Retail Pro International is pleased the announce the availability of the new Retail Pro Prism® Applications Expert core product knowledge course!

Learn everything you need to know about Retail Pro Prism (v1.4.0.172) features and functionality – from handling sales transactions and returns to setting up promotions and touch menus!

What You’ll Learn

System Overview

How to access Retail Pro Prism and get it ready for use. You will learn how to:

• Access Retail Pro Prism
• Setup default store, price and tax
• Switch between different Retail Pro Prism Themes, Layouts and Views
• Customize the various data grids and search screens found throughout Retail Pro Prism

Employee Management

How to use employee and security-related features in Retail Pro Prism to:

• Establish Retail Pro Prism-specific security permissions
• Override another user’s security restriction
• Automatically logout a user completing a transaction
• Force users to select associates involved in a sales transaction
• Check-in/Check-out

Point-of-Sale

Point of Sale Basics

How to use basic features and functions of the Retail Pro Prism Point-of-Sale module to:

• Lookup/list items on a transaction
• Handle a sales transaction
• Check stock levels
• Manage customer accounts
• Give discounts at Point-of-Sale
• Determine what tender types are available for use at Point-of-Sale
• Hold a transaction
• Handle pending transactions due to an unexpected disruption
• Discreetly capture information at Point-of-Sale using POS Flags
• Charge a fee for the sale of services
• Track shipping and handling charges
• Capture miscellaneous information that cannot be overwritten by future inventory changes
• Track employee commissions
• Track Salesperson Incentive Fees (SPIFs)
• Capture Serial Numbers
• Capture Lot Numbers
• Sell and Break Kit items
• Sell Package items
• Sell Non-Inventory items
• Plan the future sale of merchandise
• Process the sale of an item at one store and fulfill the transaction at another store
• Handle merchandise returns and exchanges
• Track certain non-sales-related activities that impact funds in the register

Advanced Point of Sale Features

How to use more advanced features and functions of the Prism Point-of-Sale module to:

• Establish different sets of prices for different stores and customers
• Track taxes using the different tax methods (plus Detax and Tax Rebates)
• Use a Centrals Server to centrally lookup customers, handle merchandise returns and manage gift card/store credit payments
• Browse inventory to check stock levels, prices and price tags
• List items on a transaction by selecting or “touching” a button
• Setup promotions
• Email a receipt to the customer

X/Z-Out Reports

How to use X-Out and Z-Out reports to:

• Check on sales activity throughout the day
• Reconcile the register

Purchasing & Receiving

How to use Purchasing- and Receiving-related features in Retail Pro Prism to:

• Order merchandise for the store
• Handle the ordering of cases (case-packs)
• Handle trade discounts when ordering merchandise
• Receive merchandise into the store
• Determine how cost is assigned to inventory
• Incorporate additional costs and discounts into the costs of goods received (and sold)

Physical Inventory & Transfers

How to go through the Physical Inventory process and use transfer-related features in Retail Pro Prism. You will learn how to:

• Conduct with a physical inventory or cycle count
• Transfer merchandise out of the store

Considering Retail Pro Prism or using it now?

Find out how you can leverage the features and functions in your Retail Pro Prism that are critical for modern retail – with training from Retail Pro University!

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Thursday, June 16th, 2016 at 8:19 am .

 
The omnichannel expectation set by Tier 1 retailers has quickly trickled down to specialty retail and retailers everywhere are feeling the pressure to deliver. Retail Pro helps retailers simplify the inventory management across channels for omnichannel retail.

What’s wrong with omnichannel inventory management

The modern retail experience is composed (often) of several entirely different, disconnected software, so you are forced to keep disparate inventories for your e-commerce orders and your in-store sales – with all the duplication that entails.

In the very big picture, it doesn’t matter all that much if your systems are disconnected and duplicated. They still get the job done.

But if you examine the process more closely, you’ll see the pockets of chaos you keep tolerating when you segregate your channels, the collective negative impact of which compounds when extended year over year.

