Merchandising Consultants

DC Sales are merchandising specialists providing sales and merchandising consulting services to retailers in Southern Africa. Our goal is to provide a superior service enabling maximum exposure, higher sales and ultimately increased market share in a competitive environment.

Service include:

  • In-store sales
  • In-store budgets
  • Web ordering platform
  • Warehousing
  • Retail People Counting
  • KVI price management
  • Out of stock management
  • New product implementation
  • Marketing- Advertising Solutions
  • Features and benefits on products
  • Product flow – adjacency
  • Full suite of sales reports
  • IQ Retail – Project Specialist
  • Returns handling
  • Planogram implementation
  • On-shelf merchandising
  • Display implementations.
  • Retail Promotional Items

Store Layout

The Importance of Store Layout

Picking their way through a maze of jumbled shelves is no customer’s idea of a great shopping experience. Big retailers know this – which is why they invest heavily in store layout. And, what’s more, says this study , published in the journal Marketing Science, online shopping has ramped up the importance of store layout for bricks-and-mortar stores – meaning that making the consumer shopping experience as easy as possible is paramount.

Planning Your Store Layout

A good store layout is all about nudging customers towards the point of sale. How do you do this? By creating an impression upfront with strong visual displays, and designing aisles, positioning shelves and creating strategic ‘pause points’ which prompt customers along the in-store sales funnel. DC Sales can help by:

  • Implementing the store-within-a-store concept – colour co-ordinated product categories are visually arresting and user-friendly, helping customers quickly and easily find what they’re looking for
  • Creating well thought out adjacencies – in other words, grouping like categories near one another to facilitate the customer experience and the buying process
  • Enhancing logistics – a good layout can actually improve the cost structure of your logistics chain, reducing the opportunity for theft, amongst other things
  • Giving due consideration to customer flow management from storefront to till point.

Strategic store layout

Don’t leave your store layout to chance! Contact DC Sales for more info about how a strategic approach to store layout can positively impact consumer behaviour and lead to improved basket sales.

Point of Sale

Point of Sale Stands

The versatile range of in-the-run point of sale stands, gondolas, dump bins, telescopic price points, amongst other fixtures, lend style to any store. Request our full catalogue here.


Optimising Your Point of Sale

The end zone of retail outlets – your point of sale. A great point of sales marketing strategy can help you optimise this area for maximum sales.

The DC Sales team is on standby to provide solutions for your point of sales area. Here are just some of the ways in which DC Sales can help you can prompt more customer conversions:

  • Align your point of sales strategy with overall departmental objectives
  • Determine the right places to display your stock in store for the best sales outcomes
  • Provide point of sales displays and other materials, and activate point of sales promotions to influence consumer behaviour, and stimulate purchases directly at the till.

Merchandising Services

Employing appropriately qualified staff to do your merchandising for you is costly; not only does proper merchandising take knowledge and skill, but time, too! It makes sense to outsource your merchandising to experts.

DC Sales can help to:

  • Recommend the correct products to stock in your store based on your market demographics
  • Stock shelves and build displays which are aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and product-aligned
  • Manage general stock replenishment
  • Assist with receiving merchandise and looking after the Storeroom
  • Dealing with “out of stocks”
  • Proportionate display, slow sellers, dog lines
  • Managing “hot spots”
  • Stock rotation / F.I.F.O
  • Increase sales

Get a Merchandising Strategy

Get in touch for more info about how our merchandising support can help you to maximise your return on investment and increase your turnover.

Project Management

Retail Project Management

Store fit-outs are a process, and every process needs managing to be successful!  Here’s how DC Sales’ project management services can benefit you:

  • Provide a project analysis before work starts
  • Define goals and objectives
  • Define and work to time frames
  • Set and manage project budgets
  • Optimise your resources
  • Minimise project risk
  • Improve your cash flow
  • Delivering report-backs.

All of this amounts to a project proceeding smoothly, on time and within budget…and the sooner you’re up and running, the sooner the cash registers are ringing!

Use a Project Manager!

Overwhelmed by the enormity of managing a retail fit-out? Call us! We’ll help you refurbish or roll out your retail store from conception to completion, in the process turning it into a destination store!

Field Sales

Providing Sales Solutions

DC Sales is the conduit between the supply chain and retail, providing product and solutions to achieve the desired ROI. We work with the DC and strategic partners to ensure the supply chain fulfills retailers needs, based on their specific demographic and geographic product requirements.

Our Sales Executives are the backbone of our business and collaborate with our retailers to build a truly sustainable business.

Increasing In-Store Sales

Your objective is the same as ours – creating sustainable business . We focus on increasing turnover and profitability. Providing a turnkey solution, we work with you to:

  • Work to store and product specific sales budgets in line with stores overall sales mix – Stores health Report
  • Manage your stock to maximise ROI
  • Develop sales strategies that will increase market share and sales
  • Create value for customers
  • Manage relationships between vendors, retailers and customers
  • Interpret customer and market information
  • Sales training
  • Unlock the sales potential within your store

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence, or BI for short, refers to the process of analysing organisational information to find ways in which a company can better their service delivery and decision making across the board. While gut feelings and intuition do pay off from time to time, applying data analysis techniques to support business decision-making methods will guarantee greater proficiency and, ultimately, business growth

The Benefits of Business Intelligence

The potential benefits of implementing business intelligence are many, and include:

  • Identifying possible cost-saving opportunities
  • Discovering untapped business prospects
  • Uncovering flawed business practices
  • Accelerating and improving decision making
  • Gaining competitive advantages over business rivals
  • Building better relationships with customers.

Heinz, an American food processing company, implemented business intelligence and increased performance rates by over ten percent, while reducing their maintenance costs by up to ten percent across the board.

Is Business Intelligence for you?

Business Intelligence services consolidate raw data that would otherwise need to be captured and analysed on programs such as Microsoft Excel and Access, and presents any findings required within seconds – allowing management more time to focus on organisational growth and future ventures. In a nutshell, BI gives you instant access to information you would otherwise not be able to discover without serious time and effort. If business growth is something you would like for your company, business intelligence is for you. DC Sales helps Build It stores identify the products that are contributing, and not contributing, to their success through benchmarking – putting your Build It store in the right context to do so. Opportunity is limitless, but your time is not. For this reason, identifying outliers is critical.

DC Sales reporting and analytics will help you answer the following questions:

  • How can you get more of your products performing like your top 10%?
  • How do you invoke change to better your bottom 10%?
  • How do you identify which stock is ‘good’ and which is ‘bad”?
  • What can you do to convert your ‘bad’ stock into cash, allowing you to invest in ‘good’ stock?
  • What return of investment can you expect from these actions?

Answering these questions is the heart of our Build It analysis – understand your store, optimise your returns.

Get in touch with us to find out how DC Sales business intelligence can work for YOU!