Retail Technology Tip #5 From Storis: Make Buying Decisions in a Fraction of the Time
Furniture World News Desk on
3/14/2016
by STORIS
Your business’ revenue potential and profitability are only as good as your merchandising strategy. Let’s face it, if you buy the wrong products a lot can go wrong! Strong merchandisers know their business’ KPI inside and out and plan strategically to purchase the best assortment.
Software can help buyers identify the information they need easily by using buying tools. Every day, a business’ software collects valuable information about customers, products, and selling trends. Reporting capabilities can help illuminate new insights into merchandising and sales. In fact, using software-based buying tools can shave up to 6 hours off of the merchandise planning process each week! Here are some of our favorite buying reports found in STORIS and how having similar insights can help your business.
- Merchandising Activity Overview: A Merchandising Overview report contains data on a specific product including related costing and pricing, history of its written sales, and all related purchase orders. STORIS provides all of this consolidated data in an overview report. This report is useful for buyers, inventory managers and executives to review a product’s overall impact on the lineup.
- Eighty Twenty Analysis: The 80/20 Rule states that 80% of sales are generated by 20% of products. In STORIS, this calculation is determined using current inventory, purchasing, sales information, revenue dollars, and GMROI. The 80/20 analysis reports on the top tier products to help buyers determine best sellers, revenue generators, and weak links. This helps buyers make strategic decisions on what to buy based on what is performing.
- Average Value of a Sales Order: This type of report is used to generate the average merchandise subtotal per sales order, as well as the average selling price per piece for both written and delivered sales. It gives great insight on pricing strategy by monitoring which price points are attractive to your market. This knowledge can help you eliminate product from your stock that is outside of that preferred range and negatively impacting your margins.
- Slow Moving Merchandise: Turning ratios help buyers to manage their cash flow and open-to-buy dollars. A Slow Movers report identifies products that are moving too slowly or not at all, which negatively impacts your turning ratio. A benefit of using this report is to decide on a markdown strategy to increase sell-through rates, and decide what items to remove from your lineup altogether.
- Vale of Inventory: It is important to consistently keep track of inventory quantities, values by location, and overall inventory valuation for your company. Having this data in real-time helps buyers to reconcile their purchasing with accounting and inventory managers. The Value of Inventory report wraps up important buying activity to provide a complete overview of your inventory assets.
These are just some of the many buying reports that can help merchandisers attain insight into their business. Having access to real-time information through software can save substantial research time and help buyers to make the most optimal buying decisions. For more information on STORIS’ Buying and Merchandising solutions, visit
https://www.storis.com/buying-merchandising/.
More about STORIS: Founded in 1989, STORIS continues to be the leading provider of Retail Software Solutions and Services to Big Ticket retailers of ALL sizes. Over 350 Clients utilize STORIS’ single ERP solution including point of sale, mobile processing, supply chain management, customer care, accounting, ecommerce solutions, business intelligence and more.
For more information of STORIS’ new EMV certified Credit Card Processing integration or any questions on the EMV liability changes, contact 1.888.4.STORIS or leave a message at
https://www.storis.com/contact/
Technology Tips From Storis
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