By Multidev Technologies · PUBLISHED February 28,
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Product management is one of the most important operational concerns in retail. If you don&#;t manage your inventory effectively, you risk having tons of shrinkage and losses, which consumes your profits, spending countless hours searching for your products, and wasting time and resources on other activities that negatively impact your bottom line. Effective product management is critical to retail profitability. You need to follow some product management best practices to achieve your goal.
Here are 10 product management best practices that agile retailers can follow and manage their products:
1. Analyze the Market
Profitable stores have well-planned retail marketing strategies and campaigns that promote products in a targeted manner. This requires extensive research not only on the item itself but also on the market and competitors.
A thorough study listing the strengths and weaknesses of your product plays an important role in knowing the sustainability of the product. Therefore, it is imperative to use the best product management services to get maximum returns. As retailers are the last phase of the supply chain, they interact directly with customers and are responsible for providing impactful promotions and desired products. While product-market fit is essential for rapid adoption and growth, a complete understanding of the business is equally important for long-term product success.
2. Identifying true customer behavior and needs
Never ask customers what they want; observe what they need. Capture new ideas through customer feedback or internal channels such as support or sales. But be careful not to iterate with all the feedback that reaches you. While customers can often describe the pain they are experiencing, they may not be able to articulate the solution.
Product telemetry, the amount of time a user spends on a certain product page, can be a vital source for understanding how customers interact with a product. Without observing actual customer behavior, product managers may pursue faulty assumptions and ultimately create products that don&#;t really solve customer problems.
3. Monitor price changes
How you price each product determines how many units you will sell, which will determine your level of profitability on those items. Large retailers have enough challenges with payroll, managing multiple vendors, and operations. One area of operations over which you have much more control than you think is price changes.
With the right tools, you can continuously monitor sales prices, special offers, discounts, and promotions and keep your ever-changing prices under control. With ChainDrive, price management is easier, more versatile, and more efficient across the chain.
4. Categorize your merchandise properly
An effective product management solution allows you to define your product categories and place each product in the right category for easy organization and access. You can establish your own attributes for your products. After all, every retail business is different.
5. Strategic Product Management
A significant portion of the retail industry is unorganized and needs strategic product management to meet consumer demands in the right way. That includes your product vision and goals.
Strategic product management includes identifying market and product opportunities and goals, understanding sales objectives, deploying resources, auditing the business environment to bring efficiency, integrating front and back-end operations, and thorough category planning and management.
6. Keep an eye on the analytics
Effective retail analytics is more than just knowing how much of each product you have in stock; it&#;s one of the most important aspects of managing a retail chain. You need to have an eye on the history of the products as well as their current status. A strong analytics system allows you to manipulate the data in a way that facilitates better management. You need to track each SKU, analyze your inventory levels, and forecast how much of each product you will need from season to season. And you need to be able to do this from any level in your organization.
7. Seamless inventory management
Real-time inventory status makes inventory visible regardless of the location. Seamless inventory management between stores or businesses is fully integrated with accounting to eliminate potential human error in data transfer.
Whether you are transferring goods from warehouse to warehouse, store to store, or warehouse/store to store, you need to be able to track and control all your transfers in real-time, so you know where your product is.
8. Centralize product management
Holding your inventory management practices at the department level increases your level of inefficiency. You&#;ll have a much better understanding of your product situation if you can see all of your purchases, assignments, transfers, distributions, and more at a glance. Consolidate all your data attributes into a powerful matrix so you can manage your products more efficiently. Centralize your product management system so you can manage all parts of it more effectively and efficiently.
9. Choose the right time
Retail is about selling the right product at the right time. To sell your products to the target audience, it is important that they come across your product. With the rise of e-commerce, timing has become even more important.
Reduce the time to value for customers to less than an hour. The best product managers have the technical knowledge and deep understanding of their product&#;s technology stack to design simple and easy onboarding processes for critical customer use cases. Creating these short integration processes allows customers to quickly see the value of the product, which drives adoption and usage.
A retail product manager who uses the right mix of product, customer data, and management skills needs to deliver a show to the consumer. You must plan, execute and deliver your product and its functionality to the user at the right time.
10. Build a dedicated team
Creating the right products at the right time requires coordination with multiple teams, including development, marketing, sales, support, and design. You need to be in frequent contact with everyone who impacts the product and customer experience to make sure you&#;re on the right track and not duplicating efforts.
Product management involves more than just ordering the right product from the right supplier. It involves managing your inventory from the time you place the order until it leaves for your customer.
As the pace of technological development accelerates and software solutions continue to play an increasing role in all facets of life, the development of a best-in-class product management function becomes increasingly important. Building product management functionality allows businesses to unleash the maximum potential of their software development capabilities, fully capitalize on the return on their software investments, and ultimately improve their business results.
ChainDrive product management software provides functional, easy-to-use, centralized tools to make your operation more profitable and efficient so that you can manage all stages of your product lifecycle in real time. With features that have been requested and developed by working with retailers to find solutions to the problems and pain points, they face every day.
If you&#;d like to learn more about retail product management best practices, tools, and techniques, check out our blog or request a free online demo to speak with one of our product management software experts.
The retail industry has had a rocky ride in recent years, but demand for in-person shopping seems to be back on the upswing. Brick-and-mortar retail continues to dominate sales across the United States, accounting for 83.6% of all retail business. That&#;s a trend that&#;s expected to continue at least until , and likely beyond.
