By Jim Lewis, CEO Enhanced Retail Solutions LLC

When I shop, it is still through the lens of my buying days. Old habits die hard. One of the things I always make sure to do is check the clearance. It shows what mistakes were made. Why did it end up there? Ugly items? Too pricy? Too many? There could be many reasons. What I want to see is if those items share any common attributes. For example, are there specific colors or sizes, fabric weights, patterns, brands, etc. The key word is “see.” But since buyers may not be able to visit all of their stores, we rely on POS reports to try and decipher that information.

KPI’s and Images

KPI’s and volume metrics are vital, but if your reports do not have images on them, you’re missing out. Images let you visually see what worked and what didn’t. And not just for sales teams. Design teams can benefit a lot from reports that focus more on visuals  than statistics. Take a look at the reports below. Both place items in quartiles based on performance. The first one shows item descriptions and the corresponding KPI’s. The second one shows images.

Style performance over time with KPI’s

Style performance over time with images.

What do the top performing items in quartile 1 have in common? How about the poor sellers in quartile 4. On the visual report you can see that black patterns performed best and brighter, bluer items performed worse.

Images on basic weekly item performance tracking reports add a lot of value. Back in the old days when I was a department manager, you had to bring a “checkout” to the weekly management meeting. The is was an item that was doing better than expected. Sometimes you would know based on input from customers or sales associates. Other times, you would see a high sell through on a report and go hunt the sales floor to find the item. Boy would I have liked to have had images on those reports.

item performance report with images

Other Uses

Other great uses include seasonal reviews and performance over time. It helps answer the question which styles tend to do the best year after year. Or don’t. Do we make the same mistakes over and over?

Finally in the age of AI, melding numbers with images can enable LLM’s to help show what attributes may contribute to sales performance- good or bad. Then assign a risk factor based on history. Every bit of information can improve productivity of the assortment mix. Not just whether to buy an item, but how much of it.