Improving sell-through can be difficult. It’s a balancing act that requires access to clean data, visibility into sales and powerful tools. But, a few simple best practices from industry leaders can start businesses off on the right foot.

Sell-Through Best Practice #1: Become an expert in your data

Buyers don’t have time to understand the details of all their suppliers’ products. Instead, suppliers need to be experts in their products and their category. To improve sales, suppliers should also be experts in their sell-through data. Suppliers can build trust and gain buy-in on their recommendations by taking the time to understand the numbers.

Sell-Through Best Practice #2: Compare performance across retailers

Reviewing the sell-through performance of just one retailer can help suppliers boost performance in other places. For example, retail data helped a shoe company discover that sizes 7 and 13 weren’t selling well at a particular location. After sharing what they found, they made supply adjustments with their retail partners that improved their sell-through ratios. In another case, evidence that a particular colorway sold well at one retailer helped a supplier convince a different retailer to increase their stock. 

Sell-Through Best Practice #3: Identify overstocked locations

Certain retail partner locations may have too much inventory, causing sell-through to drop. When suppliers can easily see which locations are overstocked, they can work with the buyer on strategies to reduce existing stock and replace it with products that perform better. Strategies like markdowns, store transfers, or pop-up shops and events could help boost your overall sell-through. On the other hand, consider using the overstock data to renegotiate contracts with your vendors and get better terms, margin or pricing.

Sell-Through Best Practice #4: Take advantage of buyer meetings

Taking time to build better connections with your buyers can improve your sell-through. During buyer meetings, discuss strategies to handle products that aren’t performing, whether that’s running a promotion or discussing markdowns. For products that are selling well, attending buyer meetings can be an opportunity to suggest that buyers place more orders, make the most of seasonal opportunities and create a roadmap for the future.

Learn more about our approach to retail data analysis or how you can access sell-through data for all your retail partners.

It’s no surprise that young girls often associate math and science with boys, as only 24% of women make up the STEM workforce. Events like “Think Like a Programmer” are helping to break down those barriers.

“Think Like a Programmer” is a full-day event for Girl Scouts ranging from grade K-3. This event provides young minds to take part in practical exercises to help them understand the fundamentals of programming, jumpstart their coding skills, and continue their dedication to STEM opportunities.

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. STEM begins during childhood education and stays dynamic throughout college and beyond. This curriculum focuses on converging math and science with hands-on experiences to apply “real world” knowledge in the classroom and prepare them for success in the future.

Since 2019, SPS Commerce has partnered with Girl Scouts River Valleys twice a year to bring this event to our local community. The girls will use their recently developed knowledge and skills from this event to earn their “Think Like a Programmer Award Badge.”

“Events like this give young girls confidence in their abilities and an interest in technology, at a critical age of development. We can get these girls excited about programming early enough to make a difference as they get older and think about careers. If we want more women in computer science, we need to get them hooked when they are young. This event helps build the future we want to see,” says Amy Patton, VP of Technology at SPS.

March 2020  Event

On Saturday, March 7, 2020, SPS hosted “Think Like a Programmer with SPS Commerce.” More than 30 Girl Scouts, their troop leaders and, SPS employees came together at SPS headquarter, eager to learn how a programmer really does think.

The Girl Scouts collaborated directly with the SPS Women in Tech team to witness first-hand how their learnings would help them develop the necessary skills for prospective future careers.

“As a girl, experiences like this led to my own future as a programmer; it was wonderful to be part of exposing that same possibility to so many more young women for the future of all women in technology,” Charlotte Countryman, SPS Women in Tech member, reflects on her own path to becoming a programmer.

The Women in Tech group consists of more than 60 employees in the Minneapolis office that continuously live out the SPS company value “Give Back.” Similar to their work with Girl Scouts River Valleys and other local organizations, the Women in Tech team is one of many groups at SPS that provide opportunities similar to “Think Like a Programmer with SPS Commerce” throughout the year.

Thank you to all those that made this event such a success!

As a company, SPS Commerce is dedicated to giving back to our local communities and encourage volunteerism and philanthropy among our employees. If you would like to learn more about what SPS Commerce does, visit this page.

If you’re the 800 pound gorilla that is Walmart or Amazon, or even Nike and Coca-Cola, you can throw your weight around more with your trading partners and get them to comply with your policies and practices. For example, Walmart is getting stricter about enforcing “on time in full” requirements from their suppliers and getting those vendors in line for it to successfully compete with Amazon. When Nike reduced the number of retailers it works with to focus primarily on its 40 biggest retail partners in the U.S., those retailers reaped a bit of a windfall, but you can be assured that they’re all trying to follow this big brand’s requirements to the letter in order to ensure that number doesn’t fall to 39.

Chances are you don’t have the clout to be able to strong arm your trading partners into compliance. But you don’t really need it. Collaboration with a network itself — the actual cooperative sharing of information, responsibilities, ideas and promotional efforts — promises big enough business value for trading partners to engage.

