Pushfeed and Category Management

How can pushfeeds help with Category Management?

As I was in the CatMan busi­ness for many years, I can tell you how. Let me tell you a little bit from my own expe­ri­ence:

The answer is: daily busi­ness! Products with high rota­tion are out of stock or in the back of the 50cm shelf and prac­ti­cally not visi­ble, custo­mers put products back into another facing, so products are not at the place they should be and so on. This can lead to bad results, even if the plano­gram itself would be great, but in this situa­tion shop­pers cannot see it and so there is no orien­ta­tion and ther­e­fore no sales increase possi­ble. This is the most frusta­ting result for indus­try and retail, because they put so much work into it.

This is where we come back to the initial ques­tion.

If every product has it´s defi­ned place in the shelf — with push­feeds and divi­ders, the plano­gram will auto­ma­ti­cally stay as it was on the day you left the store. Every product is at the front of the shelf, so the plano­gram in total is visi­ble and tidy, and the shop­per orien­ta­tion will increase immensely and so will sales accor­din­gly. If you then have products with high rota­tion, even the last product will be at the front, if you really have an out of stock, a lable or sticker with the picture of the product on the push­feed can help the shop­per to see that usually the product is here. So he or she can ask someone in the store for help. Addi­tio­nally it is helpful for store employees to put the right product where it belongs, this also helps a lot for plano­gram sustaina­bi­lity.

And rese­arch also shows that shop­pers put products back more carefully, if there is a really tidy shelf.

With addi­tio­nal orien­ta­tion elements like flags, rails with colour coding or light­ing you can also improve the orien­ta­tion in big cate­go­ries.

So, and how can we measure if it is really better than before? It is still very diffi­cult to analyse the shelf or base turno­ver without promo­ti­ons or displays. But as in every part of our life also here the digi­ta­li­sa­tion will help us in future. There are systems which count every move­ment in the shelf — if someone takes a product out or if someone refills, even for every single store and every facing (buzzword “local or store indi­vi­dual cate­gory manage­ment”). The systems tells you also if there were out of stocks and how long and how often. Regar­ding this topic please read more at this same point in a few weeks.

At the end there is nothing left to say besi­des: I wish you great success and fun with all your CatMan projects in the future. 🙂

Kris­tin Kolbe-Schade, Head of Marke­ting, POS Tuning GmbH