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Mobilize the store on Cloud

March 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Now that the retail industry is safely past the 2015 predictions and hype, let’s see what enterprise retailers and SMBs are investing to better sales and customer service. Enabling more payment options and integrating EMV before the deadline is the top priority among retailers. The Cloud has never been so sought-after, and the number of retailers migrating to it is only going to rise.

Then, integrated loyalty is one aspect that retailers are seriously investing in. Mobile POS, integrated retailing and better loyalty benefits are points that a retailer can benefit the customer with, and mine valuable customer data alongside.
The thrust is also on to bring technology to the floor for empowerment of Shop-Floor Employee. Along with back-office improvements and Cloud integration, the Mobile POS enabled employee is expected to work as queue-busters, better upsells and an overall enhanced retail experience. In short, 2015 will see the employee becoming the real face of the retail chain.

Mobilize the store on Cloud_Infographics

Filed Under: Blog, Multi channel retail Tagged With: , , ,

The multichannel movement’s arriving fast: is your business ready?

March 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Multichannel

If this month’s Apple Watch launch underlined anything about today’s consumers it’s that they love technology.

Wherever you look, people are blending their online and offline experiences using connected devices – and this is changing the game for the retail sector.

The multichannel movement has created new challenges and opportunities for retailers wanting to capture customer value at every touch point, particularly online.

Over the past 12 months, the enormous increase in mobile retail has led to eCommerce’s importance soaring. Already Multichannelwe’re seeing promotional events such as Black Friday become a global retail phenomenon. In fact, according to a recent report by Dunnhumby, 20% of total growth in established markets will come from online shopping in the next 5 years.

However, it’s important to remember that online shopping is only half the story. There are very few consumers who shop exclusively through the internet. Whether the final sale is attributed to eCommerce or the store, it is likely that the buyer has interacted with the retailer across both channels, using multiple devices, on their journey to purchase.

What does this multichannel movement mean for retailers?

Most importantly, the rise of multichannel has created a compulsion to offer consumers a seamless journey however they shop. Desktop, mobile and store shopping can no longer be treated as separate entities; they are part of the same customer journey, and therefore a common brand identity and product availability must exist throughout.

For retailer eCommerce platforms in particular, this means optimising websites for use on all devices. The importance of responsive content will increase further next month when Google updates its search engine criteria to prioritise mobile optimised websites – highlighting that consumers must be able to find and view content easily, and purchase quickly, even on small screen.

It also means that the digital journey must be firmly integrated with offline activities. One of the greatest challenges for today’s retailers is integrating bricks and mortar into the multichannel experience.

More often than not, shoppers enter a store with some level of knowledge from online research. This last point in the journey involves seeing and trying the item at the shelf edge, and asking final, detailed questions that perhaps can’t be addressed online.

Equipping customer service personnel with Mobile POS technology linked to back-end systems provides access to this depth of knowledge. It also enables staff to pull up recent orders or abandoned purchases, to continue shoppers’ online journeys in the store.

How can retailers best serve multichannel shoppers?

There’s no doubting that multichannel shopping is a complicated world, with many technology solutions available to address these complexities. The key for retailers is to implement systems that enable them to flexibly serve and customise experiences for shoppers in all channels.

Good news is on the horizon for those that achieve this agility – as the Dunnhumby report notes, multichannel customers are worth 30-67% more on average than those who shop in a single channel. It seems the multichannel movement is packed with shoppers who are hard to negotiate to the checkout, but who reward great experiences richly once they get there.

Filed Under: Multi channel retail Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Cloud-powered retailing in 2015

March 19, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Retail Insights

In this month’s issue of CitiXsys Retail Insights, we’ve taken up how multichannel retail solutions powered by the Cloud Retail-Insightsreinvent store operations and scalability. Read on about ideal ways of customer engagement and the substantial role of Cloud-based Mobile POS in delivering customer satisfaction.

The cover story talks about what the Average Joe wants from a retailer, and how can the latter use multichannel retail solutions to deliver and create a lasting, positive brand image. Whether it is in-store or online engagement, the modern retailer needs to be there for the customer.

