Retail Link gives you huge amounts of data about your products. You know where they’re most likely to sell, when, in what quantities, and with which other products. This data can be connected with other information that comes from outside of Retail Link — for example, back in 2004, Walmart determined that beer and strawberry Pop-Tarts sell briskly before hurricanes, something most of us wouldn’t have predicted just on the basis of common sense.
But you don’t get data on individual shoppers. That unusually large sale of beer last week? You can’t tell whether it was for a wedding barbecue or a hackathon, a sale to a group of Millennial guys or to one elderly woman.
This is important for consumer privacy, so it’s not likely to change soon. However, you can connect your sales data from Retail Link and the Walmart Store of the Community Traits report, and see whether patterns emerge.
Here’s some of the information SOTC reports show:
- Population density, distinguishing rural, urban, and suburban neighborhoods
- Ethnicity, including whether the store’s neighborhood includes large proportions of Hispanic residents as well as demographics such as African-American
- Age, in ranges such as 18-34 (Millennials)
- Marital status and numbers of children
- Level of education attained, distinguishing among high school grads and college grads
Seeing that your product sells better on weekends at stores in towns with a high proportion of Millennials can be a heads-up for promotional opportunities — and, like the connection between Pop-Tarts and hurricanes, it’s information that you might miss if you didn’t connect the data from Retail Link with the information about the area around the store.
Are you taking advantage of all the opportunities you can with Retail Link? 8th & Walton classes will give you the tools you need to connect Retail Link reports with your real world.
