Frequently Asked Questions
Do you have questions? We have the answers! If your question has not been answered below, please contact us at digital@stayinfront.com and we will be happy to help you.
How can Digital Merchandising help my company?
The Digital Merchandising solution shortens the time of the Sales Representatives’ visits to stores, therefore reducing an organization’s costs. The solution is more precise and much quicker than human assessments and justification of the shelf display. Find out more here.
What can I learn about my business with StayinFront Digital that I don’t already know now?
StayinFront Digital can report over 120 KPIs from one single series of photos. Companies often don’t know how much information they are missing about their products in stores, or how much money they can save, using the Digital Merchandising module. Download our overview brochure to find out more.
Is Digital Merchandising only useful for improving the performance of sales repsentatives?
StayinFront Digital dedicates and customizes the reporting framework to deliver valuable data and insights to different departments within the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies’ organizations. Reports can be customized and crafted presenting metrics on the retail performance for multiple different departments including: sales, trade promotion, category management, key account management and marketing departments.
Are you able to share the best practice on Digital Merchandising in a variety of markets?
Yes we can. We have global customers who operate their business across different continents, in different countries, in different markets, and in a different chains. Read our latest case study here.
How can I access the Digital Merchandising results?
If you use the StayinFront TouchCG software, Digital Merchandising is one of the modules included with StayinFront TouchCG Advanced. StayinFront Digital also has its own stand-alone solution, in which you can see all of the results of Digital Merchandising. There is also an API, to connect with any system.
Who would benefit from using Digital Merchandising in an organization?
Tha data can be presented across many layers and granularity, which makes our reporting framework a powerful analytical tool. This means that many departments such as Sales Teams, Distrubutors, Promotion Management Teams and Marketing Teams would benefit from a Digital Merchandising solution.
Why should I trust Digital Merchandising and the technology behind this?
The retail industry has become more and more competitive. The manufacturers facing online retail giants, local challengers and private brands need to be on top of their all-time competitors. The amount of data available to businesses today is tremendous. In 2018, there were 33 zettabytes of data, and it is assumed that there will be 175 zettabytes in 2025. This data mine offers businesses with so many opportunities.
Can Digital Merchandsing help my sales team become more efficient?
Yes, generally store visits by the sales representatives are less time consuming and more productive. You will save time on shelf auditing, the accuracy of data collection is much better, and the reps can see the standard KPI results of Digital Merchandising in real-time and can then react immediately. Generally looking at projects across the globe, an uplift in sales can also be seen.
Trade Promotions are very hard to audit. How can your software deal with audits of short and frequently changed promotions?
We are aware that some promotions may take only a few days and are substituted by others. For this reason, we have introduced a “Promotion Calendar” – web-based easy to use a tool, where CPGs can build a promo scheduler, indicating the promo categories/products, retail chains and dates. Whenever we receive a picture from promotion audits, based on the calendar, we know which products should be visible on a specific display on a certain date and place.
For one of our current clients, we conduct price promotions audit even if they are maintained only for 2 days. The data and pictures collection is outsourced to a crowdsourcing agency, all the data goes via an integrated API, so the results are available almost as if the audits were done by the sales reps.
Your 20:20 RDI solution and Digital Merchandising seem very complementary. What are the benefits of them working together? Can you demo both solutions in action?
Yes, we have a dedicated demo instance with 20:20 Retail Data Insight and Digital Merchandising. We would be more than happy to demonstrate to you.
20:20 Retail Data Insight gives exceptional insight as a result of sales data analysis. The CPGs get information not only about items sold but can benefit from many alerts and indications of what is happening with the products listed to a specific store/chain. That is one side of the story, as the Digital Merchandising can provide addtional information about a product availability on the shelf, shelf layout. Both of the systems give much deeper root-cause analysis and can support the back-office users in making a wide range of decisions: making products more attractive as they seem to get obsolete, price discussions, distribution enhancement – shelf layout or shelf space changes towards top-sellers exposition.
Do you provide you Digital Merchandising services with external partners?
From many discussions with our clients and prospects, we see a significant push towards optimizing the size sales teams. Some companies have separated the business and sales development activities of a sales rep from market research tasks. The second is quite often outsourced, as it can save not only money but also redesign the work of experienced field force.
Stayinfront has prepared for such a situation. We have already partnered with two crowdsourcing agencies and are very close to co-operate with merchandising agency pointed by one of our clients.
We benefit from the very flexible API and are ready to integrate with any partner with open software within a few weeks. So, we are progressing with the geographical coverage and the range of information we can collect.
