While online shopping rises in trajectory, stores have continued to remain highly relevant. In the US, over 85% of retail still happens in physical stores, while ecommerce still represents a small percentage of total retail sales, that is, only 14.5%.
Stores are widely known to add an element of localization to the business. Having a strong local presence is essential to establishing a brand identity and creating a meaningful personal touch. Customers continue to visit stores to experience the products physically and test them in person before purchasing them.
In this blog, we take you through the top 5 highly useful techniques to boost store sales instantly.
1. Maintain the health of your stock
Make sure every product has an adequate number of sizes and styles. Have enough XL, L, M, and S sizes for each product. By eliminating or reducing stock brokenness, there is the least likelihood of losing sales and revenues. To maintain the health of the stock, brands can use techniques like auto-replenishment or take measures like inter-store transfer or transfer from the warehouses. Data analysis has a significant role to play in maintaining the health of the stock as it can give brands a fair idea of the potential distribution curve for various sizes and styles.
2. Boost inventory exposure to maximize sales
A lot of challenges in modern inventory management lie in the lack of visibility across different markets and locations. This becomes all the more complex as omnichannel overtakes retail businesses and demands better integration among various channels.
Improving integration and ensuring a seamless connection between ERPs and warehouse management solutions can drive inventory exposure significantly. Making the right inventory available in the right stores as per regional demand means enhancing the likelihood of conversions. It also helps increase the turnaround time and avoid unnecessary discounts by selling at just the right price on the basis of the local demand. Increff Offline to Online (O2O) helps expose store inventory to online consumers to increase sales conversion by enhancing product listings.
3. Placing the right inventory in the right stores
Cutting-edge BI and accurate assortment planning help place the right products in the right stores. Demand analysis can keep brands abreast of the trends in regional demand and enable them to respond accordingly in terms of assortment planning. Demand analysis is not an ad hoc step, but a continuous process of evaluation of demand to enable better decision-making and create more accurate product assortments.
Likewise, Regional Utilization has an entirely local focus and enables brands to make products available as close to the customer clusters as possible, besides reducing costs of logistics and delivery.
Explainer video: Reduce logistics cost and delivery time with regional utliization
4. Top seller/core style identificationÂ
Once brands are aware of their top-selling products or are able to identify the core style of their customers, they can have the right product mix in the right quantities. Each store could have a different top-selling style, shaped largely by factors such as local fashion outlook or cultural inclinations. Teaming a white shirt with blue jeans is a universal fashion favorite that brands must have in adequate quantities across stores so as not to miss out on sales opportunities.
Conversely, it is also very helpful for brands to keep tabs on their slow-moving products so that they may avoid overstocking these items and freezing precious financial resources. Slow-moving products could be cleared faster using deals and discounts.
5. Identification and pullback of dead stock
Brands must keep a vigil on the velocity of their products, especially the slow movers that can be cleared using markdowns. In case some products aren’t sold off despite using these tactics, brands must proactively identify the dead stock and pull it back into the warehouses. Alternatively, some products could also be shifted to other stores where they could be in demand in their local markets. This opens up the shelf space for better products that could attract buyers and help attain higher conversions for the brand. Replacing the dead stock with products that are trending in the market is simply a great way to boost sales.
Brick-and-mortar stores are unlikely to fade away anytime in the foreseeable future. Rather than ignoring this crucial source of revenue, brands must craft proactive strategies to pull customers into the stores, boost their conversion rate and raise a healthy revenue. The above-given tips are a proven solution to meet the growing challenges of physical store retail in times of the rapidly growing online retail industry.
