Amazon has 536 Million Products on sale as of now. Not SKUs, products.
Let me put that in context. If Amazon wanted to, it can give one unique product to every single person in all of North America as a Christmas gift and still have the same products on its virtual shelf for the rest of the world to buy.
Isn’t that mind-boggling?
People are now searching for ‘stuff’ on Amazon directly because they know that Amazon’s endless aisles are sure to have the product they are looking for (This ‘searching on Amazon’ phenomenon has other players like Google worried, but more on that, in another article). How does a retailer, specifically the ones who deal with individual categories resist getting steamrolled by this Goliath?
You can never beat Amazon in Assortment volume, but here are some actions you could take to challenge the Goliath.
Drive real-time engagement:
Treat every guest context such as restaurant visit, cart composition, promotion response, coupon burn, e-commerce clicks, etc. as a dynamic trigger for personalization. Intelligently and uniquely respond to every guest with next best offer based on past behavior, like-for-like patterns, and marketing priorities.
Smarter Category Management:
Localize assortments based on sales forecast, customer demographics, purchase patterns, weather data and seasonal trends.
Plan Assortments better:
Identify fast moving, slow moving, overstocked and understocked items to help identify the right assortment for the next season.
Optimize Markdowns:
Analyze historical category and brand performance, market trends to recognize markdown performance and leverage those insights to design effective markdown campaigns.
Democratize Store Insights:
Arm store managers, department managers and associates with necessary insights about sales, promotions, inventory and employee productivity.
Boost fulfillment performance:
Identify the bottlenecks in shipping delays and ensure better customer satisfaction by making smarter vendor selections.
Clienteling
Enable store associates to initiate conversations with high-value customers based on their personas, past purchases, and next best offer.
Win back Lapsed customers:
Identify guests who have lapsed or at risk of leaving and proactively take actions by identifying the right mix of offers and channel strategies to engage them.
If you are interested in seeing some real-life examples of how other retailers are combating Amazon with innovative store experience ideas,
Download this Whitepaper
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