Grocery store stocking data

To keep your shelves and displays well stocked, you’ll need to capture and use all the right data including the following:

Foot traffic—Analyzing foot traffic in your store is always key to keeping your shelves properly stocked. And, with the pandemic, that’s even more challenging. As reported by Grocery Dive, foot traffic in grocery stores is vacillating month to month as guidelines for handling COVID-19 change. But there are tools to help, like foot tracking counting systems, consumer predictive analytics and forecasting services. By using these tools and staying on top of your store’s foot traffic, you can better determine what needs to be ordered so your shelves are full and waste is reduced.

Know your customers—How well do you know the people who walk through the doors of your grocery store? How many of them are families with small children? How many are singles looking for smaller portions? Do they present a large demand for healthy food? What about their ethnicity and the need for an international aisle? Are they cooking complicated meals that call for herbs, for example? The more customer information you have the less likely you’ll run out of the items they’ve come to expect in your store—and there are plenty of technology-based tools to help you capture it.

Get a handle on less popular items—Keep an eye on how your less popular items are selling. How many of your customers would be upset if they were unable to find, for example, a particular flavor of quinoa? Regularly determining how niche products are selling and deciding which to discontinue can be a good way to save money. But you don’t want to do it at the expense of losing business.

Some of your customers choose to shop at your store simply because you carry one of their harder to find items. So, when you do decide to discontinue something, make sure you have a robust feedback outlet for your customers. Think about placing a sign near one of the removed items indicating that it’s been discontinued and, if they’d like to provide feedback, let them know where they can do it. Otherwise your customers are likely not going to say anything and simply find another store that sells it, risking the chance that they’ll buy all of their groceries there instead.

Supply chain management—So, you have a handle on foot traffic and you’re using customer data to help understand their buying habits and can accurately gauge when you need to replace particular items, but what about your supply chain? Ensuring that items arrive on time and intact can be a daunting task with many moving pieces in your supply chain. To help you with the process, there are services and inventory management software available to simplify and increase the reliability of your supply chain. For example, NCR Power Enterprise offers a suite of supply chain management and logistics software to help you manage the flow of goods and reduce the complexity of your supply chain.

How stocking data in a grocery store can improve the customer experience

Your customers have high expectations, particularly millennials and Gen Zs who are used to getting what they want and in ways that are convenient, easy and fast. So, the customer experience among grocery stores is competitive and accurate stocking is key.

No empty shelves—During the pandemic your customers are cutting your store some slack understanding that items like toilet paper and canned goods are harder to keep in stock. But they are also very aware of the supermarkets that are managing to keep those items in stock better than other stores. In general, having well stocked shelves that include even the hard to find niche items goes a long way in making your consumers happy.

Getting what they want—There is a good reason why grocery store cashiers ask customers if they found everything that they were looking for, because your customers need to get what they want, plain and simple. If the answer is “no” they didn’t find everything they wanted there’s a very good chance that they’ll go to your competitor to get it and if it happens enough times they’ll stop coming to your store or at least visit it less often.

Easy navigation—It may seem like a small thing, but your customers don’t want the inconvenience of having to move their carts around your staff as they stock shelves. And they don’t welcome the idea of needing to ask them to move so they can retrieve items; they’ve come to expect a high level of ease as they navigate your store. So, having your shelves stocked before you open or after you close is ideal, and during slow times when necessary.

When you have the data you need to stock your shelves as efficiently as possible you’re bound to increase your bottom line.

Retain and attract customers—When a current shopper can rely on your store to have what they need and they’re able to shop conveniently and with ease they are much more likely to make your store their go-to for groceries. On top of that, they’ll likely, particularly during a pandemic and when other natural disasters strike, tell their friends and family that you have the products that they’re looking for. That, of course, means more business and less chance of losing business.

Reduce waste—Using accurate data gives you a much better chance of not over ordering a product that you end up throwing away because of either having too much or it’s on the shelf past it’s use-by date. You can save money with accurate stocking data that reduces waste.

Streamline your supply chain—You will reduce inefficiencies with a supply chain that runs smoothly and one that you can depend on to make deliveries on time. For example, when distribution center trucks aren’t held up, the chances of your produce arriving fresh and attractive is much more likely.

Without technology, getting a handle on stocking data involves a lot more people power and much more room for mistakes. Fortunately for grocery stores, there are many technology-fueled tools available to help in the tracking process.

Rely on an effective POS system—One of the last places where your customers interact with your store is when they pay for their items at your point of sale system. While its basic function of collecting money is crucial to your business, it’s also an excellent way to improve your inventory management and deliver information directly to an electronic device. That way, you can easily download the tracking information and rely on it to place orders. But not every POS system offers the same features. Check out what NCR can deliver for your POS system to see if it’s the right fit for your store.

Use in-store cameras—Many grocery operators are upping the use of cameras in their stores to give them the sort of insight into their customers that the online stores enjoy. By placing cameras inside and outside our store, you can track customers, gather information about them and send it to a central server to be processed and analyzed. Based on the analysis you can decide if your layout is serving your customers the best way, for example are your aisles easy to navigate? Also, cameras are being installed above shelves for inventory control and to determine your customers’ shopping behaviors, like which aisles they visit the most and which products they buy.