Retail Analytics .
“The noblest pleasure
is the joy
of understanding”
- Leonardo Da Vinci, 16th Century Polymath
The problem at a glance
How can data help you to increase sales and customers?
The Profile
More and more retail businesses are becoming data-centric and that is the way to go if you are yearning to succeed in this competitive environment. To increase your sales, drive more customers into your stores, record higher profits along with customer satisfaction, you should rely on retail business intelligence rather than guesswork.
With retail data analytics, you can draw actionable intelligence from every aspect of a business from sales to customer behaviour; these include, but are not limited to:
- Point of Sale systems (POS)
- Cash Recycling machines
- Customer self-service machines (KIOSKS and self-checkout machines)
- Customer loyalty programs
- Website
- IoT devices (temperature controllers, fridges, coolers, people counters, cameras, and many more)
The Challenge
Despite having access to such large volumes of data, retailers are unable to leverage this tremendous advantage. The reasons behind this could be lack of time, the indecision in knowing which reports to generate and which area of the data to work on. The presence of whopping data could be overwhelming, rendering the retailers unable to ingest all the data.
Even if they did manage to make a report, it would be cluttered with too much data. Thus, retailers would not know how to interpret the data from full reports. Therefore, they wouldn’t know what actions to take from the data their business accumulates.
All these snags stem from the fact that retail produces data in silos and the reports are specific to the data from each system.
Outsourcing the data management to an ordinary third-party provider could help to some extent, but still, it will not help you unlock the full potential of your data. The reports generated on loyalty systems or websites and social medias by such services are seldom real-time.
In most cases, the retailer would not possess the bandwidth to correlate the data generated in different silos, even though it is related. Assigning an employee to monitor this data could incur more expenditure and precious time for your business. Eventually, you end up squandering your business’ data gold mine.
The Solution
Site Lantern in-store analytics services can help you make headway in customer experience and operational performance. We collect data from all the disparate systems within a retail environment and consolidate them into a single data store from which you can derive valuable insights into sales, customers spending habits, customer engagement and much more.
Here’s an instance where Site Lantern’s data-driven efforts helped a business to record better sales and performance. Our retail data analytics was deployed by an Australian Retail chain with 250 stores across the country. Their requirement was to collect all the sales transaction data from their Point Of Sale System (POS) and report on the following aspects:
- Sales
- Profitability
- Sales trends
- Supplier market share
- Product range within various stores
- Provide suppliers with market share info
One of the key drivers for this product was that they wanted to provide their suppliers with information on the market share they had over their competitors in various sales regions. The solution was to deploy a Site Lantern data collector within their environment to collect all the Point Of Sales data, which included the following fields:
- Date of transaction
- Product category (5 levels)
- Product cost price
- Product sale price
- Product code (allowed us to get details on supplier)
- Customer loyalty card details (allowed us to get details on the customer)
- Teller id
- Store id
It took us just 2 weeks to integrate all Point Of Sale data from 250 stores into Site Lantern retail business intelligence system and provide them with the information and insights they needed to meet all their reporting requirements and beyond.
The Result
The following are a sample of sales reports we were able to furnish with our exemplary business intelligence in the retail industry.
- Average Sales per Day
- Branch Sales
- Bottom 20 Customers by Net Value
- Bottom 20 Suppliers by Net Value
- Bottom 5 Categories by Net Value
- Top 20 Customers by Net Value
- Top 20 Suppliers by Net Value
- Top 5 Categories by Net Value
With Site Lantern retail analytics, you receive a single source of truth about your customers, their interaction with your brand, their buying preferences which in turn will help you to optimize your supply chain and maximize the revenue.
