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.

Implementing Sustainable Merchandising

In the factory-to-customer cycle, merchandising is one of the most wasteful processes. From the fuel consumed by field reps to the amount of paper used in traditional audits and surveys, on top of promotional and seasonal displays, it is easy to see why merchandising is considered “eco-unfriendly”. A field merchandising app can make a world of difference when it comes to sustainability. By adopting a field merchandising app, CPG and FMCG businesses can expect the following: Virtually eliminate the use of paper in in-store activities such as planogram checks, audits, surveys, and orders, among others. A state-of-the-art field merchandising app will also allow for instant access to the data collected, slashing the time and cost spent on data entry. Considerable savings in rep travel time and fuel thanks to the route optimization functions of field merchandising apps that automatically calculate the shortest store rounds. A cross-platform field merchandising app will all

Cloud for Retail Execution: Make Away with Data Storage Costs

Why Go Paperless? In order to store 2 million paper documents, an organization can expect to spend between $40,000 and $60,000 on filing cabinets alone. Those same files could fit on fewer than ten CD-ROMs (Business Guide to Paper Reduction) . If we assume that a filing cabinet uses from 6 to 20 square feet of space and the office space costs $23 per square foot , the space for a one filing cabinet will cost a company $1656– 5520 per year . How to Go Paperless? When you choose paperless data collection your data storage costs can be significantly reduced or even brought to zero. Digital data collected using mobile forms require much less space than paper sheets and therefore cost less money. With the development of mobile technology you don’t need CDs or any other data carriers to store and access your data. More and more companies opt for Cloud storage. The price of Cloud storage starts at $0.01 GB per month and the average number of MS Word pages per GB is 64782.

Solving Information Loss in Merchandising Once and For All

Information loss used to be an inevitable consequence of retail merchandising. With many field reps performing a number of tasks on each one of the stores in their individual territories, it is easy to see how the amount of data collected on the field grows exponentially and is, therefore, increasingly difficult to handle and more subject to information loss. Mobile merchandising software is the ideal solution to information loss in retail merchandising. When businesses implement a mobile merchandising software solution, they prevent information loss in the following stages of data processing: Data collection It is easy to see how information can get lost in traditional pen-and-paper merchandising. With mobile merchandising software, field reps perform tasks such as filling out forms and taking pictures in their mobile devices, leading to less misunderstanding and mix-ups. Data transcription With mobile merchandising software, there is no data transcription. The information goe

Retail Execution with VisitBasis

Search This Blog