How SAIT increased organic product sales by 5% in just 45 days
SAIT, an Italian grocery retailer, was facing low profitability of specific product categories. The supermarket decided to invest in RetailerIN® in-store analytics to find out the best positioning for high-margin products.
- Actionable support for marketing and category managers
- 16% increase in engagement time
- Increase in sales by more than 5%
INTRODUCTION
SAIT is an Italian grocery retailer with a strong commercial presence in northern Italy. Founded in 1899, it currently runs approximately 100 supermarkets.
PROBLEM
The supermarket was facing some issues due to the low profitability of specific product categories and wanted to investigate more on potential causes, whether the problem was in the store layout and product placement or in the lack of product quality and of interest of customers towards those products.
SOLUTION
To achieve such a goal, we deployed our RetailerIN® technology in one of their stores, a mid-size one (~1,000sqm) located close to Trento, Italy.
RetailerIN® is an in-store intelligence solution. Starting from the high-precision tracking of shopping carts and baskets, RetailerIN® maps the full customer journey, from the moment the customer enters the store to check-out, making the physical store as measurable as an e-commerce.
RetailerIN® is also able to connect the customer's purchase path with the receipt and the products purchased. Thanks to this, it is possible to jointly analyze traffic and sales data by measuring the funnel for each category or product.
RetailerIN® path analytics provide data on customer behaviour at the level of each single area of the store from the department, aisle and down to the end-cap, in order to validate product positioning thanks to the measurement of traffic and of the engagement time.
The deployment included the installation of 14 ceiling mounted antennas and 150 tags attached to shopping carts and shopping baskets. The indoor positioning system used was provided by our technology partner Quuppa. The deployment was fast. It took about 2 hours for deployment design and planning, 4 hours for cabling and electrical work and 4 hours to install and fine-tune the actual localisation infrastructure. In less than 10 hours overall data, collected in real-time, started to flow through our cloud-based processing pipeline, and information started populating a Web-based dashboard providing actionable KPIs directly to the retailers’ decision-makers.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
RetailerIN service was used by:
- the retailer’s marketing department: to take informed decisions on the management and in-store positioning of specific brands and promotional areas.
- category managers: to gain insights on the value of the store space, based on the number of customers visiting and dwelling in the various areas of the store.
RetailerIN highlighted the presence of some cold areas - areas with low foot traffic in the store.
By mapping categories and products to the actual layout, the analysis revealed that some of the high-margin products (in particular organic food products) were positioned in a cold end-cap of the store. As a result, these products were moved to a high-traffic end-cap, as identified by RetailerIN heatmaps and zone analytics, leading to a positive outcome. In particular:
- shoppers started spending more time in the organic food area (16% increase in area engagement time with respect to the initial layout),
- 7% more customers had at least one organic food product in their basket, and more importantly
- the sales of such products grew by more than 5% over a 45 days time period. And this was not a temporary effect due to the new placement: after three months this increase in sales still persists!
Our RetailerIN® solution helped SAIT to solve an important problem directly affecting its profitability. Low conversion rates for the previously mentioned products caused the store not only to have a substantial cost due to the high volume of unsold inventory, but also to bear the risk of missing a great opportunity to increase profitability. Thanks to the valuable data provided by the ThinkIN solution, SAIT understood the real cause of the issue around low sales. Just by changing the positioning of these products to a more strategic place within the store, the supermarket recorded a significant increase in profitability.
