Concepts of Merchandising and Merchandise Planning in Retail

Retail Merchandising

Merchandising is a process involving developing, securing and managing the merchandise mix to meet the firm’s marketing objectives. The merchandise ­mix stands for the retailer’s total offering, be it goods or services or both. The merchandising process is a three tier structural set of activities. The following configuration gives the idea of merchandising process.

The first stage or tier is to do with developing the merchandise-mix which is composed of two elements namely product and service-mix. The second stage or tier is securing the merchandise-mix which involves two highly skillful and  specialized  activities namely the buying process and the procurement process.… Read the rest

The Concept of Retail Sites and it’s Classification

A retail site  is the actual physical location from which a retail business operates. According to retail specialists, retail site is one of the principal tools obtaining and maintaining a competitive advantage through spatial monopoly. A given site is unique when its “positional qualities” serve a particular trading area consumer in way that no other site can match. That is why, retailer’s site problem has solution in its identification evaluation and final decision of perfectly matching site.

The first step in appraising retail site locations is to identify all potential site alternatives. The number of site alternatives in any given trading area can range from an extremely limited to a very large selection.… Read the rest

Growth Potential of Retail Trading Areas

Every retailer must answer one more question before completing the trading area evaluation process. That is what holds for the future for the retail trading area ? In other words he is to foresee the growth potentials of trading areas. It is because, the marketing opportunities can change quickly or dynamically growing trading areas might turn either static or decline. The retailer either must fight to maintain present market share or be willing to survive on a smaller share without future growth. However, with the growth, the retailer has an opportunity to expand sales and market share at a reasonable amount of cost and effort.… Read the rest

Out-shopper Analysis in Retail Management

It is very clear that not all the consumers who are within the trading area shop exclusively from that area. A group of consumers known as “out-shoppers” frequently and regularly shop outside their local trading area. These consumers spend a considerable amount of time, money and effort making inter-trading area shopping trips. Some out-shoppers look for economic gains arising from lover prices in larger trading  centers  where assortments are better and the level of competition is more intense. Some shoppers simply seek the diversity of unfamiliar or more stimulating surroundings. Demographically  out-shoppers  are younger and are relatively well educated and their relative income is high; psychologically,  out-shoppers  are active and are on the “go”, urban-oriented who are neither time conscious nor store loyal shoppers.… Read the rest

Trading Area Potential in Retail Site Evaluation

Most of the retail site evaluation procedures use the concepts of “trading area adequacy” and the “trading area potential” to predict the total trading area business and the share of business a particular retailer can expect.

Read More: Trading Area Adequacy

Trading area potential, it is something, which is predicted ability of a trading area to provide acceptable support levels for a retailer in future. The two important concepts in trading area potential are residential support levels and non-residential support levels.

Residential Support Levels

A retailer is to concentrate on the most important source of business, namely the area’s residents, after sufficiently identifying the gross trading area.… Read the rest

Trading Area Adequacy for Retail Layouts

Trading area adequacy is the ability of a trading area to support proposed and the existing retail operations. The support capability may be viewed in a “Gross” as well as “Net” form. Here Gross adequacy is the ability of a trading area to support a retail operation without any consideration of retail competition. That is, the gross adequacy measures the total amount of business available to all the competing retailers within a defined trading area. Contrary to this, “net adequacy” is the ability of a trading area to provide support for a retailer after competition has been taken into account.

The Gross Adequacy of Trading Area

Measurement of gross adequacy determines the trading area’s total capacity to consume.… Read the rest