Future of the Retail – I. Supermarket

How to Optimize Your Supermarket by Using Retail Analytics?

Analyze different areas in your supermarket and take action to gain loyal customers for a pleasant shopping experience.

Customer expectations are growing day by day. Groceries need to develop a viable customer retention strategy to remain their existence in a competitive environment. In-store experiences determine customer relations in the supermarket. They should identify the most efficient ways to build and maintain a loyal relationship with their customers. Retail analytics help supermarkets understand their customers’ shopping behavior and the ways to retain valued customers.

The cloud, mobility, social media and analytics-based solutions provide new metrics for the retailers to enhance customer experience and gain loyal customers. Retail analytics provide substantial analytical data on inventory levels, consumer demand, customer preferences, etc. for

• Marketing & Pricing
• Staff Management
• Checkout Line Optimization
• Stock Optimization
• SKU Range Management
• Store Space Optimization

The supermarket is a big self-service retail shop, delivering foods, meat, bakery and dairy products, and even other products that are not foods. It is so critical to understand customer needs and satisfy their demand in retail especially in groceries. Retail analytics provides groceries a comprehensive and essential data and knowledge about customer preferences. The prediction of the shopper preferences by using previous data provides an easier path to set a course for better marketing, store space optimization, SKU range management, stock optimization, check-out line optimization, and staff management.

The retail analytics provide significant metrics for the supermarket. The data that is collected by using retail analytics can show customer behaviors based on specific areas. It’s easier to give the shopper the most ideal customer journey by setting the design of your supermarket, product layout and promotions depending on the shopper preferences. Moreover, you can count your shoppers, discover the yearly, monthly, weekly, daily and hourly traffic of your supermarket, conversion rate, the optimum size of the shopping cart. Analyzing these data helps you increase your profits and gain loyal customers.

Marketing & Pricing

The retail analytics also helps you to observe the effects of your promotions and increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy by using this data. Additionally, you can analyze the effectiveness of the valuable areas in your store such as; promotion area, gondola, check-point area. You can also determine if your cross-sell products draw as much interest as you wish and increase their efficiency. Nextly, retail analytics helps you make a decision on pricing. It’s easier to observe reactions of the shoppers to changing prices by analyzing the spent time and number of visitors in that area. In supermarkets, there are also rental service areas such as; bakery, butcher, and cheese monger. You can determine the prices of the rental areas in your supermarket considering the densities of the areas. It’s also possible to determine the number of personal and optimize staff management in the rental areas by measuring the number of visitors and service time.

Staff Management  

You can learn about the most visited and most time spent areas in your supermarket. Having a knowledge of the rush hours and the number of visitors in your supermarket helps you to optimize your staff management and personnel shifting to not to lose the interest of your shopper due to long waiting time. Efficient staff management prevents long waiting times especially in cash points to decrease the abandonment rate. Thus, you don’t lose sales opportunities in your supermarket and maximize customer satisfaction.

Checkout Line Optimization

Through monitoring waiting times and densities in the checkout area, store managers are notified instantly and automatically when the number of people in the queue or waiting time exceeds the level. The retail analytics can also give you insight into the preference and efficiency of the usage of the multiple-server queueing system or single server queueing system.

Stock Optimization

The retail analytics also helps the groceries in stock optimization. If you learn about the dead-points and busy areas in your store, you can optimize your store layout and prevent the accumulation of stock.

SKU Range Management

You can also determine the product range by collecting the data about customer behavior. For instance; if there is a wide product range, the shopper may not able to find what she is looking for. You can analyze if the range is too wide by observing spent time in the area.

Store Space Optimization

Heat map technology is a part of retail analytics. You can use heat maps to detect the most visited areas in your supermarket and change the store layout to increase the potential of the dead-ends in your supermarket. Furthermore, you can compare the specific areas between different stores in your supermarket chain. So, you will be able to observe the groceries that have a higher performance and take action to reach the potential sales of the supermarket that have low performance.

Technology solutions are driven by data, and the need for food retailers to use it efficiently to remain in the center of the industry is rapidly increasing. People counting technology helps supermarkets to improve in-store operations. The supermarkets that want to take part in the center should follow the technological trends and start collecting data to increase their profits.

Did you check our business intelligence solution with Heat Mapping Analysis? You can start using Udentify that analyzes the costumers’ behaviors at the brick and mortar shops. Udentify provides local conversion rate, head counting, heat maps, and order analysis. Thanks to the image processing technology, it can follow the customers anonymously, with which it gives meaning to the data that is gathered from the tracking by converting them to statistical models. It enables company managers to take data-oriented decisions by its management interface.

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