Merchandising is a practice, which contributes to the sales growth. At a store level, merchandising refers to the display of products in a way that it stimulates customers to make a purchase. The most successful retailers spend a lot of effort to develop their product placement strategies, capturing the best places on the shelves and providing higher sales.
In retail stores merchandising involves promoting sales using product design, packaging, store and shelf location, pricing, and so on. When implementing a merchandising strategy for your brands, one of the most important things is to maintain a sufficient stock of products. Out-of-stocks is truly a nightmare both for suppliers and retailers. The most common reason why a customer leaves the store without the item he was willing to buy, is empty shelve. Lost sales not only significantly impact a company’s bottom line, but also damage brand trust and result in lower customer loyalty. To maximize the value of in-store merchandising activities we recommend checking out the following tips to keep your products always in stock.
Assortment.
Define a minimum set of SKUs for each point of sale. Specific figures may vary depending on the demand, store attendance, product type and store assets.
How merchandising software can help?
To make the data on SKUs available to office managers and field merchandisers, implement a merchandising software solution. Merchandising software allows aggregating all data on products, customers, locations, SKUs, price lists, and assets in a Cloud database, available from browser for office managers and through mobile devices for field merchandisers. Using a merchandising software solution you can always set up recommended quantities for each product, linked to the particular store, and your merchandisers will have mobile access to this data when making a product purchase order using the merchandising mobile app.
Stock.
Maintain an optimum supply of goods, providing a permanent presence of SKUs in each retail location. Due to the fact that each retailer tries to reduce storage space to extend sales areas, it’s critically important to ensure accurate and timely delivery of goods.
How merchandising software can help?
Empowered with a merchandising software solution, your merchandisers and sales reps always have access to the history of retail visits and previous orders, along with the results of merchandising audits. This allows each field rep to have a clear picture of retail conditions in each store. Having this kind of data literally at their fingertips, merchandisers can easily identify previous out-of-stock patterns in each store, and make order to have products delivered at the right times to prevent out-of-stocks. Providing a real time data workflow, merchandising software allows accelerated reordering. As soon as a merchandiser discovers the lack of product at a point of sale, this information is instantly available in the office, so the manager can quickly take appropriate actions. Moreover, merchandising software gives merchandisers an opportunity to make product orders right at the point of sale with just a couple of actions.
Presence.
Lost sales often occur when the products actually available from stock, for whatever reason, were not put up on the shelf. Companies should conduct regular merchandising audits performing shelf checks to ensure having full set of SKUs properly located on the shelf, and at the right price.
How merchandising software can help?
The up-to-date merchandising software solutions provide mobile tools to perform all kinds of auditing activities using tablets or smartphones. Empowered with a mobile app for merchandising, your merchandisers can make photo-reports, collect electronic signatures, and evaluate the quantitative parameters of the layout. All the data, collected at points of sale, is instantly transferred to the corporate database and is available for managers. This allows minimizing the time between discovering of non-compliance and taking appropriate actions.
Turnover.
The basic rule is that you first need to sell a product, brought before to avoid the return of products that have expired. Products delivered at an earlier date, must be exhibited on the shelves in the first place. When a new product arrives, it should be put back on the shelf.
How merchandising software can help?
Merchandising software solution provides product bar code scanner to fasten product search when performing a merchandising audit. Along with the opportunity to set up sell-by date for each SKU, it allows merchandisers to maintain optimal product turnover.
Register at www.visitbasis.com and you’ll get access to VisitBasis merchandising software completely free.
Call us today +1 (800) 497-6293 (tall free), or schedule a demo, to see how merchandising software works, or read our previous article to learn more how to automate merchandising activities.
To try our data collection software for free register at www.visitbasis.com and download the VisitBasis Retail Audit App FREE on Google Play or App Store. To learn more about how our field merchandising system works request a demo or check the links below to watch the demo videos.
