Retail Survival of the Fittest: 7 Ways to Future Proof Your Retail Store

1. Go through your sales and inventory data and identify your top sellers, high-profit products, and low-margin items.
2. Brainstorm ways to maximize your sales and margins. Like T-We Tea, you could start bundling high-margin (but slow moving) products with your top sellers. Or, like BikeBerry, you could start personalizing discounts to make sure that you aren’t slashing your prices too much.
3. Identify any menial or repetitive tasks in your business and then find tools and apps that can automate them.

. Dwell time in the store
2. Average shop times across a particular time of day or day of the year
3. Parts of the store that customers visit the most and the least
4. Where customers live or work in relation to the store
5. Cross-store data comparisons
What should you do with all that information? The first step to turning data into something useful is to analyze what those numbers mean and figure out how you can improve. For example, if the numbers tell you that checkout time in your store is longer than the industry average, use that information and find ways to streamline the checkout process.
Or, say you know which parts of your store are getting the most and least traffic. The next step is to figure out why certain store sections are getting more visits than others. Is it because of the products in those departments or is it their positioning in the shop?
And don’t forget to consider factors outside your store, such as the weather, environment, time of year, etc. As David put it:
Retailers need to understand what the above metrics mean and how to explain the differences, such as was there bad weather one day that increased or decreased the dwell time? Did some other store nearby run a major sale that brought people into the mall or the block? Did a special advertisement bring more customers in for a particular reason? Did a store layout encourage or discourage shoppers from going to a particular place?

Online Coupons
Retailers can also use their promotions to gain more insights about in-store traffic. By tracking the coupons redeemed at checkout, merchants can see which offers are driving traffic to their location.

People Counters
A simple, yet highly effective way to implement in-store analytics, counters are also used by retailers to measure foot traffic.

Mobile
Each mobile device equipped with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth broadcasts a unique code called a MAC address that can be logged by sensors whenever the phone’s Wi-Fi or Bluetooth capability is turned on. This code lets retailers track the movements of customers within their store, shedding light on tons of data points such as the amount of time spent in each aisle, where shoppers go after viewing a particular item, customer wait time at checkout, and more. And since each code is unique, sensors can tell if someone is a repeat customer.
It’s important to note that in-store analytics technology doesn’t collect personal information. As theFuture of Privacy Forum put it, “A MAC address is simply a 12-character string of letters and numbers; it doesn’t contain personal information like your name, email address, or phone number

1. Find ways to merge online and offline channels in your store. You can begin by providing in-store pickups and returns, for one. Perhaps you can start letting shoppers check if a product is available in-store using your website. Or, if you don’t have online customer support yet (i.e. live chat, social media), consider setting up the systems that would let your customers reach you however they want

Nike has an average response time of 2.8 hours, well below the Interbrand 100 average of 5.4 hours. 55% of the time @NikeSupport is able to respond within 30 minutes, and an additional 13% of responses are made within the hour.”
Talk about dedication!

. Evaluate your online, offline, and mobile strategies. Have you established an online and mobile presence? Are you enabling customers to research, shop, and pay for items across various channels? Do you have an online store, and if so, does it integrate with your offline shop?

“For online pure-plays, returns are dead-net cost; for a brick-and-mortar store, a return is a potential new sale.

webrooming—the practice of looking at items online only to buy them at a physical location—will result in $1.8 trillion in retail sales by the year 2017. Meanwhile, online sales are predicted to reach only $370 billion in the same time frame.
In addition, people who buy online prefer to pick up and return items offline