Improve In-Store Product Assortment

Business Problem

The classic story many people have heard about how retailers maximize their revenue through smart product assortment is by placing the most popular products at the back of the store so that customers walking in will also view other less popular products. This happens during everyone’s trip to the grocery store trying to find milk and it also happens when Longchamp customers walk into their luxury retail outlets trying to find their renowned Le Pliage Tote Bag. However, while retailers frequently experiment with how different product assortments impact overall revenue and the hotspots within a store, there are limitations to existing solutions as they don’t help retailers infer which products are likely to be desired or undesired in the future. Showcasing products that will perform poorly in the future not only results in high holding and inventory costs but also leads to opportunity losses in missing out on the chance to stock more profitable products.

Intelligent Solution

AI helps you optimize your range of in-store product assortments by predicting the revenue each SKU will generate within a time period into the future. In understanding which products will perform poorly, your merchandisers will have forward looking information on products that would be better removed or replaced. AI makes these predictions by finding complex relationships in large amounts of data.

Removing products predicted to perform poorly will leave a more targeted assortment that is tailored to the desires of your customers, simultaneously also reducing expenses related to holding slow moving inventory. Depending on the availability of data, the predictions can be generated separately across the SKUs of each store, enabling your merchandisers to take a unique approach to optimizing the assortment of their products.