In-store shopping has always been big business. It&#;s the preference for millions of shoppers in the United States who seek out in-store experiences for the customer service, product selection, and competitive pricing. Providing that experience&#;and reaping the benefits that accompany it&#;comes down to effective retail store management.
What is retail store management?
Retail store management includes all of the processes and responsibilities associated with running and managing a retail store.
This includes:
Retail store operations
Employee management
Sales and marketing
Inventory, warehouse, and supplier management
Customer service and support
Payments and accounting
While specific tasks vary, retail store management is all about ensuring that a brick-and-mortar shop operates as needed to sustain the desired business output while satisfying customer demand for products and services.
Effective retail store management comes down to a combination of people management and process building. These two converge to create a retail business that operates efficiently, and encourages customers to come back again and again.
The role of a retail store manager
A retail store manager is in charge of creating and executing both the people management and process building that&#;s needed to run the business. They ensure that the operational, commercial, and human resources sides of the business all run smoothly.
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Specifically, a retail store manager is in charge of:
Hiring and training staff
Managing and motivating employees
Developing strategies to increase customer visits
Growing store traffic (potentially online and offline)
Meeting sales goals
Ensuring customer satisfaction
Managing inventory and ensuring stock remains level
Stocking shelves and merchandising products
Of course, a retail store manager isn&#;t necessarily directly involved with each of the above jobs. Like any good manager, they&#;re also expected to be exceptional delegators. While they are ultimately responsible for the outcome, they manage and rely on staff to help spread the workload and achieve the desired outcomes.
4 key retail store manager responsibilities
Specific responsibilities will vary depending on the size of the retail business, the number of employees, and the amount of product that&#;s sold through the store. Smaller stores may have a single manager that wears many hats, while larger stores might have role-specific managers who focus on one or two responsibilities.
Regardless, the key responsibilities of retail store management come down to the following five categories.
1. Hiring and managing staff
People are a central component of any retail store. As such, retail store managers have a direct hand in sourcing, interviewing, and hiring new staff to fill vacant positions and adequately staff the shop.
Once employees are hired, retail store managers also play an important role in onboarding and training new staff&#;either themselves or by delegating to a qualified staff member. Creating and deploying the onboarding curriculum and training schedules also fall into their wheelhouse.
Lastly, retail store managers are also in charge of setting employee schedules, delegating to managers on duty, and setting goals for their teams.
2. Improving customer experience
Strong customer service is integral to any successful retail store. As such, retail store managers are directly responsible for setting expectations for customer services levels, and ensuring all staff meet those expectations.
3. Optimizing store processes
Successful retail stores run on multiple converging processes that allow them to operate at scale. This includes internal operations, procurement, promotions and sales, customer service and support, and finances. Typically, retail store managers are involved in creating and executing these processes (or continuing them from a predecessor).
4. Supporting growth
Lastly, retail stores are typically in business to make money (go figure, right?). Growth, therefore, is a key consideration. It&#;s the retail store manager&#;s responsibility to find opportunities to drive growth. Think making store improvements, expanding product offerings, hiring more skilled staff, or implementing new training&#;and to mitigate issues that might lead to losses&#;like shoplifting, return fraud, or inventory error.
KPIs for retail store management
Tracking and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) is another important requirement for retail store managers.
Here&#;s a non-exhaustive list of KPIs for retail store management:
Conversion rate (number of sales / visits to the store)
Sales per square foot
Sales per employee
Average transaction value
Year-over-year revenue growth
Net and gross profit
Customer retention rate
Tracking and reporting on these metrics is how retail store managers can show progress within the business, and identify opportunities for improvement.
10 tips for retail store management
Clearly, retail store management isn&#;t for the faint of heart. There&#;s a lot to juggle, and a lot of people that rely on the retail manager&#;both internally and externally.
10 tips to help aspiring or current retail store managers be successful in their role:
The only way to juggle all of these responsibilities is to implement repeatable processes, backed by the appropriate tools , to help the business operate efficiently at scale.
There&#;s always room for improvement. Ask employees and customers for feedback on what&#;s going well, and what could be better. Action that feedback regularly.
These metrics offer valuable insights into what&#;s going well, and what isn&#;t. Analyze past trends and current benchmarks to identify parts of the business that need work.
Supply chains are critical to success in retail. Always maintain good standing with vendors and suppliers to ensure products remain in stock for customers.
Reduce administrative burden by automating manual tasks like scheduling payroll , and inventory.
Customers crave positive experiences in-store. Experiment with different layouts and offerings to make the shopping experience a positive one.
Networking and making connections in the community builds interest and loyalty amongst local shoppers. Get involved and carve out a place in your community.
Nurture and reward repeat shoppers with loyalty points and exclusive offers. This encourages repeat business, and builds loyalty.
Shoppers today want to browse and buy on their platform of choice&#;online, in-store, or a hybrid. Think about how to offer this experience in a seamless and integrated way.
Homebase: your best friend for retail store management
Retail store managers wear many different hats, and Homebase is the perfect tool to help them do that. With it, managers can build schedules, communicate with their team, track time, and manage HR and compliance documentation all from a single platform.
Want to learn more? Get started with Homebase today.
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