Boomerang Commerce Extends Its Retail Solutions Suite With Prescriptive Assortment Optimization
Industry’s First Near-Real-Time, Omni-channel Assortment
Recommendation Engine Helps Top Retailers Identify Product Gaps and
Quickly Boost Profitability
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Boomerang
Commerce introduces prescriptive Assortment
Optimization, a new application within its cloud-based Retail
Solutions Suite, the first prescriptive analytics solution for
omni-channel retailers. The company’s Assortment Optimization is the
first near-real-time, prescriptive analytics and recommendation engine
to help merchants identify which popular products they are not yet
offering; suggest a priority and volume for adding these items to their
inventories; and manage these at scale. The application can be deployed
in less than two weeks, enabling retailers to boost revenues and profits
in the first month of deployment regardless how many tens of millions of
products are in their catalogues. One of the top 20 retailers in the
Internet Retailer 500, for example, used the application to identify
dozens of popular products carried by competitors and earned more than
$100 million in incremental revenue growth for the two product
categories tested.
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“Today’s retailers are battling for survival in a climate of sluggish
sales and intense competition,” says Guru Hariharan, CEO and founder of
Boomerang Commerce. “Now, analytics-driven, big-data science is removing
the guesswork from purchasing decisions, enabling omni-channel merchants
to combine their gut instincts with data-driven insights to adapt
quickly to changing consumer and competitor behavior. Boomerang Commerce
addresses this new science of retailing with the industry’s first
product assortment recommendation engine that prescribes an actionable
plan for choosing the right mix of products for the right customers in
the right channels at the right time. Our prescriptive retail suite is
the secret weapon that allows any retailer to compete effectively and
continuously – 24×7, at any scale and in any channel – against even the
most technologically advanced companies.”
Prescriptive Assortment Optimization Delivers Competitive Edge
Proper assortment management and alignment is a differentiating factor
for retailers. In
July 2015 R.W. Baird’s Colin Sebastian found that Amazon just
surpassed the 350-million mark for the number of products in its
catalog. In its cell phone category alone, Amazon increased product
assortment by 308.6 percent from Q1 to Q2 this year. Released today, the
Boomerang Commerce Retail
Analytics Report for Consumer Electronics reveals that big retailers
– Best Buy, Target, Jet and Walmart – competing with Amazon in this
category are significantly lagging behind in their product assortments.
For perspective, in the analysis of 1,200 items, the closest competitor,
Walmart, stocks only 32.93 percent of the same consumer electronics
products as Amazon, and its prices average over 7 percent higher. Target
only stocks 13.19 percent of the Amazon selection. Boomerang’s
prescriptive Assortment Optimization is designed to help retailers close
this gap between what they currently offer and how they need to change
and manage their offerings over time to stay competitive.
Actionable Assortment Recommendations Drive Revenue, Improve Customer
Experience
The Assortment Optimization prescriptive analytics technology monitors
assortment, product ratings and popularity, social media signals and
other metrics to give merchants the industry’s first assortment
management solution that is updated hourly. Based on this
up-to-the-moment data, the assortment recommendation engine prescribes
specific actions retailers can take to improve their inventories daily.
Unlike legacy solutions that produce long lists of products that a
retailer doesn’t carry, Boomerang’s Assortment Optimization tells
merchants which specific products they should carry, how much to stock
and how to price those products against competitors to maximize overall
profits and minimize cannibalization from other categories. In addition,
it helps omni-channel merchants prioritize and synchronize assortment
offerings to give customers the products they are most likely to want –
either in stores or online.
Specifically, Boomerang’s prescriptive Assortment Optimization enables
retailers to:
-
Manage Assortment at Scale: Automatically scans relevant
competitors hourly for changes in popularity and seasonal trending and
manages assortment at scale -
Improve Merchandising Decision Making: Provides actionable
recommendations for adding best-selling items not currently in the
catalog -
Increase Revenue and ROI: Enables retailers to offer the right
additional products to spur sales, deploys in less than two weeks and
saves time previously spent on manual processes -
Forecast New Product Demand and Profits: Determines how many
added products could be sold and at what price, guiding inventory
purchases -
Identify Private-Label Assortment Opportunities: Guides
retailers to profitable opportunities to include private labels in
assortments -
Track Cannibalization: Determines whether new products are
negatively affecting sales of core products -
Leverage Social Signals: Analyzes consumer-generated content
like reviews, ratings, recency of ratings and product Q&As to stay
ahead of competitors and trends -
View Easy-to-Use Dashboards: Provides modern dashboards to view
the state of the assortment at any given time
Specifications and Availability:
Boomerang’s Assortment Optimization is available now as a standalone
application or as an integrated part of the company’s Retail Solutions
Suite, which also includes prescriptive Price
Optimization and Competitor
Intelligence applications. To help retailers prepare for the holiday
shopping season, Boomerang Commerce is offering a Custom Assortment
Analysis for new customers that respond by Oct. 30.
About Boomerang Commerce
Founded in 2012, Boomerang Commerce offers the first prescriptive
analytics suite for omni-channel retailers. Seven of Internet Retailer’s
Top 50 retailers rely on its Retail Solutions Suite, which delivers
actionable decision recommendations that enable retailers to proactively
compete and boost profits at scale. Built by a team from Amazon,
McKinsey, MIT and Stanford, Boomerang applies machine learning and big
data analytics to massive data quantities across digital and
brick-and-mortar channels, and it derives superior insights and
actionable business recommendations to transform business decision
makers into retail ninjas. For more detail, please visit www.boomerangcommerce.com.
All product and company names herein are trademarks of their
registered owners.
Contacts
Boomerang Commerce
Corinna Krueger, 510-219-3634
corinna@boomerangcommerce.com
or
BOCA
Communications
Brigit Valencia, 360-597-4516
brigit@bocacommunications.com