Inefficiencies in replenishment

Extraneous steps in the workflow

Underutilized resources

Gross inventory and labor duplication

And it hinders you from making more intelligent use of your inventory across the enterprise – especially later in the season, when you might be faced with stock outs (lost sales) and overstocks (unprofitable markdowns).

Stop retail chaos

Omnichannel in its most practical sense is intended to stop retail chaos like this through the simplification and streamlining of retail processes and technologies.

Connecting your back office inventory, e-commerce, POS (and etc.!) systems in the Retail Pro Prism platform gives you unified visibility into your operations and performance, and simplifies data sharing – so you can make data-driven optimizations and achieve benefits like these:

• Shopper autonomy Empower shoppers to look up, order, or purchase available store inventory online or at another location
• Reduced shipping costs Allow customers to pick up or return online purchases in-store or at satellite locations
• Increased inventory turn Rebalance inventory across the enterprise and fulfill online orders from the nearest store instead of from the warehouse

With all your technologies connected in Retail Pro Prism, you can then deliver the inventory visibility your customers expect from omnichannel.

Deliver on the omnichannel expectation

Your customers have learned to expect little conveniences like being able to go on your website to look up whether a particular item is in stock at the store nearby and reserve or purchase it.

Little customer-facing conveniences like that can actually require a major operational upheaval, depending on the state of your inventory and whether you can tie your e-commerce to your inventory management software.

With Retail Pro Prism, you can do that. e-Commerce and POS at every location can be seamlessly integrated to the Retail Pro platform (whether you use the native applications or opt for other software of your choice), so they can share transactional data in real time (or whatever interval is optimal for your operations) with the inventory management tools in Retail Pro.

This ensures that your inventory data is up to date when a shopper is looking for a particular product at your store. You won’t have to ask your customers to wait while you go get a different device to look up the inventory information. You can easily look up whether you have that item in stock from any device you use for your everyday operations, including iPod, iPad, Windows, Android, laptop, and desktop – because all of the same features are accessible on every device, even from the POS.

You can also see whether your other store locations have the particular item your shopper is searching for. With Send Sale transaction is Retail Pro Prism, you can record a sale at one store and fulfill the transaction at a different store that has available inventory, so you save every sale and your customer leaves satisfied.

With Send Sale transaction is Retail Pro Prism, you can record a sale at one store and fulfill the transaction at a different store that has available inventory, so you save every sale and your customer leaves satisfied.

Reconcile digital and physical inventory counts

To offer customers this kind of visibility into what you have in stock, it’s critical for you to be on top of your physical inventory. Retail Pro Prism helps you keep accurate counts of your physical inventory and determine whether any loss has occurred.

• Confirm your inventory on a store-wide or warehouse-wide scale, or on a bin or shelf
• Record physical counts data by scanning barcodes, RFID tags, or manually typing item identifiers
• Use current On Hand inventory values as start quantities in your physical inventory file
• Identify and review discrepancies easily with a separate Discrepancies list

Retail Pro Prism helps you keep accurate counts of your physical inventory and determine whether any loss has occurred.

With your inventory levels confirmed in Retail Pro Prism, you can increase in-store fulfillment accuracy for online orders being picked from your store shelves, and improve replenishment rates.

Sporting goods and apparel retailer Massey’s Outfitters uses Retail Pro to keep lower inventory. They rebalance their goods between stores and send directly from the vendor via integrated dropship rather than pulling from the warehouse. Warehouse-based replenishment for web sales accounts for only 25 – 50%, resulting in significant efficiency gains.

Inventory accuracy is foundational to every omnichannel strategy. Take control of your inventory today with complete visibility in Retail Pro Prism.

Discover omnichannel simplicity

Want to see how you can simplify omnichannel inventory management with Retail Pro Prism? Learn more in this brochure or request your free consultation today!

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Friday, June 3rd, 2016 at 10:06 am .

Virtual reality is the latest retail innovation.

