Assortment & merchandising
Esplanda shows what to feature, bundle or stop carrying, with the arithmetic behind each call, free in Esplanda POS.
You approve every change to your site and your shelves, unless you’ve set limits it may work inside. See how Esplanda works.
Illustrative example
Contribution ranking
Revenue-ranked merchandising promotes expensive, low-margin national brands that customers would have bought anyway. It looks busy and earns almost nothing. Esplanda multiplies four things instead, and the first is the reason it works differently.
The gross profit on one unit, from your actual cost.
A high price isn’t a high margin, and most merchandising software never learns the difference.
How likely the product is to sell from this particular position.
The same product sells differently on a homepage grid and in a cart cross-sell.
Whether you can actually supply it across your locations.
Promoting what you can’t sell wastes your most valuable positions.
A deliberate reason to promote it: a hero category, aging stock, a house brand.
You say what matters commercially, without faking the arithmetic.
A stock floor. Below it, a product isn’t shown, however well it scores.
Diversity limits. A maximum number of positions for any one brand and any one category, because a page that’s all one supplier’s range is a page customers stop reading.
Cost, stock and sales come from the same record the rest of Esplanda reads, so the shelf and the stock report never disagree. See how our retail inventory management software keeps the stock figure accurate.
Bundles
A bundle that looks obviously sensible is usually a discount on sales you were already making. Gin and tonic, chips and salsa: the pairing is real, and that’s the problem, because the people who buy them together already do, at full price.
Sales that wouldn’t have happened without the bundle.
Full-price sales you were going to make anyway, now made at a discount.
A bundle earns money only when the gross profit on the first beats the gross profit given away on the second.
| Test | Rejected when | What it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Incremental gross profit | Profit gained on new units, less profit given away on displaced units, comes out negative over the window | The obvious pairing of two fast movers. Almost every one fails here |
| Displacement ratio | Displaced units divided by incremental units is above one | A bundle moving more existing demand onto a discount than it creates, even when the total still looks positive |
| Category margin floor | The blended margin across the bundle falls below the floor you set for that category | Decisions that look fine one at a time and would quietly wear a category down |
What survives is usually not what a rep would suggest. The bundles that pass tend to pair slow-moving items whose displacement is genuinely low. They turn stock that was sitting still into margin without touching your fast movers.
You see the accepted ones, with the reasoning. A bundle that failed its own arithmetic never becomes an approval card, because a queue full of known-bad ideas is how owners stop reading the queue. Esplanda proposes the bundle, and your pricing rules set what anything costs.
Delisting
A dead-stock report is a list of problems with no answer attached. The missing half is the part that matters: if this comes off the shelf, do those customers buy something else of yours, or do they leave?
Every delist prediction is stored next to what actually happened to sales afterwards, where you can see it. See how we measure results.
Searched, not sold
Your own site knows which products customers search for and never buy. In most stores that knowledge dead-ends in a report. Esplanda splits it three ways first, because three different problems look the same on that list.
Not carried
Demand you’re turning away, with a count behind it.
Where it goesA suggested line on your next order, with its expected profit, written by our purchase order software.
Out of stock
Not an assortment problem. A stock problem that looks like one.
Where it goesYour cover and reorder point, not the range review.
In stock, not bought
A price, presentation or placement problem.
Where it goesA promotion or a better position, not a purchase order.
Every recommendation lands where it becomes an action.
Gaps against nearby stores. Items comparable stores near you carry and you don’t feed the same list. Our competitor price tracking, the Competitor Intelligence line, reads what nearby stores carry; this is where it becomes what you should carry.
Rising across your region. When a category is climbing across stores like yours, it arrives here as a suggestion with its cost attached, from our retail benchmarking.
Never an empty page. A search that finds nothing shows the nearest alternatives you do carry, and the empty search is logged as a signal. A customer who sees nothing leaves; one who sees something close often doesn’t.
Online and in store
Online, Esplanda moves the positions itself. In store, it sends the job to a phone and checks the finished display by photo, so every result is measured against a display that was actually built.
Instead of shelf drawings and 3D models: an ordered facing list per shelf, one photo, and the result measured.
Built to be right
Every word of copy traces back to your catalog or your supplier data, and every rating to a review with a recorded origin.
