How to Take Competitive Advantages from Product Assortment Optimization Process

In the competitive world of retailing, web scraping is a must-have approach to be two steps ahead. Based on data collected with the help of web scraping, companies may build attractive marketing campaigns, handle price optimization, manage investments, and develop a product assortment strategy.

By analyzing customers’ preferences and behavior, retailers and e-commerce business owners can develop an effective assortment optimization to connect businesses and their buyers closer. This article will explore product assortment and how to build a proper e-commerce assortment strategy.

The product assortment optimization process refers to deciding what types of products should be offered to buyers according to their preferences to enhance revenue. In other words, your product assortment is the mix of goods that you pick out to maximize the chances of selling. Fast-moving consumer goods mainly sell more, while others, like jewelry or electronic items, sell slower, though they provide higher profits. Therefore, a perfect product assortment strategy should be an intelligent mix of these two product types. Assortment optimization also extends to distribution channels. This term refers to the assortment optimization process in both online e-commerce platforms and physical stores, enabling planning the marketplace and building further sales and marketing strategies. Based on the product line’s sales potential, retailers may consider extra market space or vice versa to decrease the product line if it is not profitable.

A successful assortment strategy doesn’t mean offering your customers an assortment of random items. To build a complete assortment strategy, you must balance your product offerings with your actual business goals. So, you have to understand the basics of your product line, including its breadth and depth. To build a worthwhile assortment strategy, consider the following steps.

Research is fundamental to any strategy. Market research helps to identify the target audience by collecting and analyzing data and to gain a better understanding of what you offer to your customers based on specific figures. Competitor analysis helps you learn about your competitors, their products, and prices to estimate how your product can stand out from competitors. Customer analysis provides you with helpful and worthful insights about your customers’ preferences and purchase habits that will help you gather feedback about your actual product assortment and change it correspondingly.

Once you are finished searching and analyzing, check your product list to understand which one has a bigger chance of being sold. For example, if you offer products currently in style, you might have too much stock out of trends. In this case, you can do two things to keep your sales steady over a short to medium period:

• Offer stable trends products.
• Choose products so that surges in sales of another complement sales dips in one product.

Don’t forget about the essential part of the product assortment. The search feature helps users to find the product they’re looking for. Customers use search to find the required product, which shows their intention of purchasing. So make sure you are providing easy-to-use search functions and the right keyword combinations for product titles that can lead to your product page. To check what keywords people mostly search for, use Google’s Keyword Planner.

The assortment planning helps guarantee assortment enhancement. Consuming behavior changes; that’s why retailers have to keep assortment data up-to-date and use it upon necessity. Generally, it is recommended to conduct practical testing to ensure that inventory investment is worthy. Start testing with a few resources to check the customers’ reactions. Only by studying assortment data, you’ll make the right decisions. Then you can move forward with investing more.

The product assortment is a whole bunch of product sets and lines that have different characteristic features and are offered by one company. Synonyms of product assortment are product mix and product portfolio. The assortment defines a variety of retail stocks.

E.g., let’s take a female clothing manufacturer as an example. The product assortment of this manufacturer consists of three major product types: dresses, shirts, and pants. They offer three lines of dresses: formal, every day, and party dresses. Each of these types comes in several varieties, e.g., maxi, mini, and midi by length; winter and summer dresses by season, etc. The number of these varieties is the length of the product line, and the number of colors and sizes of each variety is the broad line’s depth.

It is a system that helps retailers to control their assortment and decide which parts of the assortment to choose for promotion to maximize sales. To create an assortment optimization plan it is recommended to use analytics tools and conduct sales research to get information on which products get more sales by seasons, locations, and user personas.

Optimizing product assortment will undoubtedly establish a connection between retailers and their customers. Additionally, while buyers are experiencing your product line, you can gather data for further product and service experimentation. Specifically, web scraping is a win-win approach to collecting valuable content and building the best product assortment strategy. At DataOx, we have been in the web scraping industry for six years and have helped over 1,000 clients, from startups to large enterprises. Schedule a free consultation with our expert to find web scraping gurus ready to assist you with your web scraping project.