Download the magazine to read more articles on technology transforming the retail landscape for the store customer with the Mobile POS-assisted clerk, Cloud- Easing scalability of retail operations and valued CitiXsys channel partners.

Filed Under: Retail Trends Tagged With: , , ,

Merchandise Hierarchy in the age of Cloud

March 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Merchandise Hierarchy in the age of Cloud

Traditionally in retail, merchandising refers to the selection of products a retailer has available for sale and how those products are displayed in-store. And with retailers aspiring to cater to the modern customer, merchandise hierarchy is an essential element in any modern enterprise retail management software.

Every retail organisation, regardless of its size, has a merchandise hierarchy for all the goods. A merchandise hierarchy is a reporting structure under which sales and inventories of products are tracked and managed. Essentially, categorisation of products is the primary function of the enterprise retail solution’s merchandise hierarchy. As common misconceptions go, it is NOT intended to describe a product or classify organisational, production or design elements.

And with retailers eying Cloud applications for management solutions, merchandise hierarchy is one of the servicesMerchandise Hierarchy that can be powered to give even more freedom and agility for the store.

A retail merchandise hierarchy can have flexible or multiple levels, with the highest level providing an overall enterprise view. Then, subsequent hierarchies narrow down the family or class of the product. It provides a common language and consistent codes at each hierarchical level, and ensures that the retailer’s merchandise resides systematically in one place and is grouped based on similar form, format and purpose. And when that place is the Cloud, it lends agility and savings for the retailer.

With an effective, Cloud-based automated merchandise hierarchy in an Enterprise Class Retail management solution, users can:

  • Define multiple merchandise hierarchies in the system, and have it ‘trickle’ down to all the stores automatically
  • Attach more than one merchandise hierarchy to individual products
  • Top-down reporting at all merchandise hierarchy levels; thereby saving man-hours and leading to effective resource management
  • Hierarchical classification of products allows customisation of reports and evaluation, to address specific needs of retail businesses or the overall enterprise.

Advantage: Retailer

By incorporating automated merchandise hierarchy, a retailer benefits through better visibility and performance, understanding of customer demands, and more effective merchandise and sales planning. The main advantage of merchandise hierarchy is that it lend to well-calibrated sales forecasting. With careful planning and analytics, retailers can get to know which are fast-moving consumer goods, and avert ‘stock-outs’. Conversely, it also allows the retailer to know which are slow-moving goods, and reduce inventory to save time, space and money. With the top-down reporting, it becomes even easier for the retailer to get actionable insights.

Also, merchandise hierarchy, along with data insights, can reveal which item sells with what, so that the items can be ‘bundled’ to give greater value to the customers, while increasing the basket size for the retailer. In the end, it’s a win-win situation for both the customer and the retailer.

A retailer with well-structured merchandise classification has a complete view of products across multiple levels and is able to drill down and analyse data in a variety of ways suitable to their specific business requirements. And with Cloud agility, a retailer is not bound by any infrastructural hindrance of traditional IT set-ups as it lends a unified view of merchandise operations.

The benefits are also reflected in better integration with supply chain partners, and improved coordination between retail planning and production, which in turn leads to a reduction in production costs and inventory requirements.

With Merchandise Hierarchy, a retailer gets:

  • Deep insights into historical merchandise performance
  • Forecasted projection of future merchandise performance
  • With flexible or multiple merchandise hierarchy, a retailer can take advantage of seasonal sales, trends, festivals and the like.

Merchandise Hierarchy enables retailers to boost sales, increase margins and reduce inventory costs by improving performance and efficiency of their allocation, store-replenishment planning, and buying functions. iVend Retail on Cloud helps its clients achieve success through its integrated suite for merchandising hierarchy, assortment, store planning, and replenishment applications.

iVend’s integrated merchandise management also provides retailers with accurate information from purchase to payment. iVend Retail on Cloud from CitiXsys Inc, accomplishes everything that a flexible merchandise hierarchy system requires it to do and, as a true multichannel-ready Cloud application suite, addresses all retail touch-points such as front-end POS operations, inventory, merchandise hierarchy, customer loyalty, data and analytics, eCommerce/ mCommerce, and reports, in one suite of applications.

Filed Under: Blog, Merchandize Hierarchy Tagged With: , , ,