The challenge arises from the time delay between when an item is sold and when its associated costs are fully accounted for. This lag can extend up to 12 weeks, leaving supermarkets in the dark about their true profitability until it's too late to make necessary adjustments. This lack of real-time visibility can result in several costly consequences:
Conservative Pricing: Without accurate gross margin data, supermarkets may struggle to make informed pricing decisions, causing them to default to conservative pricing strategies and potentially miss out on profit opportunities or even lose customers due to prices that are too high.
Over-ordering Leading to Locked-Up Cash: Supermarkets may over-order slow-moving and promotional items, tying up valuable cash in unproductive inventory.
Under-Ordering: Supermarkets may understock popular items, leading to lost sales and customer dissatisfaction.
Enter Puzl, a leader in retail AI. Puzl's revolutionary approach uses AI to provide independent supermarkets with immediate insights into their fully blended gross margins up to 12 weeks in advance. This then delivers four benefits for grocers:
Always Hitting Target Margins: Because Puzl helps grocers see their margin issues in advance, they can course-correct them before the future arrives and always achieve their desired margins.
Boosting Competitiveness: Puzl gives grocers visibility into how pricing on individual SKUs affects their overall gross margins. As a result, merchandisers can get hyper-aggressive with pricing on key items while still delivering their desired margins. Stores using Puzl are seeing their price image changing within three months.
Transforming Profitability: By delivering truly low prices, stores attract new customers and boost profitability. The average Puzl user is seeing profitability grow by 0.7-1.5%.
Improving Liquidity: Because Puzl’s AI is so accurate, stores are starting to use our volume projections as their basis for promotional ordering. We’ve seen stores move from 35-40 days of stock-on-hand to 14-20 days of stock-on-hand. That has a massive impact on cash flow.
Puzl's AI-powered gross margin management platform is a transformative solution for independent supermarkets seeking to break free from the shackles of delayed data and unlock their true profitability potential. By embracing real-time insights and predictive intelligence, supermarkets can navigate the complexities of high/low pricing strategies and achieve sustainable growth and success.
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