Merchandising Software: Taking the Advantages of Retail Data Analysis

To make the value from retail data it’s not enough just gathering it. Transforming the aggregated data into understandable information provides actionable insights and data-driven decision making. In today’s business landscape retail data analysis is a key to increasing productivity and gaining competitive advantage.

There is plenty of merchandising software solutions on the market, which allow companies to collect various types of retail data, performing in-house retail merchandising audits, customer surveys, and photo-reports. Cloud merchandising software solutions offer instant data exchange and offline capabilities. The top merchandising applications also have built-in analytic capabilities, allowing instant data analysis and reporting through Web-based dashboards and export/import features to integrate your data with third-party software if necessary.

What data you can analyze using merchandising software?

There are different types of retail data you can analyze and report on using a merchandising software solution. Let’s consider some of them to find out how retail data analysis can help a company to increase productivity and improve the bottom line.

• Customer-centric data includes retailers’ location, contact information, price-lists, history of orders and returns, feedback, brand loyalty, and more. Capturing and analyzing this type of data allows companies to better understand their customers’ needs and requirements, identify highly profitable/troublesome customers, specify promotions and product offerings to each customer, design personalized marketing, detect “lost” or dormant customers to win them back, and make sales forecast for the future.
• Product-centric data like order amounts, inventory levels, and out-of-stocks allows you to get insights on how your products are selling in different locations. This type of data is important for you to achieve optimal inventory levels across stores leading to improved efficiency at the supply chain level. Evaluating the product demand at points of sale you can adjust your products to better fit each location finding optimal mix of product types and quantities via each store. Having the information on which products are sold faster than others allows identifying profitable products, which is important for manufacturing planning and when designing new product lines. Merchandising software also allows identifying previous out-of-stock patterns in each store. Having this kind of data allows managers to take appropriate measures to predict potential out-of-stock situations and maintain proper inventory levels in each location.
• Competitor-centric data. Merchandising software allows gathering data on competitors’ products, prices, marketing strategies, market share, and customer profile. Competitor analysis is a substantial part of marketing strategy. It allows companies to assess their competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and develop effective strategies to improve competitive advantage using targeted marketing when competing with those surrounding brands.
• Merchandising data includes product location at store and on the shelf, quantitative parameters of the layout, pricing, and POS materials management. Analyzing this type of data you get a sense of product layout influence on sales, which is important to success in winning the on-shelf war with manufacturers.
• Promotional data allows measuring success of promotions and evaluating customer feedback. Analyzing how effective was you promotion and why is a key component for the success of your future promotions. Aggregating and evaluating promotional patterns also allow companies to identify customers responsive to promotional offerings and specific types of marketing to develop highly targeted promotional campaigns based on this data.

Retail data analysis gives you the ability to maintain high quality of customer service, optimize your supply chain, and react quickly to market trends.

When it comes to retail data analysis, VisitBasis merchandising software is one of the most complete mobile data collection solutions in the market. It offers several ways for customers to compile, filter, and read retail data, so users of all backgrounds (and not only "IT people") can quickly view the information they are looking for.

Visit www.visitbasis.com to get your free trial, or book a free live demo to see how retail data analytics works on VisitBasis merchandising software.