Tracking on-shelf availability of products is one of the most mission-critical initiatives CPG companies carry. When there is no product on store shelves, there can be no sales. And, along with losing the transaction revenue, there is always the risk of losing the customer for good and any future sales since customers rarely go through the trouble of looking for a missing product in other stores. Instead, they tend to choose an alternative, competitor product – and they might like it, permanently switching to another brand.
Despite its importance, on-shelf availability of products tended to be tracked manually, not only leaving a lot of room for human errors in data collection and transcribing but also little opportunity for planning.
With advances in mobile technology, the development of a retail audit system solutions helped expedite the process, but it still left room for errors when it came to misidentifying products or improperly counting faces or calculating percentages.
Now, artificial intelligence is bringing in the newest developments in retail audit system solutions with product recognition for on-shelf availability detection. What this means is that merchandisers at stores will only need to take one picture of the target product shelf and data – such as on-shelf availability and share of shelf – will be automatically extracted from it, making it possible for merchandising and distribution managers to generate instant reports and tweak their planning in order to avoid out-of-stocks.
BrandML is the product recognition technology for on-shelf availability detection from VisitBasis, the developers of namesake retail audit system. Not only does it bring state-of-the-art tools to merchandising software, but BrandML is also cost-effective and fast to implement.
Learn more about BrandML product recognition for on-shelf availability