Working closely with your trading partners can make many aspects of delivering on consumer expectations effortless. When more accurate, efficient, streamlined and automated your trading partner relationships are, the easier it is for the consumer to make a purchase and get the item they want. Delivering on those expectations can turn them into repeat customers, which leads to more sales and more profitability for all the links in the retail supply chain, and ultimately achieve profitable omnichannel execution. With the right systems in place, you and your trading partners can:

• Calculate more accurate forecasts
• Take advantage of on-time discounts
• Reduce overstocks, stock-outs and backorders
• Identify where all sources of inventory are located
• Make more strategic pricing and promotion decisions
• Streamline logistics and lower costs associated with shipping
• Communicate accurate product details across the ecosystem
• Identify trends more quickly, from regional level to store level
• Create more profitable assortment and product offering choices
• Practice tactical or lean inventory practices, such as Just In Time (JIT)
• Gain greater visibility into inventory throughout your network (and beyond)
• Execute more complex order fulfillment processes (buy online pickup in store (BOPIS or BOPUS), ship from store, etc.)
• And more.

Deliver on consumer expectations

When more collaboration is available across a trading partner network, more complex processes and strategic choices are possible to execute more efficiently and grow the business. Apply tools to calculate the closest and cheapest shipping options for e-commerce, including whether to ship from a distribution center or ship from a store that could be closer. Automatically order more product when existing stocks hit a predetermined level. Plan a more precise reverse logistics process for when customer returns do happen to reduce costs and get the inventory back to the best location for sale or liquidation.

Speaking of complex processes and strategic choices, many retailers and vendors seek to participate in drop shipping programs. Such relationships require close collaboration in order to set up all the systems needed to get the order from the retailer’s e-commerce website through to the vendor’s order fulfillment system and out for delivery. Once the item is on its way, it takes cooperation for the drop ship vendor to keep the retailer updated on the shipment, so the end-customer can track the package through transit.

Ensuring inventory, product availability

With more data shared across trading partner networks, it opens up the opportunity to drive more sales which makes both retailers and suppliers happy. With analytic applications, retailers can provide suppliers with visibility into how their items sell-thru at the store level along with consumer feedback, so they can make adjustments to product offerings. On the flip side of the coin, suppliers and vendors have insights into how their products perform with all of their retailers and may be able to offer assortment advice.

Smaller retailers can also benefit from giving their larger suppliers a look at their own point of sale (POS) data, because it can lead to greater understanding of how to better market and promote those products. More effective promotional execution means more sales for the retailer, which also benefits the supplier. And if there’s a 3PL or freight carrier involved in the process, they can benefit from closer, more consistent relationships among their trading partner networks as well.

Shipping and carrier rates

With more trusting relationships, trading partners may be willing to negotiate on shipping and carrier rates. More precise inventory management and potential changes in purchase quantities could mean changes to LTL (Less Than Truckload) and TL (Truck Load), which could in turn impact shipping charges and carrier rates. A drop ship vendor may offer special shipping rates to retailers that meet a certain threshold of orders or order values. Changes in relationships with 3PLs may lead to adjustments as well.

Collaboration’s value among a trading partner network has the potential for accelerating returns.  Imagine the spirit of collaboration explored here and multiply it across every trading partner in a network. What would a 10% improvement look like for each partnership, whether it’s on-time deliveries, better communication, reduction in order errors or improved total sales? What would it mean if more accurate, more granular and detailed data was exchanged between you and everyone in your supply chain?

How much higher can your business reach when all of the links and cogs surrounding it are running as efficiently and accurately as possible, working together to ensure product availability, appropriate variety and consumer experience satisfaction?

Working together in a collaborative manner by sharing POS and inventory data as well as leveraging the automation power of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions can benefit everyone in the supply chain. To learn more about trading partner networks and how to utilize them, please ask to speak with one of our omnichannel specialists.

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This is the basic concept behind the Value-Added Partnership. The idea for Value-Added Partners (VAP) is based on the concept of Value-Added Resellers (VARs). An example of a VAR is an IT company that resells software and hardware with additional customer services included, such as uptime checks or offsite data storage. Car dealerships can also be VARs by adding additional features, such as custom parts and services, like special oil changes.

For many years, success favored the giant companies because they had the most power. Now that’s all changing – the most agile businesses to bend to consumer expectations are winning. Thanks to low-cost-but-more-powerful computing and communication, plus being able to react and pivot more quickly than large companies, the competitive advantage is tipping back toward the smaller companies and the natural partnerships that can develop between them. Each company provides one part of the value-added chain, and coordinates its activities with their other partners. As a result, each company plays a role in the success of the other participants in the chain.

But you don’t just want to enter into such a partnership without some research. You want to make sure your VAPs are technically and financially strong business partners. You want to be able to trust them too, as some partners in VAP relationships will even share information, assist each other, and cooperate on orders for large clients.

The information sharing can include sharing order data, sales information, or product information. The technology that makes it possible for retailers and suppliers to communicate can also help VAPs communicate more easily with each other.

How can suppliers evaluate value-added partners?

This is where SPS Commerce’s Retail Community network can come into play. This tool can be used by retailers to find new suppliers, vendors to locate new retail partners, manufacturers to find raw material suppliers and make other valuable connections. Each member of the network has a business profile that describes a lot about their products, businesses and available services. Additionally, considering asking these questions of each prospective value-added partner.

