Perfectly match your in-store assortment to local demand – at every location
In simplest terms, micro-merchandising is the process of ensuring that every retail location and channel carries an assortment matched to their local demand.
This is very impactful because every location has its own geo-demographic profile, including:
These are all factors that impact spending habits and preferences. When retailers bring the same assortment to every location, they face overstock and lost sales at the same time – as some products that do well in one location may sit unsold in another.
By building location-specific assortment, retailers will see…
Minimize product cannibalization and ensure locally popular products are always in stock.
Only allocate inventory that is likely to sell in any given location and eliminate unnecessary stock.
Stocking more location-specific inventory ensures that fewer items will need to go on markdown.
Maximize availability of the top-selling products in every location, and minimize deadstock.
Higher sales at lower inventory costs will improve your overall margins
Ensure your customers can find what they want, when they want it, and where they want it
Micro-merchandising isn’t just an interesting theory. Through the power of retail AI, it has become a reality.
AI can account for dozens of factors (pricing, seasonality, cannibalization, etc.) and calculate demand on the fly for every SKU at every location.
AI can help you create store and product clusters using hard data, as well as automatically adjust them as new data comes in.
With the help of machine learning and simple business rules, micro-merchandising AI can learn your unique business and its constraints.
With massive changes coming to the economy and consumer behavior, it’s more important than ever to keep your customers happy while optimizing your margins. One can’t come at the cost of the other.
This is what makes micro-merchandising so powerful.
By truly accounting (and optimizing) for the geo-demographic differences within your customer base, you can:
Micro-merchandising allows you to bring your products closer to the people that want them – without making any changes to your supply chain.