Retail merchandising analytics is one of the most complex activities in channel management. It involves translating physical data at sometimes thousands of stores into readable information, in the form of tables or, preferably, chart reports.
There are numerous challenges in this process. Just to get things started, compiling information collected on paper from many stores takes a monumental transcription job, which in turn generates a lag between when the results were collected and when the reports were viewed.
By implementing an app for retail execution, managers will completely eliminate this lag time between retail data capture and reporting and even go beyond: businesses can exponentially increase the breadth of data it collects by developing in-depth forms and generate merchandising reports much more representative of their retail channel realities.
Some of the merchandising report types that are easily extracted from an app for retail execution, such as VisitBasis, include the following:
Planogram compliance report: this merchandising report becomes very easy to run when data capture forms include fields for SKU and face counts.
Visual merchandising report: one of the greatest advantages of implementing an app for retail execution is that these can capture photos, accurately showing centralized management the conditions found at retailers.
Merchandising audit report: these types of reports can include several questions, evaluating metrics such as product availability and pricing. Out-of-range pricing, for instance, can significantly affect product sales so having regular access to pricing metrics helps management decide on the most effective pricing strategy for each SKU.
Category report: this merchandising report sample can combine information such as category share of shelf as well as shelf pictures and show management the reality of its brand at different retailers.
Competitor product report: with the ability to fully customize forms and basically having unlimited access to reports, management can use mobile retail audits to gather competitor intelligence and start developing preemptive strategies.
