Retail Analytics
A single source of truth about your customers, your products and your suppliers.
“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding”Leonardo da Vinci, 16th-century polymath
The problem at a glance
How can data help you increase sales and customers?
The Profile
More and more retail businesses are becoming data-centric, and that is the way to go if you want to succeed in a competitive environment. To increase sales, drive more customers into your stores, and record higher profits along with customer satisfaction, you should rely on retail business intelligence rather than guesswork.
With retail data analytics you can draw actionable intelligence from every aspect of the business, from sales to customer behaviour. Sources include, but are not limited to:
- Point-of-sale (POS) systems
- Cash recycling machines
- Customer self-service machines (kiosks and self-checkouts)
- Customer loyalty programmes
- Website
- IoT devices (temperature controllers, fridges, coolers, people counters, cameras and many more)
The Challenge
Despite having access to such large volumes of data, retailers are often unable to leverage this tremendous advantage. The reasons may be lack of time, or indecision about which reports to generate and which area of the data to work on. The sheer volume can be overwhelming, leaving retailers unable to digest it all.
Even when a report is produced, it is often cluttered with too much data, so retailers do not know how to interpret it or what actions to take. All these snags stem from the fact that retail produces data in silos, and the reports are specific to the data from each system.
Outsourcing data management to an ordinary third-party provider can help to some extent, but it will not unlock the full potential of your data: the reports generated on loyalty systems, websites and social media by such services are seldom real-time. In most cases the retailer does not have the bandwidth to correlate the data generated in different silos, even though it is related. Assigning an employee to monitor this data costs more money and precious time. Eventually, you end up squandering your business’s data gold mine.
The Solution
Site Lantern in-store analytics helps you make headway in customer experience and operational performance. We collect data from all the disparate systems within a retail environment and consolidate them into a single data store, from which you can derive valuable insight into sales, customer spending habits, customer engagement and much more.
Here is an instance where Site Lantern’s data-driven efforts helped a business record better sales and performance. Our retail data analytics was deployed by an Australian retail chain with 250 stores across the country. Their requirement was to collect all sales transaction data from their point-of-sale system and report on:
- Sales
- Profitability
- Sales trends
- Supplier market share
- Product range within various stores
- Market share information for suppliers
A key driver for this project was that the retailer wanted to give its suppliers information on the market share they held over their competitors in various sales regions. The solution was to deploy a Site Lantern data collector within their environment to collect all point-of-sale data, including:
- Date of transaction
- Product category (5 levels)
- Product cost price
- Product sale price
- Product code (giving us details on the supplier)
- Customer loyalty card details (giving us details on the customer)
- Teller ID
- Store ID
It took us just two weeks to integrate all point-of-sale data from 250 stores into the Site Lantern retail business intelligence system and provide the information and insights they needed to meet all their reporting requirements and beyond.
The Result
The following are a sample of the sales reports we were able to furnish with our business intelligence for the retail industry:
- Average sales per day
- Branch sales
- Bottom 20 customers by net value
- Bottom 20 suppliers by net value
- Bottom 5 categories by net value
- Top 20 customers by net value
- Top 20 suppliers by net value
- Top 5 categories by net value
With Site Lantern retail analytics you receive a single source of truth about your customers, their interaction with your brand and their buying preferences, which in turn helps you optimise your supply chain and maximise revenue.
Want to see this working for your business?
Tell us about your data and your goals. We will show you what Site Lantern can do with them.