Customers like having options. Offering an attractive bouquet of options to choose from is essential in retail. Assortment planning is the process of intelligently selecting the right products to put on your digital shelf.
In a market where the competitor is just a click away, you need to offer enough variety to keep the customer engaged. Offering too many goods adds to the inventory carrying cost. Too few options bore the variety-seeking customers’ experience. Being presented with too many choices that are similar can also confuse the customer.
How much is too much? How does a retailer achieve the right assortment of goods or services? Read on to know more.
Table of Contents
Build On the Basics
It is disconcerting for a regular customer to visit your store for a staple product and find it out of stock. Identify the essential items in your product line that are likely to always be in demand. Your product assortment should be built on a good selection of the basic products. This keeps your store attractive to buyers who follow trends as well as the ones who keep coming back for the basics. Return buyers will also be more likely to pick a newer product from the store because they trust the seller. Highlighting both the basics and the trendy encourages the customer to make impulse buys.
Monitor And Adjust
Assortment planning is not a one-time decision that is set in stone, it is an ongoing exercise. Retail solutions keep you informed of sales trends in real-time. Analyze this data and keep your shelves stocked with the items that perform best. Analytical tools are most useful when they drive flexibility in inventory stocking. Use the data to identify gaps in your product list and rectify them. This may mean making changes to planned decisions but helps you ride the wave of market trends as they happen.
When the inventory optimization process is continual and responsive to real-time data, you become highly competitive. If a particular item or brand keeps selling out, it is a hint to expand your offering of that item or brand. If all the variants of a particular item sell out, you can experiment with stocking more variants of the same.
Reinforce Your Image
One of the essential aspects of assortment planning is keeping the product selection in line with the brand image. Think about what your brand is known and recognized for and build on it. If you are known for stocking the latest trends, do not play it safe and only stick to the basics. It is all too easy to get carried away with reacting to customer trends and lose focus of the company’s goals and image. Use the real-time data that you get from retail solutions to adjust your offerings within the premises of your brand strategy. But sometimes, it pays to also take risks backed by data to step out of your comfort zone and attract new buyers.
Be In-Step With Marketing
Select products that live up to the claims that you make in marketing campaigns. You can also let your marketing campaign ideas be driven by your product assortment strategy. It would be disconcerting for a buyer who has seen ads for premier products to be offered mid-range products. Assortment planning and marketing have to be in sync to get the maximum results.
Anticipate Demand
Customer expectations are high all year round and it is important to meet them continually to ensure customer loyalty. Some shopping trends are very localized to the time of the year or geography. Plan your product assortment with sensitivity to the trends. You should also modify your stock to reflect demands during particular seasons and events. For example, during the pandemic lockdowns, there was a surge in orders for items that were required to work from home.
Respond To Trends
Social media holds immense value and opportunities to create and assess trends. Certain styles or products become very popular in response to endorsements by influencers or celebrities. Retailers who respond quickly to these trends grab the attention of buyers. For example, Bernie Sanders was pictured wearing a pair of mitts during the inauguration of Joe Biden. His image went viral and the demand for similar mittens surged. Knitwear designers and retailers who responded had the right product offering at the right time. They might have also organically gained exposure to new customers.
Picking an assortment of products is no longer a hit-or-miss gamble. Intelligence Node helps you make the right decisions backed by solid real-time data. We help you optimize inventory and get ahead of the competition with scientific data-driven assortment intelligence.
