How to Detect and Prevent Empty Shelves and Never Lose a Customer Again
Out-of-stock (OOS) is a common problem for businesses of all sizes. They can occur for various reasons, such as inaccurate inventory forecasting, supply chain disruptions, or poor shelf management. Whatever the cause, OOS can significantly impact the bottom line, hurting customer satisfaction, operational costs, and growth opportunities.
To get ahead of OOS at the store level, consider taking these critical actions:
Detect store-level out of stocks in near-real time
A key distribution opportunity can be rendered ineffective by OOS, but in-store insights can help you combat this problem. Monitor out-of-stock data at the store level and quickly convert it to action items for distributors and sales teams, ensuring that your products are back on the shelves and available to consumers in a timely manner.
Identify emerging trends in local areas
Consumer demand exceeding supply can often lead to a widespread out-of-stock problem.
Leverage innovative in-store execution intelligence to get real-time information on aggregated trends facing areas. Detect a wave of OOS before it happens by adjusting your supply or redirecting inventory to high-demand geographies.
Investigate recurring issues
Evaluate OOS over time using in-store insights. If a location is consistently running out of a product that has plenty of inventory, it is an excellent opportunity to increase the size of their regular order and, thus, the value of that account to your business.
Target competitive products
Detecting out-of-stocks of key competitive brands is an opportunity to sell your own products in their place. Applying these data-driven methods to catch your competitors’ out-of-stocks can help you gain market share and increase brand credibility amongst retailers.
Modern in-store insights quickly provide store-specific data, giving you a picture of which products and locations are experiencing OOS. These insights enable a data-driven approach to business strategies that can mitigate and ultimately prevent out-of-stock in the future.