Nature of Retail Mix

By Sai Verano

We have tackled retailing concept last time and for a more in depth discussion on feeding readers with some basic ideas on business and retailing, I decided to tackle retailing mix this time.

Retailers should give a lot of time determining their retailing mix. Retailing mix can help a lot in having a profitable business with good customer relationship with repeat business transactions. Retailing mix are the elements used by retailers to satisfy their customers' needs and wants. The more effort exerted to satisfy customers' expectation in your retail store, the more customers you will have because of word-of-mouth advertisement. Thus, making your business more profitable than your competitors.

There are four elements in retailing mix that you have to consider:

• Type of merchandise sold
• Variety and assortment of merchandise sold 
• Level of customer service
• Price of merchandise

Type of merchandise sold. The type of merchandise sold should be in line with your target market. For example, your target market are students. The one of your retailing mix element should include merchandise that would serve your student market. Thus, you have to sell school supplies like papers, ballpens, bags, scissors and other materials that students might need in their studies. Having a complete merchandise would satisfy customers more because of the convenience that you are offering considering that they don't have to go to distant malls just to buy their school stuffs from bookstores located there.

Variety and assortment. As mentioned earlier, having a complete merchandise will satisfy your customer more. Before determining the complete merchandise that you need, you have to understand variety and assortment first. Variety is the breadth of your merchandise. It is the number of merchandise categories that a retailer offers. For example, in a school supply store, the variety of merchandise that the retailer might have are the following

• paper category - where all paper products will be located
• box category - where all boxes will be located as well as other storage materials used by students
• art material category - where all art materials will be included like water colors, canvas, crayons, paint brushes, etc.

Assortment is the depth of your merchandise. These are merchandise that is under your merchandise categories (variety). It is the number of different items in a merchandise category. Using our example above, in the paper category, a retailer might have the following assortment in his paper category:

• intermediate pads
• yellow pad
• oslo papers
• art papers
• manila papers
• bond papers
• newsprint papers

Level of customer service. Customer service pretty much determine the price of merchandise sold. Customers would be delighted if you offer most of the services that they want and need. Some of the services that you can offer to your customers are the following:

• friendly and knowledgeable sales associates
• great music background for your store to be interesting to customers (you have to consider the type of music that you will play based on your target market)
• credit card services
• well-planned store layout for ease of buying
• car park
• air-conditioned store

The rule of thumb with this element is that the better the customer service, you have to increase the price of your merchandise proportional to your expenses so that your business will be profitable and that you'll stay in the business for a long time. This why, high-class or high-end stores with great overall ambiance mostly targets the higher-earning individuals in the society because they are the ones who can basically afford high-priced products in that specific store.

Price of merchandise. As discussed above, customer service pretty much determine a large fraction of product pricing. You should also remember that this element should also be in line with your target market. If your target market are students, you cannot have high-priced school supplies because students are always on a budget. It's not always an aim to have higher prices nor the best customer service in the market (though this is an advantage). You can always have the best marketing strategy to suit your capital, your target market, and your store location.