 
Used to be, virtual reality was technology reserved for gamers. Today,  as stores search continually for innovative solutions to help them best the competition, VR is taking hold in retail environments. In fact, some see it as the future of retail: Data from CCS Insight notes that roughly 2.5 million virtual and augmented reality devices were sold in 2015, with that number soaring to more than 24 million device sales in 2018. The CCS Insight analysts estimate that more than 12 million virtual reality headsets alone will be sold in 2017.

Virtual reality offers a way to let consumers go for a test drive in markets they never could before. For example, Lowe’s is using the technology to create an immersive, contextual experience that bridges the digital world with the physical one. The massive home improvement chain branded its solution the Holoroom: “a digital power tool for kitchen and bath design.”

The Holoroom debuted last November and is aimed at helping customers take the guesswork out of their home projects. Using the Lowe’s Holoroom app, renovators can design kitchens or bathrooms using products sold by the retailer. When they designs are finished, they are turned into YouTube360 videos for customers to enjoy and share. So far, the VR technology, including Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard, has rolled out at only a handful of stores. That tech is at two ends of the spectrum: Google Cardboard is a VR platform developed by Google for use with a head mount for a smartphone (a VR for everyone concept), while Oculus Rift uses state of the art displays and optics designed specifically for VR.

Either way, the role VR will play in retail will likely be transformative. Said Ben Wood, CCS Insight’s Chief of Research: “Most consumers find virtual reality a mind-blowing experience the first time they try it. We believe it has tremendous potential and it’s not just about expensive high-end devices such as the Oculus Rift. For only a few dollars, consumers can dip their toe in the water with an inexpensive cardboard holder for a compatible smartphone. We expect this democratization of the technology to deliver growth not just in affluent mature markets but also in emerging markets where smartphone penetration is stronger than ever.”

As for the Lowe’s customer, it’s fun and also practical. VR provides an easy way to understand and edit each of the components of an interior design. Design can be overwhelming and difficult to visualize a final product, VR can bring it into sharper focus for many.

Retailers should also find benefits beyond customer satisfaction. In the Lowes example, every product selected by the VR-enable customer can be purchased at the store. That makes for easy add-on product selling, which adds up to a high-value shopping cart. In addition, the software should help speed up design times and reduce returns. After all, customers who are not blessed with a sharp “mind’s eye” will be able to get a pretty accurate idea of how their designs will look.

This entry was posted by Jennifer Bosavage on Friday, May 27th, 2016 at 6:13 pm .

The ecommerce market in the Middle East and North Africa is valued at $15b

Sarah Algethami, Gulf News Staff Reporter

Retail Pro International’s Rammohan Nair accepting the Partner Award from University of Dubai – presented by the VC, KHDA Chairman and the Indian Counsel General.

Dubai: The retail industry in the UAE is slow to adopt ecommerce, according to industry experts.

Many retailers are not embracing ecommerce for a number of reasons, such as challenges in delivering goods and being discouraged by the failure of other companies in setting up ecommerce sites, said Rammohan Nair, Director of Strategic Accounts for the Middle East and India at Retail Pro, a global retail management software company. Nair was the moderator for a recent round table discussion with Middle East retail visionaries regarding directions for omnichannel customer experience.

“The addressing system that we have in Dubai is not easy… also, there have been players in the market that have had high expectations but did not meet them. There are bad experiences that have deterred people,” he said on the sidelines of an event organised by Smart Stores Expo in Dubai on Monday.

He also pointed out that some franchisees in the country are not allowed to set up an ecommerce site.

“The big retailers are franchisees and certain franchisee business agreements don’t allow the franchisee to have their own ecommerce sites,” he said, adding that while consumers in the UAE are buying more online, many still prefer to shop at brick and mortar stores.

“Traditionally here, shopping malls have been a place that people visit… visiting a shopping mall in this part of the world is a part of everyone’s life,” he said.

Colin Beaton, managing director of Limelight Creative Services, a retail consultancy in Dubai, said that consumers’ concerns about cyber security is another reason why retailers are slow to adopt ecommerce.

