Does Your Merchandising Mesh With Online Sales?
Online sales are predicted to grow around 9.32% annually over the next five years. This figure is cited in a recent Internet Retailer article on research predicting that online sales will reach $523 billion by 2020 in the U.S. Another prediction: by 2020 there will be 270 million consumers browsing and buying online, mostly using their mobile devices.
What does this mean for retail merchandising?
Mobile Is Essential
If your customers and potential customers are using mobile devices to browse your inventory, then your inventory has to be available to browse. Making sure your presence online is accessible to mobile devices may not be the responsibility of the merchandising team, but making sure the inventory is what people are looking for sure is.
If Store A has an item, and the Amazon link does not recognize that fact, the shopper may go to another seller on Amazon to get the product. If Store B has an item, and the shopper wants to pick it up at Store A, is it easy for the shopper to see their options?
Retail Merchandising-Integrated Is Effective
With an integrated approach to merchandising, duplicate inventory doesn’t need to be isolated in silos waiting for someone to find it. The inventory can be tracked as a whole, across every channel. ChainDrive’s extensive tools enable multiple views of every aspect needed for merchandising managers to make informed decisions.
ChainDrive Retail Merchandising Software is part of an integrated retail management solution that delivers the relevant data and the analytical tools to keep track of what is happening with products, purchases, suppliers, sales, and more. This comprehensive, integrated view across channels and from one end of the supply chain to the other means that effective action can be taken exactly where it does the most good.
The ability to mesh merchandising decisions with online sales and store activity means an optimal selection is available to customers wherever they find your products.