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What is merchandising? Merchandising is the set of instruments aimed to increase sales and develop brand popularity by influencing consumer. It provides special studies on the placement of goods, decoration of sales outlets and making an effective stock. The number of customers is enlarged by encouraging their wish to select and buy the maximum number of promoted goods, and by distinguishing products from those of the competitors. The need of merchandising was proved after it turned out that consumers made 2⁄3 of all their purchasing decisions near a stand. Even if buying a specific type of product is planned in advance, 7 out of 10 customers decide on a certain brand directly in a salesroom. Who Needs Merchandising? MANUFACTURER — to promote brand, to increase the recognition of goods. DISTRIBUTOR — to ensure the presence of goods in a retail chain. RETAILERS — to attract more visitors and encourage them to do more shopping.
Automation of Merchandising  PalmOrder is a perfect tool for automated merchandising.
When using PalmOrder, a merchandiser receives a powerful instrument to solve their work tasks. The system consists of a mobile device (personal digital assistant (PDA) + mobile phone, smartphone, tablet etc.) and software. Thus merchandisers do not need to carry around a huge stack of papers to fill them with a large number of statistical data. All necessary information is uploaded to a mobile device within a few seconds.
Moreover, a representative of your company can always get the actual data from your office and transfer the collected statistics back at any time. The remote exchange takes only a couple of seconds.
The received data is automatically loaded to AIS (for example, 1C: Enterprise), which eliminates the need to hire operators for this purpose.
Brief Description of the Configuration: Route planning. You can upload a route of visiting retail outlets to each merchandiser's PDA. Using the GPS-online function, you can follow the current whereabouts of your employee compared to a planned position. You can also see whether the Request, Payment or Store-Check documents were created directly from the point of sale or outside of it. On the GPS-online map these documents are marked with the appropriate colored markers.
Availability of goods. The shelves should display the goods that customers expect to find in a store. In a merchandising strategy a manufacturer specifies the set of brands which will be promoted in the certain market segments. A manufacturer or distributor can divide all customers into several categories (distribute them according to the market segments) depending on the type of buyer activity in an outlet, or the sort of buyers who visit these stores.
The set of promoted products can be differentiated depending on a market segment. For example, in a supermarket buyer expects to see a greater choice of expensive wines than in smaller shops. On the stands there should always be brands and packaging that are the most popular among buyers, and goods should be displayed on the shelves according to the level of sales. Therefore a close monitoring of the most popular products availability is extremely necessary. PalmOrder's Merchandising allows you to effectively perform evaluation of goods available in each point of sale: you can create a Store-Check document and validate the information with photos. If it is necessary, you can create an additional Request document and immediately transfer the information, including pictures, to a server via online communication channels.
Arrangement and design. PalmOrder's Merchandising provides tools to assess products' arrangement, design, location etc. An employee can take the necessary photos right from the program and send them to a server for a further professional evaluation.
Management of prices. PalmOrder's Merchandising supports several categories of prices. A product price in each point of sale depends on a market segment an outlet belongs to. For example, the price of ice cream in a cafe should be greater than in a supermarket. This information is downloaded to PDA from an office AIS (ERP). PalmOrder allows to create the required number of price categories for each product, and to set a desired category of prices for each point of sale.
Evaluation of competitors. In addition, PalmOrder gives the opportunity to assess the availability of the competitive products in each point of sale. The evaluation is performed in the context of the representation of product categories. For example, a manufacturer (distributor, dealer etc.) of beer can assess the availability of this product in a sales outlet using a Store-Check document, where he can specify the items represented in this point of sale and their prices, and then estimate if it is profitable to supply the product to this outlet. Management of shelf stock and reordering. When visiting a point of sale, a merchandiser can record the shelf stock of goods by creating a Store-Check document. He also has the ability to form an additional request for goods and to send the data to an office server immediately.
Data exchange. merchandiser can send the collected data to an office AIS (ERP) via wireless connection at any time. He can also perform an office exchange using local wireless connection (IrDa, BlueTooth, Wi-Fi).
What Will You Get? So if you use PalmOrder, you will get a huge advantage over your competitors because you will always have an up-to-date information about the market situation and competitors price policy.
Moreover, you can significantly reduce costs by increasing the number of sales outlets that a merchandiser can visit in one day.
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