“The UAE is an early adopter of technology for consumer goods. Ecommerce [adoption] is slower here than in some countries,” he said.

The ecommerce market in the Middle East and North Africa is valued at $15 billion, according to Nair. The number of ecommerce users in the region is 90 million and only 15 per cent of businesses have an online presence, he said.

“In the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] … half of internet users purchase something on the web at least once [a month],” he added.

On his outlook for the local retail industry, Nair said that brick and mortar “is here to stay” and that ecommerce will still be “complimentary to the shopping experience.”

“[Ecommerce ] is where people learn more about a product or where should they go and buy it,” he said.

Reposted from Gulf News

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Wednesday, May 18th, 2016 at 1:43 pm .

Retail Pro International is pleased to announce the availability of Retail Pro Prism 1.4!

Retail Pro Prism’s unmatched flexibility gives you complete control over how you build the omnichannel retail experience for your brand.

• Retail with any business model – corporate chains, franchise, shop-in-shop, kiosks, etc.
• Choose the hardware and database that best fits your environment and budget
• Deploy your choice of iOS, Windows, Android, and even mini devices
• Integrate every retail tool you use to create your distinct brand experience

Through no small amount of blood, sweat and tears, we have put together a big release for Retail Pro Prism. Okay maybe no blood, but there had to be a hangnail here or there and certainly a few finger cramps. Suffice to say, the team has put a lot of effort into bringing some exciting new features and functionality and maybe stepped on a few bugs here and there as well.

Highlights in this release include…

New Promotions Module

Retail Pro Prism gives you incredible flexibility and creativity in the application of promotions at POS – even more so than Retail Pro 9!

It includes several easy templates based on popular promotion types. When creating a promotion, you just select the template that most closely matches the type of promotion you want to create. The template determines which fields will be available in the UI. Using the provided templates, you can create an almost unlimited variety of promotions.

Transfers

Retail Pro Prism now has a new Transfers module that enables you to create transfer slips to move merchandise from one store to another. Transfers are especially useful when one store has an abundance of inventory and another store has a shortage. By transferring the merchandise, retailers can avoid having to place a new order for more merchandise and manage their inventory smarter.

We’ve also made many other exciting improvements, including:

• Initialization and Communication Improvements
• COD/Charge
• Enhanced Accumulated Discounting

…and much more!

Ready for modern retail?

For a free needs assessment to see how you can accomplish your retail strategy better with Retail Pro Prism, talk to your Retail Pro Business Partner or request a consultation today!

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Wednesday, May 18th, 2016 at 1:23 pm .

Retailers must deliver more effective digital interactions between consumers and their brands through omnirelevant strategies, said Globant, a digitally native technology services company that creates digital journeys for its customers, in its quarterly Sentinel Report.

“Without awareness of the digital journey, brands will fail to impress consumers and win their trust and engagement,” said Martín Migoya, Globant CEO and co-founder. “Focusing on relevance and quality of user interaction over quantity of touch points is at the heart of effective digital strategy. This requires consumer-centric thinking from the outset.”

The report highlights five elements that must exist in equilibrium in order to achieve omnirelevance:

• Harmony  – The deeply-rooted connection and affinity that this series of interactions has with a user’s flow, producing a pleasant effect
• Familiar Security  – The feeling of familiarity and trust customers experience at each moment of their journey, fostering an intimate and sage relationship between the customer and the brand
• Contextual Content  – Content that is able to fulfill a user’s needs at any given moment
• Sensory  – Creating brain stimulus that will give a physical reality to the experience
• Surprise  – The level of unexpected momentum to an experience or an interaction must have to catch the user’s attention and leave a lasting, positive impression

“Omnirelevant Experiences” represents the fifth edition of Globant’s Sentinel Report – a quarterly analysis on global market trends and consumer behavior insights and their application to various industries. Furthermore, the report includes stories and business case studies that show how omnirelevance is already being pursued in the technology, retail and entertainment sectors.

Adapted from Erie TV News.

