Top Retail Analytics Software For 2023
Retailers must accurately target and anticipate customer needs to offer the right products at the right price and time.
And they need analytics to do that.?
Analytics can help retailers make the right marketing decisions, improve their business processes, and deliver better overall customer experiences by uncovering areas for improvement and optimization.
But what is retail analytics software? You ask.
Read on to find out!
What Is Retail Analytics Software?
Retail analytics software is a solution that offers in-depth analytical data on key performance indicators used to analyze transactions, units per customer, sales volume, return rates, and many other things.?
Retail analytics software provides valuable and effective business insights.?
Retailers were already analyzing consumer buying habits and tracking their purchases to find trends and insights before “data” became as popular as it is today. Still, retail analytics is essential for marketing and procurement choices since it provides analytical data on various levels, including the supply chain, consumer demand, and inventory management.?
The retail industry primarily focuses on the customer but still has to handle logistics and supply chains.
Retail analytics software will assist retailers in identifying their customers as well as their regional and demographic information. It will also offer insights into store items, and top-performing stores, among other things.
Retailers have already adopted data. Therefore, the task is for them to revolutionize their businesses by drawing insights from it. Retailers can fully utilize retail analytics solutions to optimize sales, productivity, and customer loyalty. They may also restructure procedures, operations, and even business structures.
Retail Analytics Software Features
Many retail analytics solutions offer the following capabilities:?
Type of Retail Analytics
Retail analytics software provides today’s retailers with unique insight into their business operations through four different tools:
Descriptive Retail Analytics
Descriptive analytics, the most popular form of data analysis, assists merchants in structuring their data such that it tells a story. It integrates unprocessed data from numerous sources (POS terminals, inventory systems, OMS, ERPs, etc.) to produce insightful analyses of past and present performance.
Analysts performed these tasks manually in Excel, collecting data from various sources, preparing it, graphing it, etc. With today’s BI technologies and integrations, you may automate a large portion of this data collection and reporting effort.
Simply put, descriptive analytics uses data to explain “what” is happening in your company. However, unless used in conjunction with other types of data analytics that can reveal patterns and connections, it offers little to address the “why.”
Diagnostic Retail Analytics
Diagnostic analytics, the most basic type of “advanced” analytics, aids merchants in using data to address the “why” of particular business issues.
Diagnostic analytics employs statistical analysis, algorithms, and occasionally machine learning to go deeper into the data and discover correlations between data points using the same raw data as descriptive analytics.
Additionally, anomalies can be identified, and possible issues can be flagged using diagnostic analytics (if results do not match pre-programmed benchmarks and business rules).
For retailers, there are essentially no stand-alone “diagnostics” options. This is because complicated retail research can be automated and future predictions made considerably more effectively using the fundamentals of diagnostic analytics (finding hidden links between variables in your organization).
Predictive Retail Analytics?
Predictive analytics informs you “what’s next” if descriptive analytics reveals the “what” of what is occurring in your company. Diagnostic analytics reveals the “why.”
This kind of analytics is the second most sophisticated.
Effective predictive analytics forecasts the future using information from both descriptive and diagnostic analytics. Knowing what has already happened and what caused it is necessary to forecast what will happen next effectively.
To forecast future trends, predictive analytics uses sophisticated algorithms and statistical techniques to identify clusters and exceptions automatically.
Retail predictive analytics requires the integration of AI, advanced mathematics, and intelligent automation to forecast the future and consider the most significant relationships effectively.
Prescriptive Retail Analytics?
Considered the last frontier of analytics, prescriptive analytics is the most sophisticated type.
Prescriptive analytics may inform retailers “what you should do next” to receive the most remarkable outcomes.?
This type of analytics can tell retailers “what” is happening, “why” it happened, and “what will happen next.”
A prescriptive retail analytics system needs to know what will happen in the future and what actions would result in the best potential outcome to provide valuable suggestions.
This is a challenging issue because there are practically endless ways for a firm to affect the data.?
The precise method used by various analytics organizations to accomplish this is a well-held secret. However, the approach must fundamentally result in suggestions that merchants can confidently implement 99% of the time.
Examples of Retail Data Analytics Applications
A significant reason for using data analytics is that your decision-making will be informed by actual facts (cold, calculating numbers) and are not simply subjective.?
Retail analytics tools are excellent tools for understanding the details that are going on in your company better.?
A retailer is likely using data analytics for identifying and measuring business metrics in a way that helps them identify where they’ll be going. As a company grows, data analysis must become a crucial part of its strategy to enhance decision-making.
