Tips to Merge Your Range Plan with Your Business Goals

Posted by Trade Beyond on March 13th, 2020

The way you merchandise is critically important to your retail establishment’s success, second only to your store’s location. That reality makes your range plan one of the most valuable strategic documents in your possession. As you build the ground game in your range plan app, make sure it covers these vital keys to retail success.

Image, Vision and Customer Experience

When a customer walks into your establishment, what environment are they entering? What image are you trying to convey? Does your merchandising strategy reflect that? Can your customers easily navigate through a logical progression of merchandising opportunities?

Your range plan is the first document that should incorporate your vision, image and sales goals via merchandising and that should be reflected in your range plan.

Complete Merchandising

Making merchandising meld with vision and image is often an area that retail managers struggle. Even when the game plan achieves that goal, following it can be difficult. This leads to missed sales

To make sure you tighten that area of your range plan, even if you excel at it now, you have to cover:

  • Choice and completeness of merchandise
  • A range of pricing options
  • Appropriate quality and value that reflects your ideal image and vision
  • Stock availability, while avoiding overstock

Layout

Much like your merchandising, your floor plan and layout must make the shopping experience for a potential customer seamless and fun and that has to be reflected in your range plan. It must maximize square footage value via product visibility, which influences every form of product placement.

Your range plan should reflect your best selling items merged with typical customer traffic patterns. As you set up your range plan, make sure it:

  • Allows customers ample opportunity to be exposed to and touch the merchandise
  • Possesses displays strategically in a way that does not block a customer’s view of the rest of the store
  • Has a product layout scheme that puts impulse buys in front of the customer
  • Has a layout that “progresses” the customer through the store and gets them to make a purchase

Product Placement and Traffic Flow

Where you place certain products should be driven by that product’s performance and typical customer behavior. For example, the majority of people notice shiny and bright packaging and migrate to their right upon entering a store.

Thus, your best selling products that attract attention should be to the right of your customer decompression zone and your range plan should reflect that. Additionally, the type of traffic scheme flow you incorporate should be based on your merchandising strategy.

Your range plan has to merge your corporate goals with layout and merchandising opportunities. As you enter data into your range plan app and build your strategy, making sure to incorporate the above advice will get you on the way to achieving that goal.

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Trade Beyond

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Trade Beyond
Joined: June 17th, 2019
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