The landscape of merchandising is rapidly evolving, expanding beyond the traditional goals of sales, profit, and growth. Today, it also encompasses new areas such as enhancing customer experience, accelerating go-to-market strategies, optimizing online item attribution, and leveraging cross-channel analytics. To adapt to these changes, retailers are restructuring their buyer and support teams to better serve their customers. However, the absence of a unified analytics platform has been a significant barrier, preventing retailers from making faster, data-driven decisions.
The Role of Intelligent Merchandising in Retail
Intelligent merchandising solutions provide retailers with the agility to analyze data and generate actionable insights, allowing them to make informed decisions more quickly. These solutions go beyond manual processes by integrating advanced analytics and AI, empowering businesses to deliver value and respond to market dynamics faster.
Changing Roles in Merchandising
The role of merchandising, especially the buyer, has transformed significantly. Traditionally, buyers were responsible for managing the sales and profit of items, focusing on stocking physical stores with the right products. Their duties included recognizing sales trends, designing promotional displays, and evaluating item performance.
In today’s omnichannel retail landscape, buyers must go further. Supported by category managers, pricing managers, replenishment managers, and finance teams, they are now responsible for delivering the right product across the right formats at the right price, to the right customer, at the right time. Merchandising has expanded to include customer experience, personalization, digital marketing, and the effectiveness of retail media networks (RMNs). In addition, buyers must navigate a complex web of competition, supply chain disruptions, inflation, and other external pressures.
Obstacles Faced by Merchandising Teams
Despite the shift in responsibilities, merchandising teams often face significant obstacles due to outdated systems. Many retailers still rely on traditional, siloed systems and manual processes. This reliance on legacy systems forces decision-makers to extract data from multiple sources, resulting in delays, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
The lack of advanced analytics capabilities prevents teams from conducting real-time “what-if” analysis to simulate different business scenarios. Moreover, the absence of role-specific dashboards increases operational costs, complicates workflows, and reduces the effectiveness of merchandising strategies. These challenges can lead to lost sales, customer abandonment, and a diminished competitive edge. In fact, many retailers lose 5-8% of sales due to these inefficiencies.
At Techwave Solutions, we recognize that a single, integrated platform can revolutionize the merchandising process. Our intelligent merchandising solutions empower decision-makers with real-time insights and allow them to act with agility, putting actionable intelligence directly in their hands.
Intelligent Merchandising Solutions: From Theory to Action
Modern merchandising solutions offer an integrated workbench for analysis and discovery. By breaking down the barriers between tools, processes, and teams, these platforms enable retailers to:
- Conduct strategic planning and annual budgeting
- Perform “what-if” analysis to simulate different scenarios
- Measure supplier performance
- Automate routine tasks and foster collaboration across departments
Additionally, intelligent merchandising solutions enhance human decision-making with actionable AI-powered insights. This allows merchandising teams to better manage product onboarding, supplier relationships, content enrichment, pricing strategies, and category management.
Key Features of Intelligent Merchandising Solutions
Product Management
Speed to market is critical for retailers to maximize revenue. Onboarding new products can be a time-consuming process, but with AI-powered insights, retailers can streamline this process. Intelligent merchandising solutions enable quicker product onboarding, ensuring that the right items are launched at the right time across multiple channels. AI and generative AI tools can also help with product attribution, enrichment, and categorization, ensuring accurate data management and faster market penetration.
Supplier Management
Managing supplier relationships is crucial for retail success. Without an integrated view of supplier data, managing compliance, risks, and performance becomes complex. Intelligent merchandising platforms offer real-time insights, making it easier to monitor supplier performance, manage agreements, and address compliance issues. AI-powered chatbots can further enhance collaboration by automating supplier support and streamlining decision-making.
Content Enrichment
For e-commerce platforms, content enrichment plays a key role in product discovery. Detailed product descriptions, images, and attributes improve the customer experience and boost sales. Intelligent merchandising platforms can automate content enrichment, ensuring consistency and accuracy across all channels.
Pricing and Promotion Management
Pricing is a critical factor in retaining loyal customers and attracting new ones. Intelligent merchandising platforms enable retailers to optimize pricing strategies, analyze cost changes, and evaluate the impact of promotions. By providing real-time insights, these platforms empower retailers to make informed pricing decisions that align with their profit goals.
Category Management
Modern retailers must deliver a seamless shopping experience across both online and physical stores. Intelligent merchandising solutions allow retailers to manage store layouts, product assortments, and space planning, ensuring consistency in the customer experience. These platforms also facilitate collaboration with supplier partners, making it easier to execute range resets and space management tasks.
Turning Insights into Action
The true power of intelligent merchandising lies in its ability to transform insights into actionable decisions. For example:
- If there is a surge in demand for a new product category, the merchandising platform can identify suppliers, forecast demand, and determine the best time to launch the product.
- In the case of a supply chain disruption, the platform can provide alternative sourcing options and calculate the additional costs of securing inventory from other regions.
- For retailers experiencing a decline in market share, intelligent merchandising solutions can help identify the reasons for the decline and suggest strategies to regain market share.
Conclusion
The cost of relying on outdated systems and processes is simply too high for retailers. Intelligent merchandising solutions offer a data-driven approach to decision-making, enabling retailers to predict outcomes, identify patterns, and respond to market changes quickly. By modernizing their approach to merchandising, retailers can unlock new opportunities, increase efficiency, and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market.
At Techwave Solutions, we help retailers embrace the future of merchandising by providing intelligent solutions that empower teams to make faster, better decisions—ultimately driving growth and profitability.
