Brick-and-mortar retailers with the right assortment of products are poised to thrive, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving sales and profitability. But how do retailers keep up with evolving consumer preferences?
Assortment planning is the key to success. By leveraging data-driven insights and strategic planning tools, retailers can optimize product offerings to align with local customer preferences and trends.
Discover the benefits of effective assortment planning in retail, with actionable tips to enhance your brick-and-mortar product mix and maintain a competitive edge.
What is assortment planning? In retail, merchandise assortment planning helps brick-and-mortar companies choose the right mix of products and allot them across locations. Assortment planning makes things easier by ensuring the right product:
Assortment planning is complex, factoring in everything from regional culture and demographics to consumer preferences. Fortunately, effective assortment planning can bolster your retail operation all the way around, elevating:
A big win for assortment planning is that it streamlines retail operations. Your business can uncover physical limitations to stocking certain products and even find opportunities to trim costs. Assortment planning also provides insights into the ideal time to order products based on sales projections or restocking lead times.
Planning beforehand can also mitigate overstock and stockout issues. With information on sales trends, you can improve inventory investments to reduce stock of slow-moving inventory or replenish for high-demand products that frequently sell out.
Accounting for customer demand and preferences during assortment planning is essential for meeting their needs and garnering loyalty. Analyzing past and present seasonal sales can help you better understand how different products performed, the types of customers who purchased, and which stores sold the most units.
Why are consumers shopping now? What’s changed in the market to drive sales? Collecting and analyzing data helps brick-and-mortar retailers understand factors that impact shopping behavior, such as:
Today’s shoppers are guided by a combination of impulse, need, and “what’s hot” in the market. Assortment planning in retail has to account for shifting consumer preferences and habits. With a solid understanding of what customers are looking for, you can personalize the in-store experience. Take a pulse on this by determining their drive to shop in-store and listening to your frontline team who interact with them most.
A blend of seasonal and evergreen products can maintain profitability, especially as certain moments and holidays drive increased spending. Whether it’s back-to-school, Black Friday, Valentine's Day, or another holiday, consumers buy early to avoid inventory limitations—and taking note of this sales data allows the opportunity to determine if seasonal products are popular enough to become evergreen.
Stores in different regions have varying product needs and consumer preferences, and the data will easily reflect this. Adopting a data-driven localized approach helps tailor assortments to local customers, accounting for geographical differences, culture, and regional preferences. Using store clustering, you can group stores into different segments and adapt your assortment accordingly.
Give your brick-and-mortar stores an edge with sophisticated planning tools that maximize space, showcase key products, and drive sales. Optimum Retailing (OR) delivers robust solutions to enable growth, such as:
Set up your floor plans to cater to each store's design and customer base. OR helps you create dynamic floor plans for every location, so your team knows which assets and products go on each display. OR's one-click planogramming streamlines floor plan execution, reducing errors and improving compliance, thanks to:
OR uses store data and third-party software to optimize merchandising, promotions, and the in-store experience. Use it to obtain product insights ranging from the percentage of one product displayed on a given fixture to how much it impacts inventory across stores.
You can even build store-specific profiles with AI-driven data to analyze consumer behaviors. Collecting in-store data works to optimize operations, improve localization, and grow sales. Plus, OR’s heat mapping helps analyze and track where shoppers walk and dwell throughout each store, unlocking opportunities to improve store and display layouts to drive sales and enhance customer experience.
Improve your retail operation across locations with data-driven assortment planning. Understanding what to stock and when keeps customers coming back for more and profits rolling in. But you know shopping behaviors aren’t static, either. Use key insights to understand consumers at the local level and across seasons.
Optimum Retailing is your go-to for understanding ever-evolving consumer needs and effectively planning store layouts and campaigns. Request a demo today to see OR in action.