When it comes to retail, merchandising plays an important role in boosting sales. Always getting right product in the right place at the right price is a key to any brand's success. Clear and vibrant displays attract customers encouraging them to make a purchase.
Retailers typically group products in sales area by categories allowing customers to compare items and making it easy to make a purchase. Therefore, a manufacturer company should work closely with the retailer, performing regular shelf inspections to monitor product placement and ensure that its products are always available on shelves.
When performing merchandising audits field representatives generally evaluate the location of products in the store sales area and the parameters of the layout. Below you’ll find some best merchandising practices, which can help to develop more efficient merchandising strategy.
- Representation. If any particular group of product takes a significant share of a company’s sales volume, it’s reasonable to provide the layout of these products together, by several blocks in multiple category locations. This strategy improves the presentation of products and helps to increase sales. Keep in mind, that too many blocks can be annoying for customers, creating the sense that they are being limited in their choice.
- Visualization. Products should be placed frontally, considering the customers’ angle of view and be visible from different places. The information on the packaging should be easy to read, brief, and clear. Make sure the information on price tags is always visible. Do not overload product display by text information, customers do not have time to read, you have only 2-3 seconds to attract and keep their attention. Remember that women can search products better than men, but can overlook the products on the upper shelves. Products for kids (those that are kids are supposed to want, i.e toys, or candies, not diapers) should be always located on the lower shelves – at the level of children's eyes.
- Priority. The products that bring maximum profit and have high turnover ratio should have the best shelf location a company can afford. The best shelf position is being closer to the center of the aisle and eye-level on the shelf. The number of facings can have an effect on product sales similar to that of shelf location. More facings and best shelf location generally means more profit, but only if the extra cost of purchasing additional facings and the best shelf position does not overweight the gains made in sales.
To derive maximum benefit from the merchandising strategy a company has to make sure that retailers comply with the agreements, conducting regular merchandising audits. Merchandising software comes with the ability to create mobile data collection forms for everything that has to be checked. Having a merchandising app on their tablets and smartphones, merchandisers can quickly collect various store data. Merchandising software allows any company to conduct in-house merchandising audits on regular basis providing full coverage of retail locations and getting real-time data from the field.
Visit www.visitbasis.com to get your free access to VisitBasis merchandising software for store data collection, merchandising, retail audits, field sales and field marketing.
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.
