What Can Retail Analytics Help You Measure?
It’s important, in the retail business, to be able to measure your progress to determine if your business is successful, profitable, and growing. But what exactly should you measure?
Every retail business is different. So the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business might be different than those of another business, even another retail chain in the same niche. That’s why it’s important to choose a retail analytics package that is flexible and robust. That said, here are a few things you may be interested in measuring as a part of your analytics package.
- Profit and Loss – Naturally, you want to measure the profit and loss of your business, but what about individual product lines? You may want to measure profit and loss by vendor, product category, and may individual SKU.
- Product lifecycle – How long does it take to sell a product once you make a purchase? Does a particular product sit on your shelf for a year before it moves out the door while others sit for only three months? You can use that information to make important decisions about what stock you wish to hold in your inventory.
- Sales data – What’s selling, what’s not? Which stores are selling the most product? Which stores are selling the most of each type of product? Which sales people within your retail chain are selling the most? What times of day are your peak sales periods? In retail, sales is what drives your profits. You want to know as much as what you are selling, who is selling it, and how much is being sold as possible.
- Shortages – Are you short on any particular product or type of product? Are you always short on specific SKUs at specific stores? Do seasons affect shortages? Maybe you need to work on your allocations.
These are just a few of the things you can measure with a good retail analytics program. But reports and the method of reporting are just as important as what you analyze. Get your reports in a variety of ways that are useful to different people in the same organization. Allow each user to customize how reports are styled. This makes data sharing and analysis easier across the chain.