Author: Omprasad Devadiga

Deliver a true Omni-channel Customer Experience through the Retail Store of the Future

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

The retail industry has always been full of challenges. With the COVID-19 pandemic particularly highlighting these challenges, today’s market conditions combined with the fast-evolving customer expectations dictate that retailers should fast-track digital innovation and transform traditional business models.

Customer experience is the new competitive battleground, and those retailers who are able to harness the power of data and technology to enhance the customer experience are winning in this battle of growing customer loyalty and trust and gaining greater market share. Acting on customer insights and implementing changes in processes, technology, and mindset for the digitalization of customer journeys gives you the necessary momentum for long-term success in retail.

 

Transition to the low-touch digital store

In spite of the significant growth of the e-commerce channel, stores remain key touchpoints in the customer shopping journey and are still driving between 70% and 90% of total retail sales. In-store retention and engagement are critical to building loyalty and driving a higher volume of sales. However, your customers expect digital experiences that go beyond shopping, while always ensuring their safety.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software supports retailers in offering convenience services, such as mPOS-enabled queue management solutions and frictionless payments. These help ensure your customers have a pleasant, minimum-touch shopping experience, and ultimately spend more. Mobile POS solutions in your stores enable you to improve customer flow and ensure safety measures like social distancing are followed.

Coupled with user-friendly, innovative retail digital transformation solutions such as Endless Aisle (digital product catalogue), in-store advance orders, and targeted promotions, you can be certain of supporting in-store digital customer journeys and improving in-store customer engagement. From development and deployment to managing periodical updates to your retail software suite, ETP’s consulting, global deliveries, and support teams will take care of every step and provide promised results.

 

Offer superior omnichannel shopping experiences to your customers

Retailers’ growth drivers are now more strongly linked than ever before to their capacity to integrate the new journeys of digital customers. However, many retailers still manage their offline and online sales channels in silos.

Our expert business consultants leverage our integration capabilities to help you map customer journeys and unify all of your sales channels, order management, payment processing, loyalty programs, delivery options, and more, both in-store and out-of-store. This will enable you to deliver the true omnichannel experiences that your customers expect.

 

Empower your workforce to succeed in its new role

As the role of the store is reinvented, in-store employees will have a part to play as personal advisors to shoppers. With ETP Mobile Store, you can give your employees access to the tools and applications they need to succeed in these roles. These will be accessible from anywhere through secure mobile terminals and cover CRM, inventory management, order management and more.

There is an ongoing competition to recruit, retain and develop the best talent, particularly among millennials, who value a great employee experience. ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions can improve the collective knowledge and performance of your teams by facilitating better teamwork.

Additionally, retailers can avoid any skills gap resulting from high workforce turnover and give proper career perspective to their employees. The Orange Digital Academy and User Adoption Program offers flexible solutions that help you ensure your employees are trained and aware of new policies and processes, including the implications of new COVID-19 regulations.

 

Enhance your operations and drive growth with leading-edge technology

With consumers seeking the best of both worlds between physical and online shopping, retailers must prepare for a hybrid future. Adopting emerging technologies will help them transform their value propositions with respect to how they can improve their customer’s life, and make it easier and more fulfilling. A bold digital transformation strategy requires immense collaboration across technology ecosystems but it will help ensure success for the retail business in the long term.

Retailers typically operate a complex distributed network of business locations: offices, stores and distribution centres. At the stores, in addition to the POS, they put tablets, video, digital signs and other technologies to work simultaneously. These technologies are having a profound impact on the business performance and customer loyalty. It is crucial to ensure that the locations, channels, and devices are not operating in silos, and the data collected by each of them is not stored individually. Also, the new solutions should be able to access and understand the data stored in the legacy systems quite easily.

Balancing inventory assortments, managing orders and maintaining uniform pricing across channels requires you deploy retail technology that gives you one version of the truth about your inventory and your customers irrespective of the device or channel.

ETP Omni-channel Retail Software helps you apply more granular levels of control for specific business processes along the end-to-end integration, security and build/deploy service delivery chain. With omni-channel orchestration, you can directly determine the most preferred method of order fulfilment for each customer, personalise promotions for them based on merchandise, location, time and/or customer hierarchies, and manage third-party integrations with ERP/legacy/such other systems. This ensures you can deliver the agility and responsiveness required to enhance the shopping experience at all your business locations.

Furthermore, ETP Connect allows you to bridge your online and offline channels, costs and IT estate while ensuring that all services work in harmony with the required governance level.

ETP Group Partners with Matahari to Accelerate Its Retail Digital Transformation Journey

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

ETP Group Partners with Matahari to Accelerate Its Retail Digital Transformation Journey

ETP proudly announces a new win: Jakarta, Indonesia, 16th May 2022

ETP Group is proud to announce a new partnership designed to grow and enhance Matahari’s ability to deliver world-class, omni-channel experiences to its customers. PT Matahari Department Store Tbk (“Matahari” “LPPF.JK”) and ETP Group – both organizations will be deeply engaged with the retail industry and consumer journeys.

