The retail industry has undergone significant changes during the last decade and is continuously evolving.  Retailers are venturing into ways to personalize the shopping experience for customers.  Personalization in this digital era is more than just email surveys. It is also about the optimal use of your physical stores. 

Planning out how you will use your retail space is not always easy. From determining which products go where, how many facings, customer walk flow, prominent displays, you need to plan out every detail.  Planograms are the most effective tool that assists you in planning out the minute details of retail space.

Planograms

Planograms are a visual representation of the placement of products in a retail store. Designing planograms is a process of logical organization of products taking advantage of customer psychology and sales data. It also illustrates the number of facings for each product and its visibility. Planograms enable the retailers to plan out their retail space in the most efficient way. It creates an engaging shopping experience for the customers which leads to increased sales.

Apart from improving sales, well-designed planograms also enable you to minimize other store-level and supply chain costs and space wastage.

Here are a few reasons you should use planograms in retail:

Visual Merchandising in retail

Retail visual merchandising is about creating attention-grabbing and functional displays that entice customers to make impulse purchases. It is also about helping customers to find the products easily and creating a convenient and enjoyable shopping experience.  Visual merchandising in retail is known as the silent salesperson.

In this highly competitive world of retailing, survival depends on keeping updated with the changing shopping patterns of the shoppers and merchandising accordingly. Various merchandising methodologies can be planned out to create successful retail visual merchandising. Retail planograms are the schematics of these merchandising methodologies in a store.  Big box stores usually hire visual merchandising experts to create compelling planogram designs and their effective implementation.

Data Analysis

Planograms are more than diagrammatic store layouts.   Planograms also gives us a lot of data and insights that help you to see your customers more clearly.   Planograms help you to combine your space data and sales data and plan out your retail space more efficiently.

A detailed analysis can give you a clear picture of what is going on at each store level and POP displays. This data helps us to plan out each store level of your retail space precisely.

Stock Maintenance

The market research report by CNBC estimates the total value of lost sales due to out of stock for retail businesses was $634.1 billion in 2015.  It is showing that 4% of sales losses happen due to stock-outs for a typical retailer which can accumulate to around $40 million in a year.

You spend a lot of time wooing customers to the store and failing to deliver the product amounts to a lot of resources and effort going waste. Also, you end up earning annoyed customers. 

Most of the stock-outs are caused by inconsistent stock replenishment practices. Planograms give a data-driven visual representation and data reports on how long a product will last. This helps them to plan out their replenishment practices accurately and in a much-simplified manner.

Centralized store layouts

Retail Planograms help the retail chains to have centralized store layouts. When customers visit different stores, they expect the stores to have the same layout. Having inconsistent layouts can confuse them. 

Having consistent store layouts have an impact on your brand image and how customer relate their shopping experience to your brand. 

Excess Inventory

Excess inventory is the opposite of stock-outs.  Apart from occupying a lot of shelf and backroom space, surplus inventory ties up capital and keep retailers from re-investing. Planogram layouts and reports help you to pay more attention to the sales inventory. 

Planograms help you to understand what is trending and make better sales forecast.

Nexgen POG for Retail Success

Nexgen POG is a robust and sturdy cloud-based planogram software.  It is multi-device and multi-browser compatible. You can design planograms by easily dragging and dropping the products. It is also equipped with other multifold features like automation, merchandising standards, analysis reports, online share, bulk upload, compliance, compatibility with other planogram file formats and more.  Moreover, Nexgen POG has affordable license models. You can buy unlimited licenses at a cost that is less than the cost of a single license of other sophisticated software. You can try out Nexgen POG for free now and subscribe only if you like it. 

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