Businesses around the globe have heard buying is a science. NuORDER's CEO, Health Wells, says there's another major factor to consider. “The reality is: there’s an art piece to this,” he said at the Global Department Store Summit (GDSS).
GDSS, an industry-forward discussion platform for departmental stores, featured industry leaders in its 2022 event to discuss the future of retail buying.
Health Wells spoke about the problems in retail and how Assortments can help create an effective and efficient process. Here are his key takeaways from the event.
To watch his full speaker session, Transforming Retail Buying, Item Setup & Attribution, click the link below.
Problems In Retail
In retail, efficiency’s biggest enemy is busy work. According to a McKinsey report, ⅔ of a buyer’s time is spent doing busy work. The remaining time that they have to get actual work done isn’t maximized for efficiency either. There are two reasons for this:
- Departmental stores (even mega-departmental stores) operate their buying process on spreadsheets.
- Buyers don’t have the tools to visualize the process of buying.
Efficiency aside, these two reasons can create a host of problems, such as teams not getting to collaborate on the buying process (especially true with remote work), management not knowing what products they’ve shopped for until it reaches the warehouses, and an excessive amount of overbuying.
Although in itself these problems sound manageable, they can truly wreak havoc. Take the case of overbuying alone — a little overbuying here and there, when computed together, can cost you millions of dollars.
How AssortmentS Can Help
It might sound like it's doomsday out there, but there’s a solution to all of this. And the solution is Assortments because it helps:
1. Visualize The Buy
Brands need to decide on an entry, mid, and high price point. You might never get an entry-price customer in your store if you don’t have entry-price products. Assortments have two major advantages: they help you understand where you’re overbuying, and identify whitespace opportunities. This alone cuts down overbuying and improves sales.
2. Pick The Right Products
Assortments work like an environment, which can be filtered by inventories, budget, data points, and stores. For example, NuORDER has a database of over 500,000 retailers. All these retailers have their catalogs in a digitized format so they can be examined and shared with teams.
3. Optimize Assortments
Buyers shop worldwide but hardly have data points to make the comparison. With assortments, all the data is available to you to cross-compare. More importantly, team leaders also know where their buyers are shopping from.
4. Make The Buying Process Efficient
Your process becomes efficient because you don’t need to hire people to expand the assortment. And because your team is not working on a spreadsheet, and on a tool that helps them visualize the buy, they make better buying decisions.
Go Back To Basics
Buying is both an art and a science. And with the right tools, buyers can accomplish more effective and efficient buys. If you’re interested in learning how Assortments might be the right tool, click here.
