Three Tips to Help Furniture & Décor Retailers Manage Merchandise Better

With over 12,000 products in its famous catalog, IKEA must rely on business integration technology to optimize and manage their merchandise efficiently online and across its 400 stores. But even for smaller players in the furniture and home decoration sector, managing merchandise can still be a real challenge.

Furniture and home decoration have taken on many of the characteristics of fashion retailing with more seasonal collections, style collections, and mid-season sales.

In such a dynamic environment, retailers must ask themselves if they managing their assortment as efficiently as possible. Are they minimizing the time it takes to introduce new products? And are they optimizing their prices and using promotions to drive sales?

Here are three ways that will help increase and manage your assortment more easily and gain greater agility in the launch of new products, pricing and promotions:

Introduce products faster: In addition to saving time, introducing products from a single location has the added benefit of eliminating errors and inconsistencies between stores. With a centralized and retail-specific platform, it is easy to introduce new products into the back office and making them available across all stores, POS devices, and online in a matter of minutes. A product catalog can be organized based on multi-level product category hierarchies, and each item allows for an unlimited number of searchable product features.

Add a service: Retail-specific platforms allow retailers to extend and complement your products with the definition of services that help to increase customer satisfaction and sales. It is a good way to provide up-selling opportunities and inform customers about mandatory or optional services, such as warranties, alterations, transport services, or even classes.

Optimize pricing and promotions: Pricing flexibility plays a key role in achieving the agility needed to adapt to market trends and drive sales. These days, software solutions with a built-in pricing allows retailers to implement a more dynamic pricing strategy based on inventory levels and current conditions, rather than just guesswork. Retailers can calculate optimal prices and respond faster to minimize any dip in sales, minimizing the impact by leveraging a large selection of out-of-the-box discounts and promotions based on definable criteria including geography and target customers.

More than ever, retailers need a more agile way to introduce products, particularly when creating new collections and promotions. They also need to respond quickly to drive sales when needed, but without sacrificing any more profit than necessary.

For more information on the merchandise management capabilities of Openbravo Commerce Cloud, click here. If you are interested in our pricing and promotions engine, you may watch our webinar, Pricing Power: Optimize Retail Promotions for Competitive Advantage.