A retail Store Audit is an accurate analysis of several operational factors based on a store checklist. It consists of best practices that stores need to follow to ensure they are up to standard, and track and resolve any problems immediately. The factors include sales volume, stock levels, damaged products, Assessments of store displays and POP, competition mapping, Planogram compliance and In-store location of products, and brand and shelf share at SKU levels. According to a Stanford study, manual audits in retail proved to be time-consuming and inaccurate, with error rates reaching as high as 20%.
How do you take decisions that impact your execution performance in real-time and help improve per-store sales?
To address this issue with the lack of advanced IT tools available, CPG brands have traditionally been doing in-store audits organized by market research firms. Here, a merchandiser goes to a random store or a sample of stores every month. Ensures that the store follows the brand guidelines and manually counts and checks if the products are displayed in the desired manner.This leads to inaccurate and inconsistent data gathering, leaving your merchandiser burnt out. With a high attrition rate in auditors, retail leaders are looking to empower them with the right digital and AI tools and incentivize them to actively participate in retail execution operations at the stores.
With Image Recognition and AI, gathering in-store execution data at speed and scale makes store audits automated and simplified. This is made possible by enabling merchandisers to capture a few pictures of the retail shelves using their mobile cameras. The Image Recognition AI then processes the captured images to derive critical retail execution & business insights. Image recognition technology helps digitize and standardize audits to get consistent and accurate data more frequently which enables sales and marketing teams to make timely decisions.
The information interpreted by image recognition software can help track sales trends, too. Tapping into the data on how well different brands and SKUs are selling, retailers may boost the sales of priority SKUs by placing them closer to the buyer.
Infilect is a leader in retail visual intelligence helping CPG brands worldwide with automated in-store audits, per-store sales increase, real-time insights and competitive intelligence.
