Assortment planning is the core of a successful retail strategy.
On the other hand, tailoring assortment planning becomes difficult once your retail store number starts to increase.
As consumer preferences continue to grow dynamically at different locations of your store, you must adopt more data-driven approaches to assortment planning to stay competitive at each location.
This guide will discuss the fundamentals of assortment planning and how you can tailor the assortment planning across multiple locations to achieve maximum efficiency and higher profitability.
What is assortment planning?
Assortment planning is the strategic process of selecting, organizing, and managing the products that a retail store offers across various locations, channels, and customer segments.
It involves determining the optimal mix of products, their quantities, and their placement to maximize sales.
Effective assortment planning should consider multiple factors, including:
- Customer demand and growing shopping preferences
- Market trends, competitor activities, and seasonality
- Retail store formats, physical space constraints, and merchandising display requirements
- Sales performance data, historical purchase patterns, and demand forecasting
- Economic conditions, supply chain disruptions, and logistic feasibility
But in 2025, the assortment has become much more efficient, and accurate to strategise with the advent of advanced machine learning models and location data you can access across India.
With the said tech advancements, there’s no need to decide on assortment planning with just anecdotal data, since you can leverage data-backed insights to optimize product mix based on actual demand patterns, local preferences, and competitor dynamics, markets trends, consumer trends, and more.
Types of assortment planning strategies
There are various types of assortment strategies you can implement for retail businesses.
However, it is worth mentioning that to decide which type to go for and to see the full effect of these strategies, understanding a location and its customer base with reliable data is the foundation.
We’ll get into “how” just after going through the types of strategies.
1. Broad assortment strategy
Offers a wide variety of products within different categories to appeal to a broad customer base. It is primarily suitable for department stores, supermarkets, and large online marketplaces aiming for mass-market appeal.
However, it is essential to take market saturation, demand and existing competitors into account.
2. Deep assortment strategy
Focuses on a limited number of product categories but provides extensive variety within those categories. This would be ideal for speciality retailers, niche brands, and businesses that cater to highly specific consumer preferences.
This strategy should be adopted only after understanding the customer demographics better.
3. Localized assortment strategy
Tailors product selection is based on regional demand, customer demographics, and localized buying patterns.
This works exceptionally well for multi-location retailers, franchise chains, and businesses expanding into diverse and new markets.
| Related: A leading kitchen appliance brand utilised location data to understand the local customer base and expanded into the new market quickly.
4. Seasonal assortment strategy
Adjusts the product mix dynamically based on seasonal fluctuations, holidays, and event-driven demand shifts. This is essential for fashion retailers, lifestyle brands, and industries where consumer preferences change periodically.
5. Omnichannel assortment strategy
Integrates online and offline assortments to create a unified shopping experience for customers. Crucial for retailers operating both physical stores and e-commerce platforms to maintain inventory consistency.
6. Store-level real-time assortment interventions
To plan your assortment the best way, it should be done at the store level in real-time. GeoIQ’s location data enable you to make decisions based on real time consumer trends and market trends across India.
Let’s talk more about this now.
The best way to approach assortment planning in retail
Leveraging consumer data and market trends to your advantage can help tailor assortment plans in retail at store level across multiple locations.
Here’s how location intelligence can help:
i) Understand and forecast local demand patterns
Analyze location-specific purchasing trends to understand what customers actually need at store and product SKU levels.
This will help you stock only products that resonate with local customer preferences across locations and pre-plan emerging market and consumer trends for timely procurement of SKUs. And not react when trends have passed and you missed materialising them.
ii) Optimize inventory allocation
Ensure the right quantity of each SKU is distributed across stores based on regional demand.
In turn, this will result in reducing procuring stocks that you shouldn’t look for, improving customer satisfaction and profitability.
iii) Identify high-performing categories
Location data reveals what product categories perform the best in different locations, allowing for more targeted assortment planning. This can also aid when it comes to tailoring marketing, especially with geofencing marketing.
iv) Adjust for seasonality and trends
Leveraging location data and pairing them with historical sales and external factors would help fine-tune your product mix dynamically from season to season.
v) Adjust based on the competitor’s proximity
Gain deeper insights through competitor analysis by evaluating footfall, competitor catchment areas, and other key factors.
This allows you to adjust your assortment strategy and avoids serving in areas that might have lower demand or customer concentration.
By offering a more relevant selection to customers at each location, you can effectively improve customer satisfaction, and brand trust that would drive repeat purchases.
When to change your assortment planning strategy
i) Sales performance declines
If specific products at the SKU level or a category of product underperform consistently at a single location or across multiple locations, it indicates a need for assortment plan changes.
ii) Consumer preferences shift
Trends evolve rapidly, and staying aligned with changing customer expectations is crucial for success. If you witness your existing customer complaints or prefer other stores, it could indicate that the assortment planning should be altered.
iii) Market conditions change
New competitors entering the market would disrupt your ability to pull in new and retain customers. You may want to change your assortment plan accordingly with the competition’s offering in mind.
iv) New store openings or expansions
Entering new regions requires localized assortment adjustments to match the target audience. Before deciding on a region or a particular location, always analyze and understand the local demographics to strategize the best assortment plan for your retail store.
v) Inventory challenges arise
High stockouts, excessive markdowns, or storage inefficiencies suggest issues in demand forecasting and assortment decisions. As we mentioned earlier, leveraging location intelligence would solve this issue easily.
Conclusion
Assortment planning in retail requires a highly adaptive, technology-backed approach. With the advent of tech advancements such as location intelligence, there is no need to decide assortment plan based on your own gut or any anecdotal data.
Adopting the right assortment planning strategy and continuously refining assortment decisions based on near real-time insights can help businesses ensure long-term success.
So, book a 15-minute discovery call with us to understand your customers better and curate the best product SKUs that boost sales!
