The Critical Value of Real-Time Retail Analytics in Fashion

Technology is rapidly transforming retail, shifting behaviors, expectations, and capabilities. In fashion, real-time retail analytics are instrumental in reshaping the industry and empowering brands to boost performance and drive growth in ways that were never available before.

What is Retail Analytics

Retail analytics is the outcome of collecting retail data and processing it into insights. Available data on issues like sales and shrinkage is analyzed into insights on key issues to support better decision-making and drive optimization across the value chain.

Data is fundamental to gaining valuable insights. Today’s fashion has two separate sets of data, one for e-commerce and the other for retail. In digital stores, data is characterized by details and precision. Brands have visibility into what customers are seeing, what they are engaging with, how they are moving through the site, what they abandon, and what they end up buying.

Physical stores have no in-store customer journey or product location data and only snapshot data on inventory and sales. To give customers what they want, where and when they want it, and at the right price, retailers need new analytics founded on high-quality data and cutting-edge technologies.

The Importance of Quality Data in Retail

Just as data and analytics are valuable to e-commerce, they have the power to significantly impact physical retail.

The vital importance of digital, data, and analytics is evident in the success of top-performing retailers. Furthermore, fashion and luxury companies which made data-driven decisions about critical issues such as merchandise buying, pricing, store optimization and streamlined inventory management have proved to gain measurable results, as shown by management consulting firm McKinsey.

To boost impact, brands must use high-quality data, or it may not lead to optimized results. Analytics that rely on traditional sales data to plan and manage fashion inventory can turn out to be inaccurate. To start with, past data can prove unreliable due to the dynamic nature of the fashion industry. Numerous changes may have come into play since the data was collected, such as new products coming in, emerging trends, varying costs, marketing promotions, and more.

Past sales data can lead to excess inventory in some categories and less merchandise that customers do want in others. In addition, sales data in itself is affected by availability. You can’t sell what you don’t have. In a real-world scenario, once an item sells so well it’s out-of-stock, the retailer cannot know the full scope of demand for the product.

A happy retailer who has sold all his stock may believe it was a success when, in fact, the business lost sales due to availability issues. Relying on sales data for future inventory, he may once again make inventory and assortment mistakes that result in lost sales, excess inventory and unnecessary markdowns.

Real-time quality data is key to unlocking insights that can give fashion retailers what they need to succeed.

Unlocking the power of Customer Journey Insights

Retail data capabilities are only part of the story. The other part is bringing context and drawing actionable insights from the collected data. Data-based transformation happens when data evolves into insights that create value.

Unlocking insights from data can be powerful: it can drive efficiencies and growth in the fashion value chain and improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Tapping into a retail data analytics platform, the head of merchandising can make assortment and allocation decisions based on analytic insights, and the head of retail can review analytics to enhance store performance and sales.

Analytics are already utilized in the fashion sector. Yet, gaining real-time retail store analytics for the first time can give fashion retailers a clear competitive edge.

The Critical Value of Real-Time Analytics in Retail

Real-time store analytics finally give physical retail the data it needs in a digital world. The real-life store data gives fashion stores e-commerce-equivalent insights for their first-ever comprehensive view, unleashing new opportunities.

Why you need real-time in-store analytics?

Make fast and accurate data-driven decisions
Drive optimization
Offer personalized experiences
Gain a clear competitive advantage

So what are some of the things you can do with real-time retail analytics in your brick-and-mortar?

Transform real-time analytics into retail predictive analytics to forecast demand and optimize assortment decisions.
Drive inventory and pricing optimization to reduce overstock, out-of-stock, and markdowns.
Improve conversion through in-store customer journey metrics that indicate what draws customer attention and what items they engage with to optimize assortment and allocation.
Optimize personalized experiences, such as bopis and buy & go, with real-time inventory in store and online.
Make accurate real-time decisions about color and size allocation across stores.
Improve store performance through visual displays and space utilization to promote engagement and conversion.
Get alerts for item and shelf replenishment.
Enhance inventory localization across various geographic locations, from a cluster of stores to a single-store level.
Retail assortment analytics, for example, can show that a store in one place is in need of more winter coats while in another location, the sun is shining, and customers do not engage with coats.

Applying real-time analytics, retailers can optimize stores and merchandise performance, promote sales and turnover rates, and better serve their customers. The technology is already here – all you have to do is reimagine retail and take a leap forward.

How Does Real-Time Retail Analytics Work?