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Monday, May 9th, 2016 at 4:20 pm .

As retailers wrap up Q1 2016, now is a good time to reflect on recent retail trends as we look forward to what the future holds.

Understanding the broader environmental shifts can shape our strategies and ensure we aren’t caught off guard. I’m going to highlight five trends retailers should keep in mind as well as insights all employers should consider to improve the customer and employee experience:

• Interconnectivity
• Omni-store
• Beacons and buttons
• Black Friday
• Personalization

In this first post, I’m going to focus on the first two trends. Interconnectivity is a collective digital transformation which has been building over the last several years. Technology spending isn’t simply a nice-to-do, it is a necessity. Traditionally, retailers considered their spending across five distinct categories: in-store hardware, in-store software, marketing and operations solutions, supply chain systems and hardware, and loss prevention/asset protection solutions.

Among the leading retail executives Innovative Retail Technologies (IRT) surveyed, tech spending decisions are no longer being made in these distinct category silos. Instead, they’re being made by cross-disciplinary teams with a holistic understanding of their enterprise and Omni-channel goals.

This digital transformation and new purchasing approach is happening in the name of Omni-channel connectivity. Retail executives’ plans point to an all-out race to connect data from any and all channels to better serve the customer — and the business — wherever both are found. In the retail world this is often referred to as Unified Commerce with the goal of providing one version of truth for data pertaining to customers, products, pricing and sourcing.

Insight: Technology purchases should facilitate connecting data from all channels.

I refer to the second trend as Omni-store because the physical brick-and-mortar store still plays an important role in the retail world even as online channels build. To truly be Omni-channel requires letting go of the legacy systems and practices, such as managerial accounting, and creating reward structures and measurements that don’t simply rely on the physical. This trend ties closely to the first trend as interconnectivity really enables the procurement, sales and delivery or merchandise independent of channel. Here are a few considerations and facts supporting the Omni-store trend:

• Inventory visibility. This year, nearly 62 percent of the IRT survey respondents claimed to have inventory visibility across all channels compared to less than 50 percent the previous year.
• Order management. More than 34 percent of retailers intend to spend on solutions that improve inventory management through better visibility, and more than a third will invest in order management/fulfillment solutions.

Retailers who were maintaining legacy systems and attempting excessive integration (or sometimes not integrating at all due to systems incompatibility,) regret their decision. Instead of improvements in customer experience and business efficiency, they suffered setbacks brought about by the increased complexity.

In conclusion, as companies continue to invest in technology, interconnectivity and the Omni-Store trends will continue to gain traction.

Read the original post on Business2Community

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Monday, April 25th, 2016 at 1:51 pm .

Omnichannel retailers will have their work cut out for them this year, as they attempt to entice shoppers with both their web and brick and mortar presence in order to compete effectively against online-only stores.

A recent study by Wipro found that when consumers browse online and in a store, many opt to ultimately make the purchase online: 1/3 of both U.K. and U.S. consumers reported purchasing in that manner.

‘There is no doubt consumers are interacting with brands across both the online and in-store channels,” said Avinash Rao, Global Head, Wipro Digital. “But omnichannel retailers are missing a big opportunity to capture the 1/3 of consumers who say they are researching in store but leave to buy online.”

What’s driving e-commerce success?

The online shopping trend is being driven by 3 factors: greater convenience, better prices and ease of use.

Online pure play retailers are the big winners of this shift: 44% of U.K.  and 47% of U.S. shoppers report doing more than 1/2 their online shopping on such sites.

What should concern brick and mortar retailers is the finding that 1 out of every 4 shoppers are not even considering brick and mortar retailers’ websites.

Sounds like retailers need to leverage the one thing they have that those pure play online stores do not: location, location, location.

So how can bricks compete with clicks?

“Omnichannel retailers need to invest more in understanding and improving the customer experience journey to entice shoppers to spend more with them in-store,” said Rao. “Customer journey engineering as an approach to understanding, designing and delivering relevant and differentiated customer experiences across all channels and touch points will help retailers reverse the trend and avoid a future when consumers are no longer visiting their stores.”

