After enduring 2 years of the Covid pandemic, the financial status of the world and its citizens is painful, to say the least. Not only are energy prices skyrocketing, but also vegetables, coffee, and tea is getting more and more expensive. You can see the effects of this financial crisis already in people's shopping behavior. Cheaper supermarkets such as the Lidl and the Aldi have seen a rise in their number of clients in the past 3 months and the clients that they already had, have been spending more than they usually would.
During covid times, people would often visit just the one store, to prevent getting sick. Nowadays, they will gladly visit 3 or 4 stores, purely to see where they will get their products cheapest. Specialty stores that grew during covid times are losing revenue now due to inflation. Ultimately, consumers are going to face an enormous challenge this year and this will be reflected in the spending behavior within the retail.
So when the retail thought that they were ready to battle the world again after the pandemic, here comes the next curveball! But let's brighten up the mood a bit and talk about something that makes you happy. And, I don't know about you but something that makes me very happy is looking at the current weather forecast. Sunshine is on its way people!
And with the sun coming out again, our winter jackets are slowly but surely making their way back to the wardrobe for their summer hibernation. Different weather also brings different clothes. Often during bank holidays such as Easter or Ascension-day, people like to enjoy their extra-long weekends by booking a little city trip and cities equal shopping!
Shops want to attract as many people as possible on these weekends, so they often launch promotions and sales to lure them into the store calling it an Easter special or Black Friday weekend sale. Hosting such events and promotions takes time and calculated precision. You need to think about what items you do and don’t want to add to the promotion. To make this part of merchandise management easier for you, Chainbalance has upgraded the Event planning feature in Smart Supply to simplify this process. So how does it work?
Get ready for the super sale
Planning events is an essential aspect of increasing your turnover and attracting new customers. To simplify the planning and in particular to merge the experience of the team with intelligent algorithms, Chainbalance offers an Event Planning Tool.
Before you can start planning an event you first need to think about practical settings such as which stores are included when events take place, and of course which items you want to add. Some bank holidays are religious and not all countries share the same religion so taking the time to think about which stores are and aren’t included in a particular event is important.
Secondly, it is important to think about which items you want to include in the event. If you have fashion items that have just launched, you probably don’t want to add these to your sale. Fashion items usually don’t go on sale until the end of the season nears or they just run out of items to sell and just don’t produce anymore.
You can make this decision with just a few clicks in the Event Planning Tool. If there are reference times, we can also include this information in the process. Based on the parameters for the event, the POS, the products, and the number of products for the event, we decide on the optimal allocation for all POS, by option, color, and size (SKU). This not only saves time but opens hidden sales potential that could be overlooked in the mass of POS, products, and dynamics in demand.
So you can plan and schedule your events well in advance, share them with your colleagues and initiate everything with Chainbalance.
Cleaning out your DC
Even after a sale period, a sale might linger on for a few more days or weeks. For example, Black Friday is not only the Friday but often the whole weekend including Monday (Cyber Monday). You have a few days to run your event and even after that, you can still sell final items at a reduced price. The End Push will help you to allocate the last bits and pieces available in your DC to your stores intelligently. Like the event plan, you can choose which stores you include and which articles you would like to include in your end push.
Nobody knows when the world will settle again. It might take a few months, years, or even never return to how it was before the inflation rise and covid times. All retail can do, is think in the here and now and cleverly use the data provided. Investing in technologies that will help you achieve more in less time is exactly what a retailer and brand need in times where dynamic demand is influenced by so many different worldly aspects.
You might have missed the Easter sale through the event plan, but more bank holidays including extra-long weekends are around the corner. Plan your demo now and be ready to start using the event plan