One critical factor to achieving success in retail is understanding consumer behavior. Every day, the average consumer makes tens of thousands of decisions, driven in part by habits, impulses and even laziness. When pushed beyond the threshold, decision paralysis is induced — the paradox of choice. In retail, a proliferation of products within categories is…
Kevin Sterneckert
Today’s merchandise management teams simply cannot keep up with the demands of modern retail. Too many stores (both digital and physical), store plans and products — each with unique characteristics — leave no room to make quick adjustments as shoppers’ tastes continue to rapidly change. With a plethora of information, opportunities and competitors in the…
No retailer deliberately sets out to complicate the lives and shopping experiences of its customers. In fact, headlines point to ways the industry is doing the opposite, adding convenient fulfillment options or altering store formats to accommodate quicker in-and-out trips. However, if as many as 17 percent of items in a category are duplicative in…
Amazon has created significant turbulence in retail over the past 10 years. Most scoffed at the business case of buying books a better way, but no one is laughing now that Amazon has created a better way to buy just about everything. How can retailers win with so much disruption and uncertainty? The answer, strangely enough, can be found in Formula 1 racing. The key to winning is understanding the external conditions and tuning the engine and air foils to maximize performance.
The numbers are mind-boggling: a new research report from retail analyst firm IHL Group, sponsored by OrderDynamics, points out that retailers worldwide lose $1.75 trillion (that’s trillion, not billion) annually in revenue opportunities due to the combined costs of overstocks, out-of-stocks and sales returns. It’s a phenomenon that IHL and OrderDynamics call the “Ghost Economy,”…
