Increase Sales with Purposeful Analytics On Sales Receipts
The sales receipt is a neatly itemized list of purchases. Every purchase comes with a specific need, and hence the sales receipt is the true voice of the customer. As demand patterns change, the sales receipt data can reveal tremendous intelligence on what customers are buying, the changing trends and what the future purchases will be. “Stores Face New Kind of Shopper” is a very interesting article by Ann Zimmerman and Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal (Monday, December 28th 2009).
The financial crisis has dramatically impacted sales in all markets. Over the last two years sales have plummeted, consumers have disappeared and profits have evaporated. The financial crisis has caught us in a time of tremendous over capacity. In the B2B markets, companies have been dramatically shrinking capacity to match the new level of demand. In B2C markets, retail experts generally believe that the US now has more stores than consumer demand can support.
Customer buying patterns are dramatically changing as capacity adjusts to the new level of demand. The financial downturn further impacts this change, as customers look for new ways to stretch their money. To complicate things further, customers today have many choices of products, channels and price point. The internet has become a primary source for browsing and comparison shopping. This extends the reach of the customers, and puts pressure on companies to cater to wider product choice selection. As these shifts continue to change buying behavior, companies must have the capabilities to stay ahead of the changes. With the speed of change in products, companies need to adapt fast and stay in tune with changing demand.
The good news is that the sales receipts reveal these changing trends and buying patterns. However, this requires purposeful analytics designed to convert sales data into actionable tasks. I would also like to mention that sales data has a unique structure and characteristics. The purpose of the analytics is to reverse engineer the sales data to determine what is selling. If your product has a lot of feature choices, you can get insight into the popular choice combinations. If you sell lots of individual items (i.e. large number of SKU’s), you can get insight into what are items that are commonly grouped together. Emcien offers analytics designed for sales data. Emcien’s advanced analytics cal also give you intelligence into what choices cause the selection of other choices. Armed with this insight, you can manage your product offering to always stay ahead of the trends.
With purposeful analytics designed for sales data, you can get insight into -
- What product choice combinations are popular?
- How do the choice combinations vary by channel?
- What choice combinations are profitable?
- What are the changing trends and what choices will sell in the future?
As the market shift continues, this level of demand intelligence is mandatory to stay profitable!
5 Comments
The importance of Analytics and how they apply to you business was recently highlighted in Gartner’s list of 2010 top initiatives where Analytics ranked as number 2. Understanding the relationship of products sold together in a market basket is critical to effective merchandising. Being able to link the market baskets back to customer segments (who is buying what) is critical for effective marketing.
It’s All About Analytics
Thanks for your comments.
You are absolutely right that understanding what products are bought together is critical for effective marketing, serving the customer and staying competitive.
A earlier Emcien blog article highlighted the Gartner 2010 ranking of initiative.
http://blog.emcien.com/2009/12/gartner-cloud-computing-analytics-top-2010-strategic-tech-list/
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Nice post! That was very informative. The sales receipt is a neatly itemized list of purchases. Every purchase comes with a specific need, and hence the sales receipt is the true voice of the customer. As demand patterns change, the sales receipt data can reveal tremendous intelligence on what customers are buying, the changing trends and what the future purchases will be.