Retail analytics play a key role in understanding the shopping habits of consumers, adapting retailers’ offerings and providing an industry-leading experience. Modern Retail spoke with CEO of BeMyEye, Luca Pagano about the ways that business owners can supercharge their retail execution and maximise the impact of their visual merchandising.
Here’s what Luca had to say.
Why are retail analytics important?
Being able to collect retail analytics and data enables retailers to understand areas for improvement and make changes that benefit businesses.
Luca explained: “Nearly $1trillion dollars in retail sales are lost every year due to out of stocks and poor assortment or promotional compliance. Continuous, accurate and actionable instore analytics are essential to address this problem.”
What are the benefits of great instore merchandising?
Retail analytics also impact instore merchandising, with this being a pivotal part of helping new and loyal customers to find the items that they are looking for, while encouraging purchases.
Luca added: “The right instore merchandising ensures that shoppers are able to identify the product and promotions they want at the right time in the right place, hence their overall instore experience is better and, as a consequence, retail sales are greater.”
What are the main aspects of instore merchandising that retailers should focus on?
When it comes to analysis of stock success, making sure stock levels remain at a suitable level is incredibly important, as well as keeping messaging relevant.
Luca said: “The most common issue all retailers face is out-of-stock, or OOS and assortment compliance, a trend that’s been exacerbated by COVID and Brexit. Empty shelves and product shortages contribute to a poor customer experience which makes offline shopping increasingly less convenient compared to online. Another key aspect is the correct execution of promotional activities, especially those that have been heavily promoted in order to drive footfall in stores.”
How does store auditing work?
Store auditing is an essential part of making sure the instore offering is suitable, however technology can now simplify this process. The benefit of store auditing is that it highlights any challenges or issues, while helping to fix any problems that may be having a negative impact on sales.
Luca commented on store auditing: “Store auditing allows brands and retailers to measure the quality of the in store execution, i.e the availability and visibility of the right products in a given category. In the past, these activities were carried out manually, first with pen and paper and more recently using excel or some clunky SFA, by store ops people and CPGs’ sales reps.
“Today, companies like BeMyEye provide user friendly tools like Compass, our Perfect Store execution app, that enables field reps and store ops managers to take pictures of complex retail scenes and, leveraging Image Recognition technology, to obtain real time, actionable insights like Assortment compliance, out of stock and share of shelf.
“This allows for rapid and consistent improvement of the shopper experience through timely and impactful remedial actions.”
What’s next for BeMyEye and how can retailers stay up to date?
“The impact that Covid has had, especially on the retail industry, has led both physical and online retailers to accelerate their adoption of enabling technologies like image recognition and related automation to bring new levels of scalability and speed to their operations. Retailers who are embracing these new technologies are coming out of the pandemic with greater operational efficiency and levels of customer service, while those who are not are facing an increasingly steep uphill battle to remain competitive.
“Hence embracing a culture of innovation is no longer an option. This can be helped by establishing strategic partnerships with companies that, like BeMyEye, have demonstrated that it can be easy, yet highly impactful, to leverage technologies like AI and crowdsourcing to materially improve the efficiency and effectiveness of core operational activities like in store execution and merchandising.”
Click here to read Modern Retail’s ultimate guide to Visual Merchandising.
Holly brings a wealth of experience in both print and digital publishing. As Modern Retail’s Content Editor, Holly is passionate about helping independent retailers to thrive in today’s ever-changing market.