Matahari, Indonesia’s first and leading modern department store, has a deep legacy in Indonesian retail. Over the years, Matahari has established itself as a truly groundbreaking national brand with 140 large format stores in 77 cities across Indonesia and has a growing online presence through MATAHARI.COM.

ETP Group is an Omni-channel Retail Software company serving market leaders in 24 countries across the Asia Pacific, India, and the Middle East. ETP has successfully implemented its V5.5 Omni-channel platforms for 500+ brands. ETP’s unique value proposition is its ability to consistently deliver enterprise class omni-channel retail solutions to its customers and build long-term strategic partnerships.

Matahari has a clear vision of becoming the leading omni-channel lifestyle retailer as a customer-centric ‘House of Specialists’ and the Category Authority in lifestyle apparel, footwear, and cosmetics. To grow its consumer base, rejuvenate and expand its omni-channel presence and improve customer experience, Matahari has chosen ETP as its technology partner.

Speaking about the partnership with ETP, Mr. Terry O’Connor, Matahari – Chief Executive Officer says, “We plan to grow loyal customers through great customer experiences by expanding our omni-channel footprint, harmonizing physical and digital experiences for customers, and increasing customer loyalty and retention. ETP will help us with this. We selected ETP because we feel that a partner should essentially be an extension of Matahari and ETP understands our vision, values, and governance well. We believe they will help us achieve omni-channel sales growth. ETP has state-of-the-art retail and digital platforms that will support us in our omni-channel transformation and help us benefit from the full potential of data analytics coming from ETP technology.”

Mr. Naresh Ahuja, Chairman and CEO of ETP Group says, “ETP is extremely pleased to partner with Matahari in Indonesia. ETP has executed many retail projects where companies have transformed from pure physical retailers to multi-channel retailers and then to omni-channel retailers. ETP’s retail, e-commerce, and omni-channel platforms and continued innovations will support Matahari to meet its goals of business growth and delightful customer experiences. ETP is aligned with Matahari’s goals of creating amazing customer experiences, store network optimization, operational excellence, and omni-channel operations. We look forward to partnering closely together and doing great work at Matahari.”

The Matahari leadership team has conducted a detailed evaluation through which it selected ETP as a partner to achieve the following strategic objectives:

  • To implement an omni-channel POS system that can manage a high volume of transactions, as well as their CRM and loyalty programs
  • To implement a system that can manage complex promotions, sales, and reports of both direct purchase and consignment vendors
  • Enable data consolidation and analysis across stores and external marketplaces
  • To improve staff productivity so that Matahari can reward its employees more creatively and become the ‘Employer of Choice’
  • To work with a partner that has a history of successful modernization and ongoing R&D that will continue to innovate in the retail software space to bring the best of physical and digital retail together

To help Matahari realize this vision, ETP will implement its enterprise-class V5.5 Omni-Channel Retail Software Solution that seamlessly integrates point of sale (POS), customer relationship management (CRM), loyalty management, merchandise and inventory management, promotions planning, and business intelligence (BI). ETP V5.5 allows the scalability required for business growth. ETP has enabled brick and mortar retailers to embrace unified commerce and drive their brands and customer relationships seamlessly.

ETP V5 Omni-channel Retail Solutions will support Matahari to deliver a unified omni-channel experience with features such as Click and Collect, Click and Deliver, Endless Aisle, and a holistic view of inventory and the customer. This will be done using real-time integration of ETP’s POS, CRM, and Promotions engine with web stores and marketplaces using ETP Connect’s secured web services framework, which can see and manage order flows.

About ETP Group

ETP (etpgroup.com) is an Omni-channel Retail Software company serving market leaders in 24 countries across the Asia Pacific, India, and the Middle East regions. ETP’s solutions include omni-channel orchestration, POS, Mobility, CRM, Marketing Campaigns, Promotion Management, Order Management, Product Information Management, and Analytics. ETP has successfully executed over 500 enterprise software projects for 500+ brands. ETP’s unique value proposition is its ability to consistently deliver enterprise-grade omni-channel solutions to its customers and build long-term strategic partnerships spanning decades.

About PT. Matahari Department Store

PT Matahari Department Store Tbk (“Matahari” or “Company”, https://www.matahari.com/corporate/) has a deep legacy in Indonesian retail. For over 60 years, Matahari has provided the growing Indonesian middle class with quality, fashionable and affordable apparel, beauty and footwear products. Matahari is very proud of its support to the Indonesian economy, employing more than 30,000 people and partnering with 600 local suppliers, as well as international suppliers. The Company has received many industry recognitions – nationally and internationally – including Top 3 Best Non-Financial Sector and Top 10 Mid-Cap Issuers ASEAN Corporate Governance Awards 2021, Top 50 Most Valuable Brand Awards 2021 from Brand Finance Indonesia, Top 500 Retail Asia Pacific from Retail Asia, Euromonitor & KPMG; Brand Asia 2018 – Top 3 Most Powerful Retail Brands in Indonesia from Nikkei BP Consulting, Inc. and WoW Brand Award 2019 – Gold Champion from MarkPlus Inc. The Company has also received the Netizen’s Brand Choice Award 2018 from Warta Ekonomi. All of these awards reaffirm the Company’s position as one of the leading, most dynamic, and trusted companies in Indonesia.

