Do you follow an assortment strategy for your store? Even if you can’t name one, it’s something you’re probably already doing on instinct.
Nonetheless, it’s handy to understand which category your strategy falls into, the rationale behind each approach, and how to further optimise yours.
And if you’re yet to open your shop, it’s essential food for thought (and good terminology to be aware of if you’re looking to write a business plan and secure a loan).
💡 Example: A corner shop or lifestyle store
With a wide assortment, you’re aiming to cover lots of different product types, without having too many types of each product. It’s why a corner shop is likely to have one or two types of toothpaste, rather than the multitude of options you’d expect in a larger supermarket.
Wide assortments work well for some shops. You want to be able to drop into your corner shop and conveniently pick up anything from chickpeas to drain cleaner, without particularly caring about the brand; that’s kind of their whole deal.
But a wide assortment comes with its challenges, including:
💡 Example: A piano shop
In contrast to a wide assortment, a deep assortment sticks with very few product types, but with multiple lines of each product. Think highly specialised or boutique shops.
If you have a brick and mortar store with a deep assortment, your main challenges are likely to be:
As Kirsten Fisher points out in an episode of her podcast, The Buyerside Chat Podcast:
“[With a deep assortment] you’re stuck at a sales volume because you’re not offering enough depth of choices so you’re just putting out more variations of the same thing, and it’s not creating additive sales.” — Kirsten Fisher, The Buyerside Chat Podcast.
Unless you’re offering free shipping, she explains, you’re likely to lose customers because they can’t hit the minimum order value for free shipping without purchasing multiple similar products, which they’re unlikely to want.
And you may experience a third challenge, too. Being presented with so many variations of the same product can be overwhelming to customers, to the point of being detrimental to sales. A popular experiment found that people preferred to buy from a market stall selling six varieties of jam, rather than 24 types; customers simply found the second stall too overwhelming.
💡 Example: Team or city merchandise shops
A localised assortment is one that’s designed to only serve people in the place it’s based in. An extreme example is merchandise that’s based on the city you’re in, or a local sports team; you’re less likely to buy an “I ❤️ London” t-shirt when you’re not in London, for example.
But it can be much more subtle than that. The clothes that H&M stocks in January in London won’t be the same as those in Florida; they’re tailored to local trends, local clientele, and the local climate.
💡 Example: Amazon, Tesco Extra or Walmart
A mass-market assortment strategy is kind of like a wide assortment strategy on steroids. Expect a product selection that’s both wide and deep, with products across multiple different categories; food, homeware, fashion, etc.
Stores with a mass-market assortment strategy want to be a place where anyone can find anything they want — no easy task!
💡 Example: A bookshop that starts selling coffee
When a shop turns to a scrambled assortment strategy, they’re testing out products outside of their usual scope to try to attract a new audience to their store.
We’re big believers in the power of diversifying your business, and working to stand out from the other shops on the street. So when done well, we think this is a great assortment to experiment with.
If you’re going to test out a new product, just be sure it fits your core vibe and doesn’t detract from your brand, and that you have all the right licences/product knowledge to handle. Bonus points if it’s not too much of an upfront investment, too.
📚 Bookmark for later: How Our Favourite Bookshops Are Diversifying (& What We Can Learn From Them)
An optimised assortment strategy looks different to every store, but some common themes are:
You first need to establish a complete picture of how your assortment is performing right now. Without this, you won’t be able to see which future changes have had an impact.
Some key metrics you should track on a monthly basis are:
📚 Bookmark for later: What’s a Good Profit Margin for a Product?
Think of each item in your assortment like a different musician in an orchestra. Each one has an important part to play, but not everyone can be a soloist (and only the best musicians should be there at all).
Categorising your products, and understanding that each category should be treated differently, is a real game changer.
If you run an ecommerce store on Shopify, they’ll actually do this for you, dividing your products up into A-, B- and C-grade products, and offering advice on how to treat products within each category:
Shopify’s ABC inventory analysis is definitely a logical base to start from, even if you don’t use the Shopify platform.
Sarah Manning, a professional visual merchandiser, also recommends looking at your ‘push’ and ‘pull’ products, both when optimising your assortment, and then building the most efficient displays to promote the right products in the right places.
📚 Bookmark for later: How to Nail the Fundamentals of Visual Merchandising, with Sarah Manning
Find you’re spending all your time wading through order sheets and coordinating with multiple different suppliers? Our founders experienced that first hand when they ran a store in Covent Garden. The admin side of retail can be a real time drain.
👋 That’s one reason why they built CREOATE, a wholesale marketplace for independents:
Create an account to view wholesale prices and start shopping today
A merchandising assortment, also known as a product assortment, simply refers to the mixture of different products you sell in your shop or ecommerce store.
If you want to analyse your assortment to identify your ‘A-grade’ products, we recommend looking at a combination of:
For each product in your assortment. From there, play around with different criteria for each product category (A-grade, B-grade, etc) until you have a logical split of products.