In brick-and-mortar retail stores, the in-store customer experience is all-encompassing and directly affects your performance. As a result, it is the prime responsibility of the retail merchandising teams to ensure a seamless flow right from entering to finding what you want and checking out.
To meticulously plan the store layout for enhancing the consumer experience, a detailed drawing known as a planogram is pivotal. With the right retail planogram software, this process becomes far more efficient, swift, and accurate.
Let us understand the various benefits of investing in planogram automation for your retail business:
Retail merchandising involves displaying the right products in the right aisle or segment to capture the customer’s attention. Understanding the customer’s in-store journey, navigation possibilities, and purchase preferences is critical in this process. With regular retail audit and planogram analysis, you can identify the high-traffic and highest-converting segments of the store. Placing high-margin products in these aisles will ensure higher profitability.
Before the inception of this software, retail merchandisers had to draw store layout plans manually. Needless to state, the process was tedious, error-prone, and extremely lengthy. Every second is precious to turn around the store for a festive display or an end-of-season sale the next day. You cannot rely on a manual planogram in such critical situations. Automated planograms enable swift display turnarounds and are easy to edit as per last-minute directives or new merchandise arrivals.
Retail store space is one of the most extensive investments that retail store owners make. In addition, there are many limitations in a manual planogram, scaling being a major one. Digitally designing a planogram gives you an upper hand at visual merchandising and justifying the utilization of the shop floor. Only with the right retail planogram software, it is possible to plan the following details meticulously:
Planogram automation is a big step towards the digitization of retail businesses. In conjunction with the right retail management system, it is possible to share automated planograms with stores across multiple locations digitally. If there is any deviance for a particular store, the required modification can be communicated and approved quickly. It improves the scalability for big retail chains, saves time, optimizes person-hours, and of course, eliminates unnecessary paperwork.
AI-driven technology is taking the retail industry by the storm, with Virtual Store Assistants, VR/AR shopping, and Intuitive POS Systems. Not just the top retail large-format stores, but even luxury boutiques and single-format stores are relying on planogram automation today. With processes like retail audit, inventory optimization, and CRM being automated, it is high time that manual planograms are discarded. Soon, implementing planogram automation will not remain a choice but a ‘shape up or ship out’ situation for retailers.
Planogram automation solutions will continue to come up with newer and more innovative ways to simplify shop-floor tasks, help retailers take inventory and improve the overall retail experience. In addition to this, these solutions will also help retailers make their planograms in an insanely short amount of time. This trend is expected to keep up in the year ahead too – and not just in luxury boutiques and single-format stores, but every large-format store as well.
