Summary

• Third-party retailers looking to optimize their assortments need access to comprehensive market data to understand where they can form profitable partnerships. 
• AI-driven technology allows businesses to spot excess stock that they can add to their range. 
• These retail analytics tools also help third-party platforms identify up-and-coming brands and market trends, enabling rapid adaptation of assortments to meet customer demand, even in unfamiliar markets. 
• Finally, retailers can utilize this technology to make customer-centric decisions when matching the pricing and positioning of their assortments. 

Introduction

As a third-party retailer, how do you identify inventory opportunities? With current supply chain issues, your product could be stuck on a boat, meaning you need new options. Or, perhaps you identified a product type that has over-performed, or a new trend you want to get into. 

Naturally, you want to capitalize and trade into products or brands that are doing well. However, finding these opportunities can take a lot of manual work. 

Access to comprehensive market insights is crucial to discovering potential, profitable partnerships. 

By using a retail analytics platform, you can more easily optimize your assortment by monitoring key markets, identifying which brands and retailers are performing well, and seeing where there is excess inventory. 

Unlocking Inventory

One way to optimize your assortment is by finding additional inventory to add to your range. With a retail intelligence platform, you get real-time visibility into inventory levels, meaning you can effectively pinpoint brands with large amounts of stock. This technology pulls together market data so you can see option counts as well as companies with high numbers of discounted products. 

High option count and discounting signal that these brands have excessive stock, which is an opportunity to unlock that inventory to add to your own sites. 

Identifying Hot Brands

Along with unlocking excess inventory to bring to your channels, recognizing up-and-coming and trending brands is another area where third-party platforms can effectively optimize assortments. 

While manually researching trends and analyzing performance can be highly time-consuming, retail intelligence, on the other hand, tracks overall market trends and quickly pulls together sell-out data to highlight brand performance across different markets. 

This data allows you to see top movers across brands and incorporate lines or products that you might have yet to consider into your range based on customer demand. 

You can also access these comprehensive metrics for markets you aren’t based in and don’t have historical experience working with. This expertise allows you to enter new markets and understand how to take a localized approach to grow your assortment opportunities.  

Matching Pricing and Positioning

Another way to optimize your assortment with AI-driven technology is by monitoring competitors to see if they are stocking the same brands at the same or different prices than you. Product matching tools in retail intelligence let you view assortment overlap, analyze if entering a new market would be beneficial, and see if competitor assortment strategies impact your performance. 

Today’s shoppers are savvier than ever and have all of the information to make informed decisions at their fingertips. If another brand prices their product more competitively than you, your customer will find out, and you will lose sales. But, with retail analytics, you can make data-driven choices to optimize your assortment accordingly, whether adjusting prices or adding products from retailers performing well with competitors.   

Moreover, once you price and product match, AI technology can help you identify opportunities to be customer-centric in differentiating your offering with rewards programs, offering excellent shipping options, etc. 

Conclusion – Optimize Your Assortment Plans Today  

As third-party retailers navigate supply chain issues and trend identification challenges, a retail analytics platform helps streamline previously manual work by providing real-time internal and market data analysis. 

Using EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform, retailers can identify opportunities to optimize their range faster, including incorporating up-and-coming brands or products, entering previously overlooked markets, and aligning pricing and positioning with competitors. 

Book a time to chat and discover how EDITED can help your third-party platform thrive.