Retailers play a significant role as a conduit between manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers and consumers. In this context, they perform various functions like sorting, breaking bulk, holding stock, as a channel of communication, storage, advertising and certain additional services. Sorting Manufacturers usually make one or a variety of products and would like to sell their entire inventory to a few buyers to reduce costs. Final consumers, in contrast, prefer a large variety of goods and services to choose from and usually buy them in small quantities. Retailers are able to balance the demands of both sides, by collection an assortment of goods from different sources, buying them in sufficiently large quantities and selling them to consumers in small units. The above process is referred to as the sorting process. Through this process, retailers undertake activities and perform functions that add to the value of the products and services sold to the Continue reading
Retail Management Concepts
Growth Potential of Retail Trading Areas
Every retailer must answer one more question before completing the trading area evaluation process. That is what holds for the future for the retail trading area ? In other words he is to foresee the growth potentials of trading areas. It is because, the marketing opportunities can change quickly or dynamically growing trading areas might turn either static or decline. The retailer either must fight to maintain present market share or be willing to survive on a smaller share without future growth. However, with the growth, the retailer has an opportunity to expand sales and market share at a reasonable amount of cost and effort. Therefore, the final step in evaluating a retail trading area is to determine the areas future growth. The retailer can very often learn what to expect by examining future conditions because, the future of a retail trading area is an outgrowth of past and present Continue reading
Store Positioning in Retail Management
Attracting the customers is the crux of the issue of retail trade. How and where the store is positioned on the site affects the retailer’s ability to attract the customers. Therefore in evaluating the existing store facilities or planning future site layouts, the retailer should answer effectively and satisfactorily these three questions. These are: How visible is the store? Is the store compatible with its surroundings? Are store facilities placed for customer convenience ? 1. Ensuring the Store Visibility The customers must see the store if the retailer wants to achieve the goals of stopping, attracting and inviting the customers. A visible store becomes a part of the consumers mental map of where, to shop for certain product as service. Visual awareness of a stores existence has the short-run benefit of alluring impulse shoppers and the long-run benefit of attracting the future customers who develop a particular need for Continue reading
Data Analytics in Retail Industry
Data acquisition using the Internet of Things (IoT) in the retail industry is one of the most important innovations in increasing the amount of relevant data that can be collected during a customer’s visit. Analyzing the behavior of a customer during an in-store purchase using sensing devices can reveal a customer’s interests and choices. Using a number of sensing devices, the in-store customer behavior is captured, pre-processed, and then transmitted over a wireless network to the cloud. A data analytics model built with fuzzy logic is developed to generate the data of a customer’s purchasing intentions. This approach will help retail stores to recommend products to customers and guide supply chain planning. Such an approach allows retailers to gain more sales thereby increasing their market value. The increase in the amount of data available due to the advent of automation, new technologies, and standards have made the decision-making process in Continue reading
Concept of Planned Shopping Centers
The expansion of suburbia brought with it planned residential developments. These new sub divisions were connected by many new city streets and through fares along which retail businesses could be established. The notion of the planned shopping center was born. Developers could plan multi store facilities that would serve the needs of these new neighbor hoods with grocery, drug, and apparel goods. With the availability of large tracts of relatively cheap undeveloped land located many miles from the inner city, but close to these new living areas, large centers could be designed that would offer one stop shopping to entire clusters of residential areas. The last thirty years witnessed the widespread development of multiunit retail strip centers and the construction of multiacre shopping malls/theme parks. Several important issues surround the choice of locating a retail business in a planned shopping center. One important consideration is the nature of the business Continue reading
Retail Site Evaluation and Selection
Retail Site Evaluation Methods Experts and analysts have at their disposal several methods to evaluate retail site alternatives. These are broadly classified as subjective and objective. Again some are quite simple and some are sophisticated. It suffices to take two most commonly used methods namely, checklist method and quantitative methods. 1. Checklist Method It provides a retail site evaluator with a set of procedural steps for arriving at a subjective yet quantitative expression of a sites value. First, the evaluator enumerates the general factors that are usually considered in any site evaluation. A typical list of factors includes all or most of the site-evaluation principles~ interruption, cumulative attraction, compatibility and accessibility. Secondly, for each general factor, the evaluator identifies several attribute measurements that reflect the location needs of the proposed operation. For instance, interception which is a key location attribute for most convenience retailers, can be divided into the volume Continue reading