Sales forecasts
Sales forecasts refer to examining historical sales data, identifying trends in sales, and predicting those sales trends. These help retailers with their inventory management, from purchasing inventory to establishing a business-wide financial target at the start of the project.?
Demand forecasting
The demand forecast is an increasingly advanced type of predictive analytics used by retail businesses. Instead of trying to forecast sales by just using historical sales data, demand forecasting uses broader data sources to estimate sales in specific periods. Demand forecasts are thus much more precise than traditional forecasts.
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Business Intelligence
For a successful data management process, companies often employ business intelligence systems to manage their business processes.?
BI software can build and display your data to provide examples of descriptive analyses. Some retail companies use BI tools using native functions in their ERP systems.?
Some retailers may use BI software such as a BI application that supports multiple data sources, appealing visualizations, and data manipulation.
Benefits Of Retail Analytics For Retailers
Retail analytics drive all retail business decisions. The retail sector uses historical data in real-time to optimize store purchases, monitor sales behavior, identify inefficiencies, forecast future demand, and optimize stocks.?
This results in a more efficient and profitable sales process through proper stocking. It also assists in personnel decisions.?
Streamlines Sales And Marketing
Data eliminates the guesswork from sales & marketing.?
Campaigning helps retailers avoid risk.?
Product development, pricing, and promotion information are all based on history, and campaign performance measures are recorded so retailers can respond to poor performance using various means.?
Hope is replaced with data that helps retailers create marketing campaigns with a sense of urgency.
Data Mapping?
The best retail analytics software removes a complex and costly job requiring extensive staff to collect and analyze data. The software maps store information automatically so that you can see trending information and make decisions easier.?
Owning Operations
Supply companies often know more about retail performance than their retailers. Analytic data allows for analyzing product trends and more minor granular changes in regions/branches.?
A supplier may notice that certain products outperform other products within a region. They could apply this knowledge to expand a product line by adding new items to their inventory.?
Retail data improves sales forecasts and inventory planning. Suppliers can analyze historical results to improve operations for upcoming financial years, meet demand, and minimize loss across regions.
Report Automation
Real-time analytics are processed into automated performance reports, giving retailers a compelling bird’s-eye perspective on their performances. This is further refined to specific regions—saving time and allowing you to make better decisions at the earliest possible stage of the planning process.
Best Retail Analytics Software
Below is a list of the best retail analytical apps available and what they can do for your retail business.
Microsoft’s primary offering, Power BI, helps you analyze market trends and buyer metrics with a rich visualization library and intuitive dashboards.?
Power BI does away with information silos to give you a single source of truth by integrating with other systems, including Microsoft Azure, Excel, and Microsoft 365.
You can draw data into Power BI or connect directly to sources with DirectQuery. The vendor provides robust modules for efficient querying, modeling, and visualization called Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View.?
You get a pre-built retail analysis sample with a dashboard and report with sales metrics of items sold across various stores and districts.
Oracle provides a Retail insight Cloud Service Suite incorporating consumer, merchandising, and sales analysis modules. These include marketing solutions, POS systems, supply chain management systems, AI and analytics, ERP, HCM, and merchandise operations.
OAC is part of the vendor’s analytics and AI offering. It consolidates sales and buyer assets from multiple systems into a single, cloud-based autonomous data warehouse.
MicroStrategy is retail analytics software with zero-click intelligence and a rich visualization library. Excellent source connectivity gathers data from files, websites, and applications.
The vendor integrates with Samsung Flip, Microsoft Surface Hub, and Google Jamboard to display business dashboards. The platform connects to AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Spotfire supports retail analytics with AI-driven visual reporting and geospatial mapping. Common data sources include big data systems, IoT devices, and streaming platforms. Interactive visualizations and customizable dashboards are available.
Qlik Sense supports retail analytics by combining buyer intelligence with sales figures. Trends analysis and forecasting help you take action on this information with responsive outreach and strategy-building.
Many value-added products from Qlik make this solution more attractive to buyers. Qlik NPrinting, Qlik Big Data Index, Qlik Insight Bot, Qlik DataMarket, and Qlik GeoAnalytics are some of them. Globalization is available with support for fifteen languages.
Bottom Line
PREDIK knows retail analytics is critical for better management of your stores and facilities. You can improve your employees’ productivity and well-being thanks to appropriate staffing planning and resource allocation.?
Our team of industry experts can create a custom build retail analytics solution for your retail business.?
You will increase customer engagement and satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the operational efficiency of your supply chain and product innovation.?
With our retail business intelligence software, we want to put these analytics at your fingertips and smooth the operation of an already hectic and constantly changing environment.
We are just on the other end of the line. Call us, and we will happily walk you through how you can achieve success with the retail analytics tool!