How to Improve Your Retail Merchandising Using Merchandising Software

Effective merchandising means having the right product, in the right place, and at the right price. Merchandisers perform regular retail visits to help consumer packaged goods companies stay competitive by making sure that their products are correctly displayed on shelves and also efficiently promoted and always in stock. This involves working closely with the retailers to accurately forecast trends, plan stock levels and monitor performance. Everyday merchandising performance may include the following activities:

• Observing displays of company’s products
• Verifying the right merchandise, place, price, quantities
• Removing damaged or freshness-dated products
• Restocking shelves with product from inventory
• Observing inventory levels
• Control of store shelves’ cleanliness
• Prompting store management to reorder when levels appear low
• Arranging for return and credit for damaged products
• Setting stock promotions/price reductions as appropriate
• Observing customer reaction to special promotions

In addition, merchandiser’s duties may include collecting marketing information, such as:

• Evaluation of retailers’ pricing policies
• Prices for competing products
• New products, developed by competitors, their success rate
• Competitor’s marketing strategies and promotions

Merchandising software allows companies to streamline merchandising activities, saving time and money and making data easier to collect, and therefore to become more efficient both in the field and in the back. Here are some examples of how you can automate merchandising activities using a merchandising software solution.

Maintaining organized shelves – Merchandising software makes shelf organization faster and easier, empowering your field reps with such tools as built-in photo reports, barcode product search, and automated data entry.

Ordering and returning products – Using merchandising software gives your field reps an opportunity to make product orders and returns right at the point-of-sale with just a couple of actions. Your field reps can view recommended order quantities and order history on their mobile devices to create an order that makes sense.

Keeping control of promotional compliance and POS materials placement – Merchandising software provides customizable task templates with different types of answers for everything that needs to be checked.

Analyzing competitors – Simple but powerful task builder allows to create any task templates for retail visits. Customizable real-time reports to analyze competitors’ strategies is one of the most important feature of merchandising software, which allow you to use targeted marketing when competing with those surrounding brands.

Conducting customer and employee surveys – Capture accurate, live data that can be analyzed in real time back at the home office.

Today you can get your merchandising software solution completely free. Just register at www.visitbasis.com, and start performing your merchandising activities in the most intelligent manner. VisitBasis merchandising mobile app is available for free download on Google Play and App Store.