The brick & mortar retail industry remains a powerful force across North America and globally. For the first time in five years, store openings
outpaced store closures in 2021, according to Coresight Research via CNBC. Customers continue to chose brick & mortar for the experience – from being able to try on clothes and hold products in their hands, to the connection with associates and the ability to ask question. The number of online retailers that are looking to open physical stores continues to grow, with Wayfair being one of the latest – the furniture and home goods retailer
plans to open three stores in Massachusetts next year alone.
Yet the evolution of the brick & mortar industry and the pace at which change is occurring continues to keep retail leaders on their toes. As retailers look to grow, expand, innovate, adjust, and find new ways to provide a superior customer experience, understanding sales data at the store level provides insights that can result in game-changing competitive advantages including strategic growth opportunities and the ability to provide an in-store experience that will keep customers coming back.
With the retail management platform Optimum Retailing (OR), retailers can go above and beyond just tracking purchases through their POS system. With one click on OR, retail leaders can see sales data for products being sold in every single store, and filter the information based on a range of categories including type of store (e.g. next generation), city, zone priority within each store, and sales period of interest. OR also layers in insights around where a product is planogrammed including the location of the product in-store and where a product is placed within a fixture, what promos are running at a given time, and can integrate additional insights gleaned from sources such as door counters or heat maps – for example, AI can assess and determine if a family of four enters of store and buys one TV, confidently confirming that the four individuals are a family based on how they move together within a store and when they leave. Together, the OR platform gives retail leaders and platform users
unprecedented visibility into store sales and trends.
Sales data integration in action
The visibility gained from the OR platform is transforming
the way HQ plans and planograms, with the strategic placement of devices and accessories informed by a new level of data and information.
One of OR’s clients in the telecommunications industry has gleaned significant insight into products carried by examining data around top SKU sales, the percentage an accessory makes up of total accessory inventory across all stores, and the percentage of product it makes up on a given fixture. The client learned that a certain phone model was in the top 10 sold nationally, yet was only sold in approximately 50% of stores, compared to the others in the top 10 that were sold in almost all stores across the country. The OR platform also uncovered that Apple users purchased a certain phone case brand more than Samsung users by looking at fixture-related data – the phone case brand in question made up 25% of space on fixtures, but made up 75% of sales on Apple fixtures and 50% of sales on Samsung fixtures. Those serve as only a few examples of how the integration of sales data into the OR platform can provide critical insights such as products that may be underrepresented on a fixture based on sales, how placement (e.g. high/low) on fixtures impacts sales, and how placement beside certain products can impact sales.
Alternative SKUs
OR’s platform also facilitates maximizing fixture profitability but allowing users to identify an alternative SKU in an informed way based on sales. By tying in inventory data including the number of SKUs that should be on display, the number of SKUs in stock, the number of SKUs a store may be short, and the number of SKUs in transit, stores can plan accordingly by ensuring an alternative SKU is identified and used if needed.
In today’s retail world, POS and customer transaction data is only the beginning. The brick & mortar industry is evolving at rapid speed, and so are the possibilities with integrating sales data into strategic retail planning. While collecting sales data at the store level is a great start, OR goes a step further in providing insights to retail leaders with a system that can cross reference SKU placement on fixtures with a store’s planogram. Strategic retail planning and retail execution is changing, and OR is at the centre of the evolution.