Esplanda writes descriptions, serving notes, pairings and image alt text for your whole catalog. Every tasting note, award and vintage comes from your catalog or your supplier data. A check runs before the text reaches you: a draft that adds anything beyond your data is thrown out whole, and you get a tighter description built only from what’s true.
Ratings reach ranking, badges, sort order and structured data once each review’s origin is recorded, and that rule is enforced every time the system starts, not left to someone’s memory. Promoting a product because of a made-up review is how a merchandising system starts misleading the owner paying for it.
Works with the rest of Esplanda
Merchandising decides what’s shown and what’s carried. Prices, orders and promotions go to the part of Esplanda that owns each one, with the recommendation handed over complete.
It starts from your costs
Merchandising ranks on margin, so Esplanda checks your catalog’s costs first and flags products with none, or with one nobody has updated in years, before it ranks anything. Getting costs onto the catalog is the first job, and it’s usually a by-product of capturing invoices with our invoice scanning software.
How much it does is your setting
Assortment and merchandising are part of the free Esplanda POS, at every setting. See Esplanda pricing.
Choosing a tool
Most assortment planning tools are built for chains planning seasons across many stores. For one store or a few, ask these six questions.
Revenue ranking promotes low-margin brands people buy anyway. Esplanda fills each position by expected gross profit, from your actual cost.
Availability is part of the score, and below the stock floor a product isn’t shown, however well it ranks.
Esplanda weighs the sales each bundle adds against the full-price sales it discounts. One that fails its own arithmetic never reaches you.
Every product it suggests you drop comes with the products that absorb its demand, the cash it holds and the shelf space it frees.
In store, a change is a job on a phone, closed by a photo of the finished display. What it earned shows up in your POS reporting.
Ranking on margin needs a cost on every item. Esplanda flags missing and stale costs before it ranks anything.
Questions
Assortment planning decides which products a store carries, how many choices it offers in each category, and which products get the best positions. For an independent store it comes down to three calls: what to add, what to feature and what to stop carrying. Esplanda works out each one from your own margin, stock and sales.
It decides what earns a place in your range and in your best positions: what to feature, what to bundle and what to stop carrying. Esplanda ranks each position by expected gross profit rather than sales, checks every bundle against the full-price sales it would discount, and shows where a product's customers would go before it suggests dropping it.
Every position is filled by the product with the highest expected gross profit per view, not the product with the highest sales. The score multiplies the margin on one unit by how likely the product is to sell from that position, by whether you can actually supply it, and by any strategic reason you have for pushing it. Ranking by revenue over-promotes expensive, low-margin national brands that customers would have bought anyway.
No. Availability is part of the score, not a filter applied afterwards, so a product that's short across your locations is moved down before it reaches a position, and one below the stock floor for that position is left out, with the reason recorded.
Three tests, and failing any one rejects it. First, incremental gross profit: the profit gained on sales that wouldn't have happened, less the profit given away on full-price sales that would have. If that's negative, the bundle is rejected. Second, the displacement ratio: displaced units over incremental units. Above one, the bundle moves more existing demand onto a discount than it creates. Third, the category margin floor: a bundle whose blended margin falls below the floor you set for that category is rejected.
Esplanda tells you, and never as a bare instruction. Every delist recommendation shows where those customers go instead: which products absorb the demand, in what proportions, and how much is truly lost. Against that sit the cash the stock is holding and the value of the shelf space it takes up. The recommendation is the net of all four, not the dead-stock figure on its own.
Planogram software draws the shelf. Esplanda gets it built: in-store merchandising arrives as a job on a phone, with which products, which endcap, how many facings each and in what order. The job stays open until someone sends a photo of the finished display and the photo is checked against the plan, so every result is measured against a display that was actually built.
Only reviews whose origin is recorded. Review data reaches ranking, badges, sorting and structured data once that's established, and the rule is enforced every time the system starts rather than left to someone's memory. Promoting a product because of a made-up review is how a merchandising system quietly starts misleading the owner who pays for it.
Nothing. Assortment and merchandising are part of the free Esplanda POS, with no setup fee and no contract. You choose whether the shelf is recommended to you, prepared for one-click approval, or refreshed inside limits you set once.
Start free today, or book a demo and we’ll walk through the shelf of a store like yours.
Esplanda POS and your website are free to start, with no card needed. Add paid tools only when you want them. See what comparable stores near you charge with the free price check.