Competitive pressures can be a motivating force to drive retailers to provide a differentiated shopping experience.

E-commerce retailers understand how customers want to shop online and deliver that experience well; brick and mortars need to learn what drives customers to buy from them, and capitalize on those strengths.

If retailers can determine the source of dissatisfaction and not just fix it, but turn it around into an enjoyable experience, that can turn consumer indifference into delight.

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Friday, April 22nd, 2016 at 2:57 pm .

I don’t know what it is about me but I always seems to be the shopper who grabs an item without a price tag. That usually means I end up spending more time at the checkout counter while some poor store employee has to go to the back of the store to find a price tag for whatever I’m buying.

While this may be a minor inconvenience for your customers, the loss in productivity due to an inefficient use of your employee’s time creates a compounding hit to your business over time.

One of the ways you can help your employees be more efficient is to provide them with more data points they can use to find an item in your Retail Pro inventory.

Add user-defined fields to filter your search

Let’s say a customer comes to your cash register with a pair of jeans. Unfortunately, there’s no price tag. You’ve trained your employee to perform an inventory search. She types in the word “jeans” and hundreds of possibilities show up. Way too many to scroll through. She gives up and runs to the back of the store to locate the same pair of jeans and get a price tag.

Now your customers are inconvenienced by long wait times and you’ve lost two times the productivity because she wasted time keying in the item in the search and because she had to hold up the line while she found the jeans in the back room.

Instead, use the User-Defined Fields (UDF) and Auxiliary (AUX) Fields to record information about your products that would help associates pinpoint them in the search.

In our jeans example, we might want to record information about the style of the jeans: the cut, the rise, and the wash. While we might carry hundreds of different combinations, once we take style combinations into account, there may only be a few choices at the register. Selecting from a much smaller list of products will prevent your employees from having to leave the cash register or make the customer wait for someone to locate the same item in the store.

Auto-populate Description2 with info in your Retail Pro

While using inventory UDF and AUX fields to record product information is fairly common, this next trick is what really helps you save time with Retail Pro.
You can auto-populate the Description2 field with information from the UDF and AUX fields.

Why is this important? Because you can’t lookup AUX or UDF information at the point-of-sale. But you can use Description2 as a lookup field. Using the auto-populate feature allows you to use UDF and AUX information as a lookup. And once it’s set up, Retail Pro will manage the data for you.

Let’s go back to our original scenario. The customer comes to the register with a missing price tag.

Now the cashier can use the Description2 field.

She enters codes for low-cut, acid-wash jeans and now only finds a couple of possible choice. She then lists the correct item on the receipt.

Before setting up Retail Pro, this process could have taken as much as 10 minutes, depending on the size of your store, the availability of other sales floor personnel to find the item in the back room, etc. Now, you’re on to the next customer in no time at all and keeping queues short.

How to set up Description2 auto-population in Retail Pro

Step 1

Set up your UDF and AUX fields in
→ System Preferences
→ Local Preferences
→ Merchandise
→ User-Defined / Auxiliary

In the Field Definitions section, name your UDF fields.
In the Field entries section, provide your pre-defined list of items that will appear when you click on the field in Retail Pro. These will be the list of possible choices when you select that field.

Step 2

Check the option to “Append selected UDF / AUX fields to Inventory Description 2 field”. The Description field can be 30 characters long. The Character Count field below will keep track of how much data you are appending to the Description2 field.

Step 3

Enter the order in which the fields will be added to Description2, the starting character, the length of the string, and a separator character.

Let’s say I want to include the first three characters from each field separated by a slash (\).  The table below represents the possible values that would be copied to Description2 for the JeanCut UDF field.  Notice in the code field, only the first three letters appear. That’s what will be copied to Description2.

