The practical core
Part 2 is the practical core of Smart Retail. It is a set of ideas, suggestions and tips on doing retail, all taken from observations of the consistencies present among the world’s best retailers. I’m going to concentrate on three areas: team, customer and store.
There is no order of importance as each is as important as the other. When it comes to store, I will make some distinctions between types of stores and give specific thoughts on virtual as well as physical stores. Philosophically, I am more convinced than ever that the fundamental principles of customer and store apply to every type of store, whether that’s a one-button, one-product Amazon Dash store located in a customer’s kitchen in Arkansas, or if it’s a retail palace on the North Circular in London.
What gives?
Inevitably, there is more that could be covered than is possible without extending your reading time unreasonably. The two areas I don’t cover in detail are buying and the maths of retailing. The first is because buyers are all unknowable lunatics, highly prized but insane and what they do has rarely been adequately captured in print. What I’ve tried to do is cover principles of product to at least get you to the point where you understand what you ought to be selling as a business, how that should be priced, at least philosophically, and why customers might engage with that product.
I would love to cover retail maths because it is, possibly, even more important than the subjects I do cover, in that without it you are hamstrung. But it would take a whole (possibly quite dry) book to take a person from scratch to comfortable competence and this isn’t that book. Instead, I am assuming that you at least understand general sales and stock maths and that you can apply the advice and ideas I go through using existing knowledge.
I also know that many readers are retailers of many years’ experience for whom the maths is like a second language. Just in case you do want a crib sheet, EDI Provider maintains a useful list of all the core retail equations and calculations: https://goo.gl/KlO10.