How to Operate Big Data in Retail

In today’s business environment retail data analysis is a key to increasing productivity and gaining competitive advantage. Big data as the way companies connect with customers is especially promising for retailers. Regular merchandising audits allow companies to better understand their business processes and get insights for successful marketing strategies.

Gaining acceptance for big data can be less challenging for a company with a proper type of merchandising software. Although today there is great variety of merchandising software solutions on the market, not all of them offer equal capabilities to users.

To maximize the value of retail merchandising audits, a company should look for a comprehensive type of merchandising solution, which includes analytic capabilities. The most sophisticated merchandising software solutions provide instant data analysis and reporting through Web-based dashboards along with export/import features to integrate your data with third-party software if necessary.

The up-to-date merchandising software allows gathering various types of retail data including:

Customer data (retailers’ location, contact information, price-lists, history of orders and returns, feedback, and brand loyalty)
Product data (product location at store and on the shelf, quantitative parameters of the layout, pricing, order amounts, inventory levels, and out-of-stocks)
Competitor data (competitors’ products, prices, marketing strategies, market share, and customer profile)

Each type of data provides specific insights to build brands and improve company’s bottom line. For example, by capturing and analyzing customer data companies are able to:

Better understand consumers’ 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
Make sales forecast for the future.

Product data analysis allows:

Getting insights on how different products are selling in different locations
Achieving optimal inventory levels across stores leading to improved efficiency at the supply chain level
Evaluating the product demand at points of sale
Adjusting 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
Identifying most profitable products
Predicting potential out-of-stock situations
Maintaining proper inventory levels at each store

Competitor analysis as a substantial part of marketing strategy allows getting a good indication of industry leaders’ marketing strategies. When analyzing competitors’ data, companies are able to:

Assess their competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
Develop effective strategies to improve competitive advantage
Use targeted marketing when competing with those surrounding brands

To get more information on retail data analytics, visit www.visitbasis.com 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