Omni channel Retail Solutions

Do You Know the Importance of Sales per Square Foot in Retail?

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

What is meant by Sales per Square Foot?

Sales per square foot is a metric commonly used by retail organizations to calculate the amount of revenue generated per square foot of retail space. Sales per square foot can be used to determine the sales efficiency of retail outlets.

What is the formula for Sales per Square Foot?

Sales per Square foot = Revenue Generated / Total Retail Space

where,

Revenue Generated refers to the amount of sales generated over a defined period

Total Retail Space is the total area of all retail outlets, whether self- or franchise-owned, used by the organization

e.g., an apparel brand generated $45,000,000 in sales revenue through 15 retail outlets last year. The average square footage of each outlet is 100,000. Therefore, the sales per square foot for the last year will be,

Sales per Square Foot = $45,000,000 / (100,000 x 15) = $30 per square foot

What is the importance of the Sales per Square Foot metric?

Sales per square foot can be used to determine the efficiency of a brand/company’s retail shops. A higher sales per square foot indicates a retail store that demonstrates greater efficiency and performance. For example, a retail company that generates $90/square foot would be deemed much more efficient than a company that generates $30/square foot.

Like many other financial ratios, sales per square foot too should be used in relative terms. The ratio should be compared to the figure for similar competitors and evaluated along with other metrics.

What can retailers do to increase Sales per Square Foot?

1. Improve the store layout

A weak sales per square foot figure could be due to poor utilization of the available retail space.

For example, there may be a retail space that is cluttered with damaged goods or unnecessary equipment. As such, improving store layout by removing the spoiled, inoperative or unnecessary assets from the retail store could help to increase sales per square foot. Creating an engaging environment inside the store that allows your customers easy and adequate access to well-lit trial rooms, installing clear and informative signage, prices and way-finding to reduce retail shopper confusion, simplifying display units, and establishing appropriate atmospherics to suit the industry type and customer preferences within that sector are all key components that can lead to increased sales.

2. Improve the planogram of the store

A planogram is a schematic drawing or plan for displaying merchandise so as to maximize sales. It can be a diagram or model that indicates the placement of retail products on shelves, as well as the layout for the entire store. Planograms are important for optimizing the visual merchandising for your brand, organizing and tracking an item’s placement on shelves, analysing retail performance, and identifying the potential reasons for changes in your sales and marketing strategy.

When done right, planograms can do wonders for your brand. Combining your planogram with store level sales data, you can use sales numbers to identify high-selling and low-selling products at each store. You can then either tweak your planogram to have your most popular items in your brand’s most valuable shelf spaces or adjust your shelf positioning to boost the performance of products that may be lagging, and start seeing new levels of retail sales.

3. Carry the latest products

Every buyer today is a digital customer with ever-increasing expectations for quality and a hassle-free and unified shopping experience across their digital and in-store activities. An important aspect of this experience is the ready availability of the right products and the right variants of colour, size, model, or style/pattern. Stocking up on what sells is a sure-fire way of increasing sales. Additionally, being able to present your entire virtual and warehouse inventory in a single screen to your customers avoids lost sales due to stock-out situation at a store. Contrariwise, carrying too much stock of products that are unappealing to customers could lead to poor sales per square foot

4. Invest in employees

Employees are drivers of sales in a retail store – store employees directly impact customer satisfaction and sales. For example, employees with a strong knowledge of company products are in a better position to cross-sell and up-sell the company’s products. As such, providing employees with adequate training (product knowledge, up-selling and cross-selling tactics, etc.) goes a long way in improving sales per square foot.

5. Invest in the right tech

Retail is an industry that never stops moving and must adjust to evolving customer expectations in real-time. Growth projections estimate that by 2023, retail sales will exceed $29.7 trillion worldwide. Modern retail technology is changing everything about shopper expectations and retail operations. The customer journey is becoming increasingly varied and personalized – customization that shoppers have come to expect. Implementing the right technology solutions enables you to maximise the retail experience for your customers by offering them a range of benefits such as personalized promotions, endless aisle functionality, freedom from sluggish checkout lines, secure and contactless payment transactions, click and collect or doorstep delivery options, instant earn-and-burn of loyalty points, being able to share their feedback across channels, and many more.

Conclusion

With the advent of e-Commerce, even though consumers can now order products of their choice from their phones and have them delivered to their home/preferred location easily, the importance of sales per square foot analysis in the overall business performance optimization cannot be denied or ignored. It can not only help improve store productivity, but also turn your customers into brand loyalists leading to higher sales revenues.
For companies that utilize online as well as physical stores, it is important to gauge the efficiency of the company correctly as the sum of sales per square foot area of their physical retail space and their online conversion rate.

Grow Your Omni-Channel Retail Business with ETPs Omni-Channel Retail Software

ETP’s omni-channel retail software is here to simplify and accelerate your retail processes. It has been successfully enabled retailers across various verticals to drive traffic to stores, increase sales per square foot and reduce operational costs in the long term, thereby creating an excellent value for retailers and end customers.