What is Key to a retail merchandise buyer? What makes a great store? Do the products get the customers’ attention? Do products “fly out” of the shelves? Is the store display prominent? Do customers associate closely with your products, brand and identity?
Merchandising and supply chain are the two key pillars in any retail business as it involves three key functions-financial, product assortment and space planning.
It truly defines retail and makes the retailer unique. The product diversity and assortment, pricing and service shape the retailer’s identity as to whether it is of the lowest price but not necessarily providing good service, it has the widest varieties, it is upscale or it has a niche and chic image.
The emphasis of merchandising is vital and it does not diminish even with mature retailers with established product repertoire, customers’ base and identity.
Merchandising sets the direction for revenues, inventory levels, mark ups, gross margins, promotions and clearance. It determines the planned targets for sales and set the inventories and along the way budgets for promotions are defined for the product hierarchies. It also needs to determine what needs to be sold, how to vary assortments from store to store and from geographical region based on demographics and purchase pattern, while factoring in competition, weather, fashion trends and new product launches.
It also involves space planning both macro and micro, where macro involves the logistics, distribution and storage constraints in the supply chain while micro space planning determines the product presentation in the store.
It becomes a huge challenge for merchandisers to stay current to ensure they offer differentiated product assortment at the right time and place to meet consumer needs and preferences and not incur huge investments on products that are stagnated at the stores and warehouses.
The challenges the retailers face is how to uncover the customer’s behaviour, traits, characteristics, preferences and purchase patterns hidden within the mountain of information coming from multiple data sources.
With Merchandise Insight, you will be able to harness these heaps of data resource points and isolate the relevant customer purchase patterns across customer segments and channels; and then resolving it with the dashboard that will give you the ability to analyze to the granularity of the stock keeping unit (SKU) and to drill down to the scrutiny of product attributes like type, volume, colour, size, style, price and vendor.
Enriching the retailers with insight in choosing merchandise that is market-relevant, customer-relevant, season-relevant, quality-relevant, product relevant is key to the success of every store.
At the same time, it also generates the market basket analysis which serves to identify the customers’ natural inclination towards certain products and the frequency of products being purchased most often. This study of product affinity often lends itself in shaping the merchandise purchase planning.
It also identifies the trend so that the marketer can capitalize on the opportunities to increase the basket size and improve profit margin.
It also helps to eliminate unnecessary markdown and promotion, determine which items to place together so as to generate impulse purchase, suggest new store layouts to optimize basket-size purchase and identify brand loyalty.
Key Benefits
The Merchandise Insight helps to:
- stay aligned to customers’ preferences
- innovate merchandise planning and assortment
- ensure more accurate sales projection and inventories checks and matching
- facilitate up sell and cross sell of products
- increase profit margins and basket size
- re-fine appropriate product placement and layout
- save costs in phasing out obsolete merchandise fast and freeing up storage space
- improve in-store experience
Agile Insight Pte Ltd
1 Raffles Place #44-02
One Raffles Place Tower One
Singapore 048616
T : +65 6750 4760
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