How to improve product availability in physical shops?

“This product is temporarily unavailable” – no customer would like to hear those words while shopping. If you are responsible for product management, product availability is certainly one of the topics that you often discuss with your distributors. How to verify if your partners’ stores are well-stocked, gather data for an honest talk with them and improve sales by ensuring that all the relevant products are available? In the case study below, we present you with some of the ways in which our customers have handled this problem.

Distribution control in physical stores as a key to improving sales

If a product is not available in a shop, the customer will probably not buy it. This is an obvious but important fact.  Although manufacturers very often stipulate in contracts with their distributors that their products have to be available in specific quantities at particular shop branches, we repeatedly hear our customers complaining that the agreed terms are not observed.

If the products of a certain brand are not available, customers very often decide to buy a product of a competitive brand. Their decision has a great impact on the sales volume, which does not reach its potential because of stock shortages. If such a situation takes place during hot-selling periods, like the Christmas season or Black Friday, it can cause major economic losses.

How to verify if our partners’ shops are well-stocked?

If you would like to verify the stock in a traditional way, you would have to send mystery shoppers to your partners’ shops and check whether a certain product of your brand is available – is it the last item available on display or maybe there are more? Fortunately, thanks to modern technologies, this will not be necessary. Dealavo’s customers can order Offline availability (distribution) reports to find out:

• Which shops stock products of their brand,
• Which shops have only one item left (product on display),
• Which branches are best-stocked,
• Which products are available in the biggest / smallest number of branches,
• If there are any new shop branches that offer their brand’s products,
• Which branches do not carry their products anymore.

47% increase in stocking after six months

In our analysis, we aggregated data of three chosen Dealavo’s customers who use offline availability reports. They represented the following industries:

• Consumer electronics (find out more about price monitoring in the consumer electronics industry)
• Health and beauty (find out more about price monitoring in the health and beauty industry)
• Household equipment (find out more about price monitoring of household equipment)

We checked how the stocking had changed in the branches selling our customers’ products. In order to do this, we compared the average share of items from the product feed at the distributor’s shops (variable available in the report) in the week in which the report was introduced and six months later. The ratio was calculated as follows:

(% of items in stock on average at the partner’s shops six months after the introduction of offline reports / % of items in stock on average at the partner’s shops at the time of introduction of offline reports) – 100%

The analysed data showed that, after six months, the availability of the items increased on average by 47%, and after one year – by 51%.

By using offline reports, the manufacturers can be better prepared for talks with distributors and back up their arguments with reliable data.

How else do our customers use offline availability (distribution) reports?

Our customers use offline availability (distribution) reports to:

• Verify the number of branches in which their products are available. As the chain of your partner’s physical shops grows larger, your products can be offered to a wider group of customers in a bigger number of locations. Dealavo reports can help you monitor the number of physical stores that offer at least one product of your brand. One of our customers observed a rapid improvement in the availability of their brand’s products in shops of his fast-growing partner in just two years. Within two years, the number of their partner’s branches offering products of their brand increased by 328%. The rest of Dealavo’s customers did not record such an incredible growth, but after six months every single one of them saw a change in the number of branches offering their brand’s products. This means that the situation was dynamic in each of the cases.
• Check product availability in each of the cities. Customers get the addresses of all branches that stock their brand’s products. This way, they can verify if there are any blank spots on the map of locations that are really important for them.
• Check what categories of products are available in each of the shops. In our offline distribution report, you can easily group products according to their category. This way, a person who manages the products can easily see if a particular branch of shop focuses on a specific category of products.

How can you order an offline availability report?

If you want to order an offline availability report to monitor the availability of your brand’s products in your partners’ branches and you are already our customer, contact your Customer Success representative to get more information.

If you are not our customer, please leave your contact details, and we will get back to you to determine which shops you should monitor in terms of product availability.