Mid-Market Innovation: Data Helps Small Retailers Compete with the Big Guys

The intensely competitive retail market leaves little margin for error. Analytics is increasingly enabling small merchants to derive the same insights as much larger competitors.

Dana Adcock, VP of Business Development at Sky IT Group, talks about the momentous changes business analytics is bringing to retail markets. Sky IT's's Saas-based SKYPAD technology helps midsize retail clients gain a holistic view of the entire supply chain process from end to end. These capabilities were unavailable to many midsize companies in the past, but low cost of solutions like SKYPAD are giving those merchants the kind of insights that were previously accessible only to retail giants.

With SKYPAD, retailers can differentiate the stock and inventory of their individual stores based upon customer demographics, offering products that are unique to the consumers that shop there. They can also respond to consumers' growing demands for products that are customized to their needs and tastes. In the apparel business, analytics also helps merchants reduce sales lost to inventory shortages and optimize inventory for the sizes their customers need. This addresses a major problem for retailers, because a customer's inability to find the right size is a major factor in lost sales.

Mobility will further change the equation as managers move out of their offices and into the field where they can interact with customers and capture data before the point-of-sale. This will further enhance retailers' ability to understand precisely what their customers need.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• analytics
• retail
• BI
• business intelligence
• mobility
• apparel
• Sky IT
• SaaS