In my Description2 field, I want the JeanCut to be first, followed by the JeanWsh and JeanRse fields. The example below shows what the final output will look like for a pair of jeans that are bootcut (JeanCut), acid wash (JeanWsh), and low-cut (JeanRse).

boo/aci/low

To get this output, I have to provide Retail Pro with the instructions for auto-populating this field. Enter the following information in the Field Definitions section.

The order column is the order in which the fields will appear. In our example, we have the JeanCut followed next by the JeanWsh field, and finally the JeanRse field.

The 1^st <n> char column is the starting character. Retail Pro will copy over information in these fields starting with this character. In our case, we are starting with the first character.

The length column is the number of characters to copy. We are copying three characters from each field.

Finally, the separator column allows us to pick a character to separate the data. I’ve chosen to use a back slash after the first two fields. I don’t need one after JeanRse because there is no additional information after that. I can include as many fields as I want (up to the 30 character limit) and separate them with any character. In this example we will stop with three parts.

Now, your UDF fields will be available when you create a new inventory item.

As you enter the information in the UDF fields, your Description 2 field will automatically populate with data from these fields.

Step 4

The last step is to set up Retail Pro to use Description2 as a lookup field. Go to System Preferences → Local Preferences → Documents → General. In the Options section, drag Description2 so it is above the line.

Now when you look up an item in a document, you can use information in the Description 2 field. In the example below, we use *boo* to search for items. It returned a list of possible matches, one of which was our new inventory item.

Now a cashier at the register can look up an item based on the attributes of the item. It’s a simple solution to a common problem. Using Retail Pro, you can streamline your processes, make your employees more efficient, and let your customers leave the store after having a great customer service experience.

Didn’t know you can do that?

Get trained and get more from your Retail Pro!

Find out how you can leverage more of the features and functions in your Retail Pro  – with training from Retail Pro University!

This entry was posted by Ulyana Avetisov on Wednesday, April 20th, 2016 at 3:35 pm .

By Bruce D. Sanders | Consumer Psychologist | Retailing in Motion

What are the effects on your shoppers when you run out of an item shoppers expected to purchase from your store? How might you turn those effects to your advantage?

Here are 3 tips, using research findings from Indiana University-Bloomington, University of British Columbia, and Northwestern University.
 

3 tips to turn out-of-stocks to your advantage

 
1. Consumers who have repeatedly purchased a small set of items from you will desire some of those items even more strongly when they discover other items in the set are out-of-stock (OOS). The more general finding is that loyal customers who encounter an OOS become more likely to come to your store promptly when sales on high-demand items are announced. Coach your store staff to sincerely empathize with the shopper and give helpful guidance, such as telling the shopper when the next shipments are due.

2. For consumers who purchase a particular item at regular intervals, encountering an OOS repeatedly will lead the consumer to change item preferences. When an item is OOS in your store, use signage to suggest an alternative which you do currently have in stock.

3. Shoppers’ price sensitivity increases when they encounter out-of-stock items. They dislike the feeling they are being required to buy a substitute for meeting their needs. To lessen the negative feelings, offer alternatives at a range of price points.

Be ready to offer a better alternative

 
Researchers at American University in Washington, D.C. and University of Arizona suggest you be ready for a shopper to veer off to a wholly different choice after learning an item the shopper has carefully chosen is OOS.

Say a shopper comes into your store and looks at expensive ink pens. The shopper narrows the choices to two, both of which have an extra-fine felt tip. The only difference between the two is the ink color, which the shopper decides is not that important.

Then when the shopper asks for the pen with the blue ink, he’s told it is temporarily OOS. He’s asked if he’d like to place an order, and he’ll be notified when the pen arrives. He declines. The salesperson—knowing the value of selling substitutability—offers the shopper the extra-fine felt tip pen with the black ink.

But, like a majority of the participants in the American University/Arizona study, the shopper goes off in a different direction, such as purchasing a fancy ballpoint pen with blue ink. Because of the OOS, the blue ink color becomes more important than the felt tip.

See more posts from RIMtailing.

This entry was posted by admin on Wednesday, April 13th, 2016 at 2:42 pm .