Inventory Management

Any company’s long-term success depends in part on its ability to perform quality product-level profit analysis and accurate demand and inventory planning. Your product marketing, merchandise planning and inventory planning functions can all benefit from detailed square-inch analysis. So, regardless of the primary purpose of your catalog, you’ll be best served if you have the tools and processes in place to capture and report your product-level advertising exposure and expense.

Barneys New York Chief Executive Mark Lee says Prada is no longer selling any new goods at Barneys (except shoes and menswear) in what he said was fallout over pricing and inventory control.

It all started with a click. Or was it a call? Or could it have been that direct mail piece? In a world with seemingly endless customer touchpoints, if you don't know what's driving your customers to your business, you're not alone.

Retailers have a paradoxical love-hate relationship with their peak season. For most, peak volumes coincide with fourth quarter holiday shopping, when it's not uncommon for 80 percent of the year's orders to come in at once. Scaling a retail operation to process five times its average order capacity is no small feat. For two months of the year, many retailers nearly break their backs to accommodate the seasonal business that will help sustain them through the other ten months. If last year's fourth quarter pushed your business to the brink, now is the time to learn how to build a better inventory plan for 2011.

Coach Inc. plans to gradually move some production out of China, where labor costs are rising, and into lower-cost countries such as India and Vietnam. But China is proving a boon to Coach's sales, as residents that have become more affluent buy the retailer's status-symbol bags.

While after-Christmas buying was tempered in the Washington-area due to the threat of foul weather, shoppers across the rest of the country got right to it, returning unwanted gifts and scoping out bargains in the aftermath of what appears to have been the best holiday season for retailers since 2007, The Washington Post...

Over the last 30 years, there's been a consistent push to streamline business processes. After all, time is money. Nowhere is this more applicable than in supply chain processes.

A study of returns policies at 88 U.S. retailers, including big names such as Target, Best Buy and Sears, found that over half don't put their returns policy on their website's home page, and one-quarter still do not allow cross-channel returns.

U.S. retailers can expect more people to try to return stolen merchandise this holiday season, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) report released Tuesday. The NRF predicts that the cost of those fraudulent returns will reach $3.68 billion during the holiday season, a 34% jump from the $2.74 billion cost last year.

Direct retailing has always been about adapting new media to market from a distance. Whether the medium is door-to-door selling, newspaper and magazine advertisements, mail order fliers, 300-page catalogs, specialty catalogs, infomercials, or e-commerce, direct retailing has always been about selling products to consumers from a distance. The format of the message and the speed of communications certainly change, but the fundamental process of selling products to consumers remains.