How do you know if you have the right amount of stock? Are you wasting your money on ineffective work strategies? Most importantly – is it okay to rely on your “gut feeling” while making executive decisions?

All these questions – and more – tend to plague the minds of young entrepreneurs out there who want to open up their own retail store. Whether it’s a large business or a small one, you need to practice the art of analysis real-time data and morph it to create predictive insights for the company’s future.

Thankfully, we have retail analytics software.

These are software designed to give you data on inventory levels, supply chain customer demand and sales so that crucial marketing and procurement decisions feel like a breeze. They help develop an understanding of past trends, thereby building an accurate, fact-based case to give insights for future courses. Many companies find themselves dodging competitive risk by keeping a close eye on these newfound trends, found using specialised tools integrated within this software.

Therefore, an ideal retail analytics software gives you detailed reports that can answer all your business questions. So what are the main features you should look out for?

Let’s find out:

Everything on the go

It is essential that you are able to make exact, informed decisions at any time – whether you are in the office, at a meeting or even on the road.

The business world likes moving fast, and a business that can’t keep up with it can’t hope to flourish. Therefore, you need to be agile to meet – and even exceed – the demands expected of you. Postponing and delaying decisions under the same excuse of “let me get back to my office” is a thing of the past.

Good retail analytics software can give you the edge in the competition by providing you with all the data you need at any time. Systems like Oscar POS offer you an Analytics Application, cloud-based so that all your data and reports are available both offline and online. Such advanced features serve to make your job that much more efficient.

A great Dashboard

A dashboard is where you see all the action take place; it is one layout comprehensible enough to cover all your sales metrics, analytics, and reports.

A good dashboard basically becomes your game-changer: you can get all the information you need – at one glance.

Well-developed retail analytics software will let you look deeper into the pool of information your company gathers for you, and then give answers to any questions that arise. Like that, all your sales, metrics and scorecards can be managed right at your fingertips. Oscar’s software is designed to give you all that command – and even more.

It gives you the ability to customise your dashboard to suit your coherency, by helping you sort by-products, customers or any other desirable feature. This allows you to reveal sales opportunities or even threats that could have gone unnoticed otherwise – giving you full control of your own business.

Predicting trends

It is one thing to keep your business updated in real-time – but the real challenge comes when you have to plan for the future. Stressing over the future – something you can’t control – might sound counterproductive if you think about it. But hear me out.

The ability to identify trends is tricky – especially if you have to maintain a well-balanced stock level and sizing range. In order to make quick and effective executive decisions, you need to be two steps ahead of everybody in the competition.

For that, you need a good retail analytics software that assesses the rate at which certain “trendy” products are selling through the right platform and the right reports. This will help you get a clearer picture of where your brand is heading in terms of progress, and allow merchandisers to identify an optimized and profitable product catalogue – one that can reign in sales.

Oscar offers this service with yet another edge – with the accumulation of old data and analysis, the system will create a clear picture of what will be in demand in the upcoming months.

Simplicity and Flexibility

As simple as those terms sound, they are perhaps the most important features a good retail analytics software can offer.

Simplicity and flexibility decide how well can you use the software. The best software is one that does not need every user it encounters to be an IT expert; along with that, it should give enough flexibility to be able to support questions and decisions immediately.

We can sum up a few of the most important features that need to be flexible and simple in all good retail analytics software:

• Compare sales – even in a range of time spanning years back, your sales should be comparable
• Trend analysis – check your customers time to see increases or decreases in product sales
• Sale or no sales? – see which products are your customers buying and which are getting dusty with disuse

Without a doubt, the real game-changer for any retail store is the active analysis of real-time data. Without that, you cannot build intelligent retail sales with optimized marketing strategies, sales tactics etc.

Analytics, in general, can be time-consuming, difficult, and downright frustrating to handle. Therefore it is always good to invest in a good retail analytics software so that you can make sure you run your business like a well-oiled machine.