Establish A Long Term Assortment Strategy with Best Seller Assortment

The season often dictates how we dress and interact with the outside world. In the middle of winter, sunblock and shorts are far from your memory, whereas in the middle of summer you never have to whip out your snow shovel and put in a hard day’s work before leaving your own driveway.

However, you have life staples that remain constant throughout the different seasons. You should be wearing a shirt at all times, as well as shoes or pants as well. Without this base supply of items, you’d be a bit of a mess. And without the seasonal garments, you’d be a bit uncomfortable in certain extreme weather conditions.

Going with the flow of things and planning accordingly is the key to success for your store’s product assortment as well. You have your best sellers, and you have your seasonal items. These groups are necessary to your store’s success, and are equal parts important to your selling strategies.

No matter what your business is, you probably have a segment of your product assortment that only experiences spikes in demand during certain seasons. You have to anticipate these products’ demand levels if you want to avoid an onslaught of upset customers. The best way to anticipate is with seasonal sales data.

Seasonal sales data will indicate spikes in certain products you already carry. You have to make sure to order heavy on these items to make sure the supply meets the demand. At the same time, you can’t simply over order, because then you’ll have to deal with excess inventory. And that will lead to steep price cuts to get stagnant inventory moving out your door to make room for more of your essentials.

Your store also has a subset of products that are constantly selling well. Ignoring this group of products can hurt your sales. These are the products that make up your core assortment, and depleting their inventory would result in major drops in sales and revenue for the long term.

These best sellers deserve heavy monitoring, especially if your competitors carry them as well. Make sure your prices are competitive, yet profitable, to prevent shoppers from leaving your store to buy them elsewhere. In this case, you might as well not have the products in the first place. You’ll have the same problem you’d have if you over ordered your seasonal items, resulting in price cuts for your popular products to make way for more temporary ones.

Just like your local meteorologist, you have to make sure you have a confident forecast to keep your inventory levels steady. Fluctuating inventory levels are nerve-racking, and can actually hurt your seller rating on marketplaces like Amazon. Forecasting using seasonal sales data and competitive assortment monitoring is the best way to keep your inventory levels smooth and steady.

Wiser’s best seller assortment can help you keep you on top of every segment of your product assortment. It can also help you explore new product ideas using competitor assortment data as well as their pricing data. That way you can make sure you’re only adding the most profitable, competitive products to your inventory.

You can also look to your competitors to see which products will be popular for the respective seasons. Who’s stocking up on what, and at what price? It’s always a good idea to build upon your inventory instead of having the same products year after year. Annual sales data is definitely useful, but it only goes so far. Competitor data unlocks so many doors that would have been nearly impossibly to break down before.

Sometimes we have our blinders up and lose track of where we stand in the market. Competitor data combined with best seller assortment opens your peripherals to make sure you’re never going in the wrong direction or getting left behind, no matter what the season is.

Contributing writer: Brian Smyth

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