As a supplier, Walmart’s Retail Link system gives you access to a sophisticated and extensive database of critical point-of-sale (POS) data. It’s great that Walmart provides transparency and access to POS data, but it can be overwhelming for suppliers to sift through the vast amount of data available. There is a tendency to spend more time aggregating the POS data than time performing valuable analysis, so here are a few tips on how to take full advantage of your POS data from Walmart.
1. Use a POS Analytics Platform
Instead of traditional POS data analysis using complex spreadsheets, which can be difficult and slow, try out a POS analytics platform like krunchbox. What is krunchbox? Krunchbox is a powerful retail point-of-sale analytics software application that helps Walmart suppliers analyze point-of-sale data to optimize inventory, increase collaboration and drive incremental sales. Krunchbox will help you filter through to the critical exceptions and present the data in an easy to understand format, including all the key attributes like vendor stock numbers. Krunchbox’s founders have over 50 years of experience selling physical product to retailers across the globe, so the krunchbox platform was built by people who have been in your shoes, who know what it is like sitting across the table from a retail buyer, and who understand retail from your perspective.
2. Determine Your Baseline and Identify Exceptions to the Trends
Determine what your baseline is so you have a benchmark for measuring and comparing sales, inventory levels and performance. Once you have your baseline, krunchbox makes the process of evaluating performance easy and gives you instant, exception-based inventory analysis. Krunchbox highlights overstocks and understocks at each stage of your supply chain from factory door to retail shelf. Whether you are planning your own purchases, managing your own warehouse inventory, or generating recommended replenishment orders for retail partners at store level, visibility of sell through data will improve the accuracy of your forecasting. Using alerts to highlight the exceptions, you will be empowered to make smarter decisions much faster and make your own supply chain more agile and flexible.
3. Have an Action Plan to Tackle Problems and Improve Sales
Today’s retail consumers have high expectations when it comes to stock levels. It’s important to have optimal stock available, but that is easier said than done since retail is dynamic and impacted by unlimited variables. Krunchbox helps you to optimize your inventory by calculating the optimal stock — all while taking minimums, maximums, models, rates of sale and seasonality into consideration. Quadrant analysis, built-in dashboards and alerts give you the power to analyze your data in real-time so your time to action goes from two weeks to two minutes, and you are able to fix issues before they become problems. When you identify opportunities and risks, you leverage the data to help you cluster the right products in the right stores to make immediate improvements and drive incremental sales.
Read More: How to Increase Sales at Your Lowest Performing Stores
4. Share Your Data Insights and Collaborate with Your Walmart Buyers
Stressed about meeting with Walmart buyers? There’s no need! Your buyer wants you to bring smart recommendations to the table offering opportunities to grow the business. That’s why they provide you with the data after all! So, get on the front foot and understand how your various categories and products are performing, even down to store level. Krunchbox will guide you on how to recommend optimal clustering of the right products in the right stores. It can generate sophisticated replenishment scripts or simply provide guidance on how to weight inventory, so you can propose solutions to your Walmart buyers, armed with the data to back it up. Suppliers and buyers working together collaboratively as a team can have a dramatic effect on achieving business goals. Krunchbox was designed to improve collaboration with your Walmart buyers using POS data, helping you work more efficiently together to help fix out-of-stocks, weight stock for upcoming promos, identify slow movers and drive higher sell throughs.
The krunchbox platform allows you to analyze your Walmart point of sale data quickly and efficiently. It will give you both visibility and peace of mind, knowing what is selling, what is not selling, and what you can do right now to drive your business harder, by getting the right product on the shelf every time. That’s a win for the consumer, a win for Walmart, and a win for you as a supplier!
See for yourself how krunchbox can be an invaluable tool for your business. Get a demo with your own Walmart data, so you can see real time examples of how to drive incremental sales.