In today’s retail landscape, customers have more paths to purchase than before – from online shopping to brick-and-mortar stores. When the pandemic started to affect the retail business, retailers adopted new technologies and provided a multichannel option to shoppers, and that is a hybrid store.

What is a Hybrid Store?

Today, most people have an unlimited choice regarding where and how to shop. With so many shopping options, retailers are forced to adopt new strategies, which include hybrid retail. Hybrid retailing combines brick-and-mortar stores with e-commerce selling. This offers shoppers a wide range of shopping options at their fingertips, which makes the shopping experience even more seamless. But how can retailers make this happen by visually appealing customers? Well, this is simple. With planograms, retailers can monitor the shelves to keep track of the availability of items and improve the customer’s level of satisfaction. So, before opening a hybrid store, retailers need to understand the following visual merchandising strategies first in order to overcome the challenges faced by hybrid stores:

• Create a winning assortment to maximize profitability: It is always important to optimize your store for a better shopping experience for shoppers. Assortment planning defines planning which items to be placed on store shelves at what period. This is a great way to drive in more sales – for example, you can highlight leather jackets at the end of autumn instead of winter. Creating a product range by analyzing the assortment can make the shopper feel encouraged to purchase them. For online stores, if you sell cosmetics, including photos of cosmetics of different brands and skin tones can help envision customers how they will look with makeup. When your shoppers find it difficult to identify the ideal product for their skin, they will visit your store and seek more personal help to choose the items. This results in boosting hybrid store sales and maximizing profitability.
• Category management for excitement generation: Shoppers will enjoy an attractive product selection, which drives sales. Retailers can use planograms to map out where products should be executed on both store shelves and online websites and analyze how much space they are getting. This helps them plan the product flow logically so that shoppers can easily navigate throughout the store and find the items. Online stores have a wide range of categories, which include men, women and kids. Again, this will have sub-categories like dresses, tops, shirts, jackets, jeans, bags, and footwear. This helps shoppers easily identify items and make purchases. For brick-and-mortar stores, each store will have significant categories to match the customer's likes and preferences. Sometimes, shoppers get confused about the sizes of their clothing during online shopping. At such times, retailers visit stores to check their sizes and later order from the online stores.
• Use retail data to improve store performance: Retailers can ensure days of supply for items on the shelves with planograms. This provides right insights into the particular time frame based on shopper’s demand with retail data reports and helps to autofill the shelves in brick-and-mortar stores and shopping websites. Other than that, retailers can improve the store's performance by providing discounts and offers and placing complementary items together to entice customers. For example, retailers can analyze past retail data of seasonal sales to identify what items are to be stocked in order to increase impulse purchases.

Overview of Nexgen POG

Nexgen POG is a robust and user-friendly cloud-based visual merchandising tool. It is designed for quick and efficient planogramming with minimal effort. Planograms can be designed by easily dragging and dropping the products. The multi-device compatibility feature of POG allows you to obtain, share and edit planograms on any device, including your phone. It helps in designing store-specific planograms for increased product visibility and sales.

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