Partner Article

How to win the retail Christmas battle

With the festive season fast approaching, the retail Christmas crown will be awarded to those retailers that are able to offer customers the most flexible, reliable and personalised Christmas shopping experience – across all channels.

Today’s consumers are notoriously demanding. And they become even more demanding over Christmas, when they can’t afford for anything to go wrong. This puts huge pressure on you as a retailer as you need to ensure you are ready to deliver a consistently great experience while focussing on sales and profit. You must understand what consumers are most likely to buy and have your systems ready for processing and fulfilment.

To help you prepare, OrderDynamics, has outlined three things you need to start doing now in order to win the upcoming retail Christmas battle:

1.) Integrate your data to enable a single view of the business – Don’t try to work from different data silos that provide a fragmented view of what’s happening. Successful peak trading is the joint effort of all departments and therefore retailers should have combined data, with interdependencies analysed so all the areas of the customer and product journey are weaved together to tell the full story.

2.) Use your integrated data to inform the right KPIs – Monitor the right things throughout the day, especially during peak trading periods to drive longer term success. To get ready for the busy trading season, retailers should focus on a mix of inputs and outputs. Inputs are the things you can control like delivery charges and promotions. Outputs are the things which happen as a consequence, they include sales and revenue. Understanding the relationship between the two is critical for selling at this time of the year.

3.) Enable real-time, accurate visibility of product and stock across all channels – Don’t disappoint your customers with a lack of available or accurate information. To meet and exceed customer expectations, retailers need to allow online shoppers to see accurate information on products, inventory availability (even at store level) and to have information updated in a matter of minutes. This ensures you can get products to customers quickly and profitability – just what they require and demand.

Retailers today are struggling with silos across the business. These silos make it time consuming to identify and react to trends, opportunities and fluctuations – at peak trading periods – rapid reaction is the difference between great trading results and lacklustre results. To win the Christmas battle retailers need to join their data and their channels.

Right in time to wrap up the festive sales!

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This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by OrderDynamics .