Assortment Planning is a Must in Today’s Retail Business
In the ever-changing market dynamics, the retail sector is becoming more and more competitive each day. From the ever-increasing competition by online marketplaces and evolving customer expectations to diverse shopping patterns and trends, product category management decisions are becoming complex to make. As consumers’ options increase, their expectations grow. Read on to learn about assortment planning software.
And as a result, retail businesses need to make assortment planning strategies more dynamic and localised. As everything associated with the retail world expands, manual data collection and analysis based on wide assumptions and averages no longer suffice. Maintaining agility and managing complexity becomes the key concern for retailers, and this is where custom software development services become vital.
So how are automated assortment planning custom software development services important to your business? Read on to learn more.
What’s Assortment Planning?
The process involves choosing the products you’ll offer during specific periods and in particular areas. These are the products that customers want to purchase rather than what you assume they want to buy. To identify these items, you need to discover both top- and worst-performing products depending on their respective units and sales.
What items are the most sought-after? And what products do your customers not purchase frequently or even ignore them? You can use this information to create an effective assortment plan that’ll blend smoothly with different customer categories. Also, doing so minimises your risk of stocking products that don’t sell, and increases aged inventory and takes up useful shelf space.
Benefits of Automated Assortment Planning Software
Automated AP software offers many benefits compared to manual processes. These benefits include the following:
Improve Overall Sales Performance
Automated assortment planning software allows for more shelf space for the most sought-after products. That means your store is set up to stock products that customers want, which undoubtedly increases sales. At the same time, your business offers much-needed customer satisfaction since consumers can easily find what they need.
Identify Opportunity Gaps
Data-driven assortment planning can help a retail business identify opportunity gaps. Using the point of sale and external market data, automated assortment planning software replaces and identifies slow-moving products and suggests high-performing items. By doing so, business owners can identify brand-new products they can sell and maximise their profits.
Combat Rising Levels of Inventory
You’ll see an increase in sales once your business starts to provide the right items at the right price and time. With a top-class assortment planning solution, you can make sure that the items in your retail store are the ones that your consumers want. As a result, there is enough shelf space for the items that deserve it, depending on their sales.
As you reduce the shelf space for products that don’t sell frequently, you also eliminate the possibility of having aged stock. After clearing any of these products, your stock levels can reduce, ensuring better control of inventory.
Want to enjoy these benefits? Use an automated assortment planning solution. Whether you have a small, or large retail store, or anything in between, automated assortment planning solutions can enable you to make data-driven decisions that’ll make each season highly profitable.
