Minimising mark-downs

Anything that can help retailers minimise the amount of stock having to be marked down must be a good thing, as Ragtrader reports.

The major trend for fashion technology over the next few years will concentrate on helping to consolidate stock automatically and how to integrate back office systems with the point of sale.

Future Business Systems managing director Mark Silver, whose company will shortly be introducing new stock consolidation modules and integrated payroll modules into its offering, says what is exciting about stock consolidation is that it can intelligently redistribute product when it comes to the end of its life.

“Mark-downs are a very large part of the sales cycle and the more that you can limit how much you have to mark down at the end of the season, the more profit you make,” Silver says.

“By having the system intelligently moving stock around between stores based on which stores are selling and which aren’t, and making sure that you have full size ranges at the stores, you are able to dramatically increase your profit.”

For Silver, one of the big trends of the future is the integration of websites with the back-end database and into the store. “It gets used in a several areas in the fashion industry – online ordering for wholesalers, the ability for retailers to have online shops.”

The difference is that these online shops are ones that retailers don’t have to maintain separately and that completely integrate into the back-end system, he says. “So when an order gets placed in an online store, it automatically comes up at one of the stores or at the warehouse for dispatch. There’s no need to receive an email and then manually key the order into the system.”