We’ve known for decades that retail’s future is data-driven. It doesn’t matter whether the storefront is physical or digital — robust, up-to-date commercial insights are essential for critical business decisions. And that’s before we address complex sales trends, supply chain management, and other vital demands. Thankfully, today’s retail analytics software can manage the growing needs of retailers, if they choose the right solution.

This article will explore the ways analytics tools can enhance retail performance, complete with a discussion of the most innovative platforms on the market. Let’s get started!

Want to learn more about how retail analytics impact your world? Check out our article, "Retail Analytics: The Ultimate Guide"

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What is retail analytics software?

What are the benefits of a retail analytics solution?

Examples of retail analytics platforms

SPS Commerce Analytics

BOARD

Sisense

Bedrock Analytics

How Vera can help

What is retail analytics software?

Retail analytics software is a data platform that identifies opportunities, challenges, and other insights from highly complex retail datasets. In 2021, most of these solutions integrate metrics from the entire retail experience to build a complete picture of performance — not just sales data but also category trends, distribution voids, opportunity gaps, promotions, and even foot traffic.

These kinds of insights are invaluable to brick and mortar storefronts and ecommerce shopping channels alike, but they can be hard to understand without data experience. To that end, modern retail analytics solutions tend to focus on visualization techniques that bring clarity to customer behaviors and market activity.

What are the benefits of a retail analytics solution?

• Data collation and organization: Retail analytics software excels at unifying data from disparate systems, analyzing them, and resolving discrepancies.

• Reporting: Retail data is highly complex and usually requires specialized employees to understand it comprehensively. For that reason, most solutions include built-in reporting tools that automatically create charts, tables, and market summaries.

• Time and cost efficiency: Retail analytics is a major timesink when data specialists do their work manually from a spreadsheet. Software solutions cut this time to a minimum, shaving off hours better spent on market strategy.

• Market research: Some retail intelligence tools connect to consumer data sources like Nielsen and gain new insights on target markets. Retailers can compare this data to their own performance or better understand competitor strategies.

• Logistical planning: Retail analytics goes well beyond customers to consider supply chain management, lead times, and other logistical details. Software tools can analyze this data for predictive modeling purposes, ensuring retailers are prepared for any likely scenario.

Examples of retail analytics platforms

SPS Commerce Analytics

SPS Commerce is a supply-chain management company that offers cloud-based software to retailers, suppliers, and providers. Its analytics solution identifies data trends by collecting, validating, and analyzing sales and inventory data from across any number of trading partners. SPS Commerce’s validation process is particularly notable for “cleaning’ data by detecting inaccurate or incomplete records and replacing it with accurate metrics.

BOARD

BOARD is a self-service business intelligence platform that provides tools to help retailers manage their own data. It comes with a range of built-in features, including data visualization, reporting, predictive analytics, and more. BOARD’s main selling point, however, is that end users can build unique dashboards within the software itself, focusing on any data sources and outputs they wish. That makes it ideal for retailers who want precise control over how granular or big picture the final dataset will ultimately be.

Sisense

Sisense is a business intelligence company known for developing custom APIs for specialized analytics tools. Its primary goal is to provide analytical capabilities for businesses  that any user can manage — even those who lack data expertise. At the retail level, it offers dashboards that identify customer trends, optimize sales performance, and determine the most effective sales channels for different audiences.

Bedrock Analytics

Bedrock Analytics is a retail analytics platform specifically targeting the consumer packaged goods industry. It is expressly designed to manage the heavy lifting of sales analysis by harmonizing data sources — such as Nielsen, Whole Foods portal, and other first and third-party databases — to produce insightful visualizations, charts, and presentations. These insights are organized within Bedrock as intuitive “storylines” that present the sequence of sales events and projections, culminating in a conclusion that retailers can communicate to executives and partners.

How Vera can help

As retail becomes more data-driven, retail analysts will face far more demands than ever before. Thankfully, we can help using advanced tools that integrate with your existing solutions. Vera is our comprehensive computer vision platform that empowers modern enterprises to control how their physical spaces are experienced, maintained, and monetized. By integrating with retail analytics platforms like those described above, Vera can leverage context-aware augmented reality to provide real-time spatial computing insights, deliver personalized facility experiences, and unlock valuable new revenue opportunities through digital advertising and merchandising.

Are you ready to learn more? Get in touch with Resonai today and set up a free demonstration.