Mercari Introduces ClusterIT Element

Mercari Technologies Inc. on March 7 released the latest in its line of merchandising software — ClusterIT. The product is designed to save retailers time and money by eliminating cumbersome processes associated with studies of consumer behavior and trends in buying patterns.

Mercari is a merchandise application technology provider. The company is headquartered in Arlington, Va., but its Mercari Retail Center of Excellence is based in Fayetteville. The firm’s merchandising solutions are built around a line of software called Mercari Central.

Two members of the firm’s Fayetteville office — Matt Waller, Mercari’s chief strategy officer, and Butch Dulaney, the firm’s vice president of research and development — are credited with creating the product. Waller said he helped conceptualize the software but said Dulaney “figured out how to make it work.”

ClusterIT, Waller said, helps retailers improve their sales and profitability by segmenting stores into similar groups. Those groups are then used to determine ultra consumer-centric merchandising plans that include the product assortment, deployment and layout of stock keeping units (SKUs).

One SKU, for instance, might be a package of hot-dogs or a tub of butter.

Waller’s example is a national chain that might have one store that sells 100 SKUs of vanilla yogurt per week compared to another store that only moves 10 units of the same product. If these two stores are grouped together with the same shelf layout, one will either have too much or too little space allocated for that SKU.

There may be historical or geographic reasons why certain stores and their category assortments and shelf layouts are organized in a particular fashion. ClusterIT is designed to organize them the way it makes fiscal sense.

“When retailers and suppliers are trying to determine which stores are enough alike to have the same assortment of products and the same amount of space given to each on the shelf, it’s a fairly complicated question which must take into account a lot of variables,” Waller said. “ClusterIT takes in a bunch of product information such as sales, sales variability, price and cost demographics and uses a statistical procedure to group the stores together for a given category.”

The software is simply designed to make a very data-intensive process more accurate and less time consuming for retailers. It also affords retailers many more “what if” scenarios that may be tested to anticipate changes in buying patterns. Other applications include identifying ideal stores for product testing and performance-based segmentations.