Article

According to the US Department of Commerce foot traffic data, monthly retail visits were lower in Q1 2023 than in Q1 2022. That is not surprising in the least given the rise in interest rates and general cost of living pressures. Yet recent personal experience of visiting shopping centres in both Canada and the US would appear to indicate that crowds and volume of foot traffic are healthy. The ‘frustration in trying to find a parking spot at the weekend’ index shows no sign of abating!

In the krunchbox sponsored “2023 Retail Trends & Disruptions” report published in December 2022, inflation and recession were hot topics. When the surveys were being circulated we were in the early stages of what has become a long series of regular interest rate rises, which are still going on at the time of writing. It doesn’t take a Professor of Economics to observe that rising inflation coupled with increasing interest rates increase the cost of borrowing and make it harder for consumers to obtain credit. As a result, purchasing power declines which leads to lower retail spending.

Have you ever noticed that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts? Welcome to Pareto’s Law, where a small portion of your actions can yield the most significant impact. Understanding this rule will transform how you approach retail analytics and allow your brand to stand out with needle-moving suggestions backed with data.

We are often asked by suppliers, what determines which products get ranged in which stores and how can we influence the decision?

In reality, the decision on which products get ranged, or stocked, in which stores is typically based on a combination of factors that vary depending on the retailer’s business strategy, customer demographics, and market dynamics.

Sell-through is important because it measures the rate at which a company is selling its inventory, which is a key metric for assessing the performance of a business. It indicates the percentage of inventory that has been sold within a given period of time, usually expressed in terms of weeks, months, or quarters.

Planning inventory for a national retail chain can be a thankless task. You will always be wrong! If you don’t have enough inventory on shelf, the customer cannot buy what they want. If you’re lucky they might buy a substitute product in the same store.

Written by  John Pitman, CEO of Krunchbox March 27th, 2023   Let’s be honest. There is a lot of hype surrounding OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been written about ChatGPT. How do I know that? You guessed. I asked ChatGPT. But let me start by making a clear statement about this article. I …

Reflections on ChatGPT in Retail Read More »

Behind every stunning visualization lies a complex data engineering process. Without the correct data cleanup and modeling steps, a data analyst cannot deliver insightful retail point-of-sale analytics. In this article, we delve into the technical aspects of data cleaning and enrichment necessary for building a successful retail point of sale analytics capability.

Understanding store distribution is a seemingly innocuous component of any retail replenishment analysis for consumer brands. Often overlooked, or worse yet, poorly understood, brands blindly build weekly reports based on data models embedded within each retailer’s portal.

Sam Walton opened his first Walmart store on July 2, 1962, and within 5 years he owned 24 stores. The rest is history! The company now employs 2.2 million people and serves about 245 million customers each week. That’s about ten times the population of Australia. The culture of the company was built on the …

How Walmart Collaborates With Its Vendors Read More »