What is this new company’s niche? What kinds of consumers and customers do they attract? Will you be reaching the same kinds of customers, or will you each be increasing your overall reach?

What’s the health of their sales? Are they fairly healthy, or do they fluctuate in their revenue? Uneven revenue can cause you some revenue problems of your own, so make sure you consider what potential financial health problems might do to you.

How automated in their supply chain? Do they use EDI, or is everything still being entered by hand? Do they even have an ERP system in place? Is it compatible with yours, or do you have a system that can translate? Fast and accurate communication is key to a good value-added partnership.

Are they any good at marketing? How well do their own promote products, and do they have a plan for promoting your products? Does the retailer’s product mix compliment or competes with your product line? You want VAPs to align well with your business so you can benefit from their network as much as they can benefit from yours.

Are they hard to do business with? What are your business and technology requirements? What are their business and technology requirements? How do they match up? Define what either parties would need to do in order to work a viable partnership, estimate what it would cost to do so and evaluate whether the investment would be worth the returns.

Finding Value-Added Partners can go a long way to extending the reach and territory of any supplier reaching into the retail community. And while you’re gearing up for the busy season, it’s a great time to look towards the future and put together a plan with other like-minded suppliers to attract retail buyers.

If you would like to learn more about our Retail Community, EDI, or other cloud-based software products that can help your company grow and prosper, please ask to speak with one of our associates.

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It didn’t take long before retailers realized they needed to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon. That has changed the larger retail landscape, as consumers use their laptops and mobile phones more and more often to buy from those retailers. This has led to the development of omnichannel strategy, where consumers expect their brick-and-mortar experience to match their online experience across their website, social media and more, which has forced retailers to make sure the online world and physical presence fit seamlessly together. In turn, retailer expectations of vendors has been raised as well.

Retailer expectations of suppliers

Now suppliers and vendors have been asked to up their own game to satisfy retailers’ and consumers’ expectations revolving around omnichannel experience. That means providing transparency into their inventory, streamlined communications through EDI, visibility for shipments, speed in all processes and working as a collaborative team player to make end-customers happy. It has also led to drop shipping from a suppliers’ distribution center directly to consumers or a retail store.

Regardless of channel and method, vendors and suppliers have more shipping and delivery options and expectations than ever before. E-commerce has also led to more features and technologies being provided to, and expected of, both suppliers and retailers.

For example, just a few short years ago, it was really only the big retailers who were asking for drop shipping from their suppliers. They didn’t want to ship cases into a warehouse only to ship out individual orders; they wanted their suppliers to manage that for them, and save those additional transportation costs. So they found a couple suppliers willing to take on drop shipping for them as part of their new e-commerce sales channel. That worked so well, now many retailers are asking each supplier to manage drop shipping inventory for them, and that number is only growing.

More services, more collaboration

It’s not just drop shipping, though. More and more retailers are relying on their vendors and suppliers to provide accurate and detailed item data on products. After all, the distributor has insights into their category that a retailer doesn’t have – but it also works in reverse, too, as retailers have data that the vendors might not have. The collaborative exchange of information between retailers and vendors can help both to sell more, make more customers happy and gain more success.

Such retailer and vendor partnerships and collaboration requires a considerable amount of trust. When vendors ship orders directly to customers, how well they perform is a direct reflection on the retailer who made the sale. Timeliness, accuracy and visibility are all incredibly important for making sure that the purchase is a good experience.

Proof is in the data

When vendors fulfill on retailer expectations and consumer expectations and have the numbers to back it up, they can win more business from buyer trading partners. When you have data that show you’re fulfilling your promises with a 99.8% on-time delivery, or 99.3% accuracy rate, retailers will want to work with you.

You can also make recommendations to retailers of what products they might consider carrying in their stores, based on the sales volume of certain products in specific regions, they may want to carry those products on their store shelves.

Now is the time to perfect your drop shipping services and build out your analytic tools to track to data so when the next negotiation rolls around, you’ll be armed with the data you need to help retailers reach their new goals. You may want to use your own internal analytics too, rather than relying on your retailers’ numbers, especially if you sell products to more than one retailer.

You may even want to roll in the postal codes you’re delivering to, in order to compare the vendor drop ship orders to their in-store sales to see which performs better. Many vendors don’t want to do drop shipping if the retail stores start doing their own fulfillment. They would rather manage bulk shipping, and leave the fulfillment to the retailers.

Of course, you won’t actually know how the numbers look until the holiday shopping season is over, but you need to be prepared to start collecting them. SPS Commerce can show you how with our point of sale analytics tools. We can help you narrow in on specific regions or even cities and zip codes, or help you compare retailers’ total sales. And we can even help you alert retailers to performance issues at the store level.

To learn more about how vendors can meet retailer expectations, please ask to speak with one of our staff to guide you through our system.

Get products in the hands of more consumers.

Automate processes, integrate systems, manage item info, gain data insights and more with SPS solutions.

FIND BUYERS

IMPROVE SALES