Looking at the real-time customer journey data you can answer questions such as:

Availability: Is the item on the shelf?
Impressions: What items do my customers see?
Engagement: What items do my customers interact with or add to their carts?
Intent: What items do my customers try on?
Abandonment: What items do my customers choose to abandon in the fitting room?
Conversion: What items do my customers choose to buy?

Real-Time Retail Analytics with Nano Breakthrough

Disruptive technologies like the Nextie first-of-its-kind Nano Bluetooth (NanoBT) tag and cloud-powered platform empower brands to utilize real-time retail store analytics and insights to boost performance and drive results.

The NanoBT tag is the first battery-free, long-range communication technology in retail. The patented tags, attached to every piece of merchandise in the store, each have a tiny chip that automatically sends a stream of real-time data to fixed readers. They change everything by transforming merchandise into live communicators. No manual scanning, no manual anything. With Nexite you get streamlined accuracy and the bonus of reduced labor costs.

An advanced retail analytics software instantly processes the automatically-collected data in the cloud and turns it into the first brick-and-mortar e-commerce equivalent analytics. Comprehensive real-life data and insights are displayed on the Nexite Platform. The innovative and intuitive retail analytics platform gives you far-reaching capabilities to drive decision-making based on individual product performance and customer in-store journey. One source, scalable solutions.

Whether you’re a retailer, CEO, Head of Merchandising, Head of Retail, or store manager, you know your business goals. Do you want to reduce markdowns? Decrease loss prevention? Improve customer experience? Localize store assortment? Once you know what to focus on, you have it right there on the Nexite platform dashboard.

Connected Merchandise Retail Solution

Connected Merchandise turns products into communicators that automatically stream data, all the way from the factory to the warehouse, and continue on the shelf, in the fitting room or point of sale. Using real-life data from connected stores, brands can gain visibility into customer shopping behavior, merchandising insights, and store optimization.

Examine data to know what items are available or how customers engage with them. Easily see whether the t-shirt in black gets more attention than the same design in blue, or that a medium-sized blouse is abandoned in the fitting room more than the same blouse in small or large, indicating a design issue.

With Connected Merchandise, you have real-time in-store visibility, such as:

What displays are customers seeing?
What items are not selling because they are not on the shelves?
Did a style have high engagement but low conversion?
Is there high abandonment with broken sizes?
Are there styles that are often taken together to the fitting room?

You can also view the Nexite Platform to see how item-level data compares to the category or store.

Move to the execution phase and gain optimization with actionable insights, such as:

Replenish – for example, when there is not enough stock for the number of people or no full range of sizes.
Change location in store – such as when there is high conversion but low engagement.
Transfer to another store where engagement is higher- to fit store localization.

Then move forward beyond operational efficiencies and apply your new visibility to driving sales, protecting margins, and building brand loyalty.

Retail Customer Analytics

The Nexite solution can give you data aligned with the customer journey: impressions, interest, engagement, abandonment, and conversion. It can tell you if someone takes a particular item to the fitting room, and whether they purchased it or not.

Until now, retailers had no clear visibility into the in-store customer journey. From item-level information to connected stores, clusters of stores and retail chains, the new Nexite technology gives you the data you need to make data-driven business decisions.

Gaining visibility into the customer journey, in store and beyond, provides tools to exceed customers’ expectations by seamlessly giving them what they want in every touch point, digital and physical.

With customer analytics and insights, you can build stronger relationships with customers and offer personalized experiences.

Customer Journey Personalization

Customers’ expectations for experiential retail, frictionless journey, availability and personalization make the shopping experience, whether online or in the store, as important as the items on sale.

Brands must offer an omnichannel experience that is personalized, connected, and engaging across digital and physical.

Real-time inventory enables you to offer flexible fulfillment options like buy-online, pick-up in store (BOPIS) and reserve-online, pick-up in store (ROPIS). Customers want to easily check out? Return? With Nexite, you can offer your customers frictionless checkout and return options that are immediate and seamless.

New capabilities can unlock opportunities for new revenue streams that bridge the gap between digital and physical, creating a true phygital experience that even extends to the customer’s post-purchase journey.

Nexite Next-Gen Analytics

Nexite new generation of advanced fashion analytics is built for fashion brands, generating highly useful and accurate data that constantly improves with AI and ML.

It gives real-time retail analytics based on in-store data. And it leverages analytics to offer first-time next-gen actionable insights and scalable solutions, all on a single platform that updates real-life data in real-time, automatically.

Real-time item-level analytics based on the nanoBT tag and backed by a cloud-powered platform is a game changer. From tactical to strategic, Nexite real-time retail analytics deliver real value that fits your business perfectly.

Learn more about our connected merchandise platform