An essential instrument for managing profitability, Merit Retail has the facilities for promoting a single item or an entire item category, which may be used for pushing slow-moving or old stock items, or simply because of manufacturer sponsorships, in parallel with, or in place of, traditional price discounts.

Merit Retail provides interfaces with the retailer’s inventory systems for retrieval of item categorization structures. This structure can be used for promotions on multiple levels, from a single item to any item category and subcategories. Moreover, Merit Retail can create customized item categories to support seasonal promotions or special campaigns. For example, a Summer Promotion might include items of unrelated categories in the inventory system that share the common “Summer” theme.

In addition to items or item categories, promotions may be defined at the store group level. Especially for large and diversified chains, Merit Retail’s capacity for store segmentation allows for differentiation of groups of related stores, which results in a twofold benefit:

• Better organization and monitoring of promotions
• Organization of promotional budgets, by targeting promotions based on local competitive conditions.

Merit Retail supports the development of coalition loyalty programs, covering partners of diverse industries. Given the low retail profitability margins, such partnerships can play a crucial role in the program’s viability in two ways:

• By including the opportunities for accumulating rewards (e.g. points) making the program more competitive and appealing to end customers.
• By providing rewards for goods & services not available from retailers (e.g. airline tickets) which can significantly reduce the redemption cost.

To effectively design promotions and rewards, retailers need to be equipped with information on local competitive conditions and customer feedback. What they do not need are local stores acting totally independently and possibly destroying the corporate image and profitability. Merit Retail adheres to our strategy for the centralization of promotions and policies that are implemented from head quarters and automatically distributed to all participating stores. Although Merit Retail supports individual store differentiation, this is implemented from a central administrative location, for maximum security, close control and a host of other benefits. Foremost amongst these advantages are the elimination of skilled professionals required at the stores, the simplicity of POS functionality and the speed of promotion implementations.

Merit Retail extends the intelligent segmentation capabilities of Merit Intelligence by adding options for segmentation according to the industry’s distinguishing variables. For retailers, these include: location, store and store category, item and item category, time of day and day of week shopping preferences. The particular demographic attributes of interest to retailers are also available, and in combination with behavior characteristics, offer the capabilities to develop product preference and profitability segments. This kind of information is a distinctive advantage for any retail marketer, not only for managing customer profitability, but also for exploiting their relationships with suppliers and manufacturers. They can transform their loyalty programs from a cost–bearing necessity, into a profit-making competitive advantage.

The extended capabilities of Merit Retail go hand-in-hand with our expertise in developing solid financial models; a must for measuring loyalty economics in the retail environment. We offer advice and then design and implement measurements of customer profitability and customer lifetime value, customer inter-segment migration and promotion effectiveness.