Sorted by Tag: Business Intelligence
How to Perform Sales Trend Analysis For Your Retail Business
(This post was last published on November 28th, 2017. We’ve updated it for accuracy and completeness.)
Do you know your sales trends by product type, region, or time period? Do you know how much inventory you have of each product?
Most retailers wish they knew more about their sales and customers’ buying habits. They want to know the right levers to push and pull to increase sales and customer satisfaction. However, there are many obstacles in their way that keep them from these insights.
It could be that your data is split between disconnected systems or that you’re dealing with legacy systems that can’t keep up. It’s complicated to converge your sales from different online and offline sales channels for analysis. With the right tools though, this doesn’t have to be a problem for you.
This post will discuss what capabilities you need to perform sales trend analysis and its benefits for your business.
What We’re Reading: Data’s Importance in Retail
We recently released our Product Information Management solution, because we saw so many merchants struggling with their product data. As retail morphs into eCommerce and marketplace selling and mobile selling and… (must I continue?) …one thing stands out as critically important: data.
It’s not just product data, either. It’s all data!
If you want to successfully grow, you need to have the people, processes, and systems in place to manage data. It’s the only way to utilize that data in ways that help you differentiate. Data can be an asset if used properly, but it can be a liability if it doesn’t get love.
This week, we’re reading about data (big and small) and how merchants/retailers need to organize around managing it.
What We’re Reading: Retail Disruption, Advice for CMOs & The Big Data Cloud
Entrepreneurs, retailers, business managers, and anyone trying win a market all need to have a dual focus on the short term future and the long term.
In the short term, you need to manage the business. What items should you order tomorrow? How many visits is your eCommerce store receiving? What will be the cash impact on making payroll next Friday? And, there are plenty of best practices that help you manage the short term.
The long term is less clear. It’s about seeing the forest through the trees, making educated guesses, and preparing your business for whatever might come. You are either disrupting or being disrupted.
This week I’d like to share three articles that look at that longer term future. What trends are you preparing to address?
Order to Cash Best Practices for Multichannel Retailers
The order to cash (O2C or OTC) process is critical retailers. And, optimizing OTC processes was hard enough without having to deal with the modern complexities of multichannel selling.
To run a successful retail/wholesale/distribution business, you need to do more than just sell a lot of goods. You need to efficiently manage how those sales turn into operating cash.
This post will dive into some OTC best practices for multichannel retailers–although, they are useful for more than just retailers.
How to Select the Right Multichannel Retail Systems
Selecting the right point solutions to execute your multichannel retail strategy is difficult. You must evaluate eCommerce platforms, enterprise resource platforms (ERP), and point of sale (POS) systems. And, it’s complicated to figure out which ones will work together to support your multichannel business processes.
For example, if you want to list different pricing for your B2C website versus your B2B website, does your ERP support that? How about your eCommerce system? More importantly, how will those systems communicate to make sure each has the right price displayed?
Many vendors do not build software that supports the key requirements to building a multichannel business. They built their software in the last decade (or sometimes the last century!) and are trying to milk every dollar they can from it. Some are not interested, others are incapable of making their systems multichannel-ready. You, the multichannel retailer, will feel the weight of that this problem.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! (more…)
