reserved for our cookie booths. […]

  2. Heather says:

    First time TCM here….how many cookies do you suggest ordering for booths? Our cupboard doesn’t open immediately, so I plan on ordering for the first 2 booths on our initial order.

    • Michelle says:

      It is a really tough question, to be honest with you. We have some booths where we sell 300+ boxes in two hours and some where we sell 90 over 3 hours. Each location is different. My suggestion would be to reach out to local troops in your area where you’re planning to sell to get a sense of how much they sell and base it off that. The first year is always the hardest because it is a guess. If you’re planning to do more booths after your cupboard opens and not just the first two you mention, you can be more optimistic and order more, with the hopes that you’ll sell out in those first two cookie booths but knowing that you have the backup of later booths, just in case. I wish I had a better answer for you, but there are SO many variables – even the weather or if your hometown football team is playing, etc factor into it. Good luck!

  3. […] troop always orders extra cookies for booth sales (more tips in that link) and for girls whose customers ask for extra cookies after the door to door […]

  4. Kala says:

    Is there a digital cookie app for ABC? Tried to download and just check out the LBB one but it kept telling me my log in was wrong. I clicked on set up account and it said we have to be singed up by council…

    • Michelle says:

      This is a pilot by council. If it doesn’t let you sign in, then your council isn’t a part of this yet unfortunately. It’s gone well for everyone I’ve talked to, so fingers crossed this is something your council has access to next year (and tell your council you want it)!

  5. Sue says:

    Is the app available on Android and Apple? I don’t see one called cookie sales app. Can you describe the icon? Thanks!

  6. Kitty cannon says:

    Is it allowable for a friend to be present while girls are at booth if she doesn’t sale

    • Michelle says:

      You have to check with your council. Every council has different rules and requirements, and I’ll also say that some enforce them much more strictly than others where you don’t want to risk running afoul of anything (thankfully ours isn’t like that). Give the office a quick call, and they can let you know what is and isn’t allowed!

  7. Larissa says:

    how many girls do you generally have at each booth? or how many would you recommend? we have had 4, but last year we tried to do 2, that way the girls wouldn’t get too distracted and could interact with customers better.

    • Michelle says:

      It depends on the age of the girls and the setup of the store. We have some with two entrances where the stores let us have tables and girls at each entrance, while others have just the one. For each table, we usually do 3 girls (which also helps if someone ends up unexpectedly sick!) – one recruits customers, one handles the money, and another tracks what they’ve sold (hands the boxes and does tick marks for each type sold to make tracking at the end easier). Does that help?

  8. Shane says:

    How does the digital cookie app work with booth sales? The only options shown are delivery, ship, or donate so I’m not sure how this would work for the booth sales. This is my daughter’s first year selling and if possible to use for credit card at booth sales that would be awesome. Any help for a first year dad to teach my daughter would be appreciated.

    • Michelle says:

      When you are at the booth, you choose in person delivery and mark it delivered. It does work to use this for credit card sales with your booth. Your daughter will have fun with this – and I hope you enjoy it, too! Let me know if you have any other questions.

      • Stephanie L says:

        I understand how this works in general. But I wouldn’t want to deliver to a stranger’s house and I don’t see random strangers willing to pay the shipping. So then what?

        • Angela Kiang says:

          Our council also does not allow in person delivery after the initial sale is over. We use the square app for credit card purchases. They gave us a free card reader and the first so many sales do not have a fee. After that it’s a small fee. The money is directly deposited into our account within 1 business day.

          • Michelle says:

            Interesting! Every council is definitely different, and you want to ensure that you don’t run afoul of their requirements. While ours won’t let girls go door to door, if you have extra cookies and a customer wants some, you are allowed to deliver them outside a cookie booth. We also do not get a card reader from council, so that’s great that they encourage that for you!

        • Michelle says:

          You hand the customer the cookies and mark them as delivered. When you have the app open and you’re at a booth, it’s more clear. But I promise they don’t have to pay shipping from a booth, nor do you have to deliver to their house. You’ll see how easy it is 🙂

          • Valerie says:

            Hi. We only get the option to deliver in person during the initial sales period. Once that has ended we can only ship the cookies. So we can’t use the app for booth sales. Unless they reactivate that option during booth sales. But I don’t know if that will happen.

          • Michelle says:

            Every council has things set up a little different, so it sounds like yours doesn’t have that option yet. Definitely check in when you have your booth (or just before!) or contact your council to see if they will have it set up. It’s still in pilot mode, so things aren’t standardized yet.

          • Carla says:

            Our council does this with the cookie app too Stephanie – – We don’t have the option to hand deliver (it’s only a shipping option). But, I have been told that in the future, if it goes well for other councils, our council will also transition. What an awesome way to use the app! Thanks for the tips 🙂

          • Michelle says:

            Interesting – our council has had the full option for 3 years now, and it’s worked great for us. Fingers crossed you get access to that side of it soon! (And yay – happy I could help you!)

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