Creating the right product assortments is the most important and challenging thing in retail. According to reports, the merchandising assortment plan helped retailers purchase the right inventory needed, and this helped them cut down on excess inventory expenses, which resulted in reducing the number of SKUs by 35% while increasing sales to 3%.
Most customers expect retailers to understand their needs and expectations. As a retailer, you must ensure that shoppers easily get what they want from your store without spending time searching or waiting for restocking. Having the right assortment strategy, such as visual merchandising, can help you plan the product assortment to entice customers.
Why Retailers Should Create a Product Assortment Strategy?
Developing a solid product assortment strategy in the store can increase sales and have an impact on the customer experience. Offering the right products your customers need can help you sell most of your products and reduce the loss that comes as a result of dead stock. The store layout design, visually appealing shelves, the ease of finding the right items, and the in-store experience they get from your store plays a crucial role in satisfying your shopper’s needs. This prompts the customer to visit your store again. One third of shoppers expect retailers to understand their needs and expectations by offering the right products at the right time. The first step in product assortment is to understand your target market and their needs. With data-driven planogram software, retailers can analyze sales data to understand customer insights, best-selling items, low- performing items, and shopper requirements. Planograms are a diagrammatic representation of a store layout that dictates a store’s merchandising plan to decide what products need to be stocked on shelves to entice shoppers. For stores to find product assortment and planogram development challenging, planogram manufactures have come up with a new option called planogram services to help you with the shelf planning process based on consumer behavior and market trends. Following are some planogram ways to maximize sales with product assortment strategies:
- Decide on target market: Product assortment will be easier to achieve once the type of target audience is decided. For example, if you run a gaming store, your shoppers are likely to expect to find a deep product assortment of gadgets and accessories when they visit. At the same time, a hypermarket that caters to diverse age groups will have comprehensive product assortment strategies in place.
- Understand customer taste and preferences: A product that a customer liked and bought a month ago would not be exactly what he wants it to be in two days. Your sales will drop if you fail to live up to customer expectations and needs. One of the challenges of retail stores are keeping up with the trends and changing demands of shoppers. You must pay attention to the sales data to know what assortment can encourage customers to make purchases. For example, during the Covid-19, most people brought medical and healthcare products like masks, sanitizers, gloves, and medicines. This resulted in stores filling the shelves and checkout counters with healthcare products to encourage shoppers to make purchases.
- Consider complementary items for cross-selling: Getting your product assortment right can help your shoppers get everything they need without any hassle. This is where you can consider complementary products for cross-selling that work well together to make customer shopping effective and increase the chances of impulse buying. For example, if you have a footwear store, you can place complementary products like polish, brushes, socks, and wipes near them.
- Account for seasonality: When deciding on your merchandise, you must also consider the seasons. Holidays, events, and weather changes can impact your customer’s needs. You might need to widen your product assortment in certain areas while narrowing it down depending on the changes in seasonality. For example, you can include different product mixes for various seasons, like both winter and summer.
Planogram Product Assortment: Final Thoughts
In general, optimizing your product assortment might be challenging, but with the right shelf planning tools, such as data-driven planograms, you can plan and execute retail shelves with the right product mix by analyzing the retail data. This helps to execute demand-driven product categories to encourage shoppers to make purchases and boost sales.
