Marketing & Merchandising
Shopping Cart Abandonment, A Consumer’s Advantage?
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine discussing the opportunities of shopping on the Internet. Okay, in reality we were discussing how the economy has affected consumer buying patterns and what we were really after is finding the best bargains. My friend shared with me something that I had not heard of [...]
Analyzing Your Company’s Marketing ROI – 5 Problems Revealed
Recently a few of us at our firm set out to develop a sophisticated marketing business intelligence module with our partner company Taurus Software. In order to do this we decided we would meet with as many multi channel companies from $10 million in sales to $100 million in sales as possible, as well as [...]
Understanding Your Demand Winners
Almost every company that we work with can easily rattle off and name the top 10-20 products with the highest gross sales, or demand winners. But often times these same companies couldn’t tell us which of those items are profit winners. The first guess is usually those core items that they never want to be [...]
What Is Your Inventory Strategy For Christmas 2009?
A few years ago I was in Australia in July and saw a lot of retailers advertising specials for “Christmas in July”; a novel idea as it is winter in the southern hemisphere at this time. Well I have started seeing ads for layaways from Kmart and Hallmark debuting their Christmas ornament collection. U.S. retailers [...]
Internal Scorecards for Merchants and Inventory Buyers
Every day, companies evaluate a merchandise vendor’s performance against goals and their worth to the company through a vendor scorecard, such as:
§ How many backorders were caused by the vendor?
§ What are the gross sales for the vendor?
§ How many RTV’s or defective products for the vendor?
§ How many early deliveries and late deliveries for [...]
Merchandising and cost of backorders
The other day we worked with a mid-sized gift marketer to have them analyze their Spring book and web campaigns from a price range perspective. They had never done this and were surprised to find that 39% of their SKU’s were $25 and under – the average price point in this group was actually $11.15. [...]
Inventory turns and age of inventory
In working with a client the other day, we were analyzing several inventory KPI’s. Their goal was to turn the inventory at least 4 times annually, up from the 3.15 turns they are doing today. We then talked about how long they carried inventory before they deemed it to be “aged” or beginning to get [...]
BI systems across the enterprise
The most serious business information problem companies face is finding a “single version of the truth.” Many companies are installing best-of-breed systems for order management, fulfillment, call center, marketing, product information, inventory, finance and e-commerce.
Yet no one vendor in the marketplace today can provide more than two of the best-of-breed components needed. Even most ERP [...]
“SORRY FOR THE DELAY – THANK YOU FOR WAITING”
I just had a pleasant experience with a back order from L.L. Bean. How can you have a good experience with something that’s been on backorder for 6 weeks? Well let me tell how.
First the background. On April 1st, I ordered 5 pairs of chino pants and 1 was on backorder. The CSR told me [...]
Ways to Save Money
The following is a brief email that we received from one of our eNewsletter readers, in response to an article we wrote about saving money in your company…
Curt:
Just received your electronic May newsletter and wanted to send you some ways we are saving money.
Cut utility usage
Drop non productive associates
Reduce fulfillment goals from 92% to 85%
Keep [...]
