Modern development of trade involves new approaches to compiling product ranges. The entire tutorial book describes the basic approaches to compiling assortments, as well as topics like digital goods, the role of the Internet, trademarks, particularly of compiling product range in e-commerce.

Retail shelf management means cost-efficiently aligning retail operations with consumer demand. As consumers expect high product availability and low prices, and retailers are constantly increasing product variety and striving towards high service levels, the complexity of managing retail business and its operations is growing enormously. Retailers need to match consumer demand with shelf supply by balancing variety (number of products) and service levels (number of items of a product), and by optimizing demand and profit through carefully calibrated prices. As a result the core strategic decisions a retailer must make involve assortment sizes, shelf space assignment and pricing levels. Rigorous quantitative methods have emerged as the most promising solution to this problem. The individual chapters in this book therefore focus on three areas: (1) combining assortment and shelf space planning, (2) providing efficient decision support systems for practically relevant problem sizes, and (3) integrating inventory and price optimization into shelf management.

Retailers today are drowning in data but lacking in insight. They have so much information at their disposal that they struggle with both how to sort through it, and how to add science to their decision-making process without blunting the art that they correctly believe is a key ingredient of their success. This book reveals how retailers can use data to manage everything from strategic assortment planning, inventory management, and markdowns to improve store-level execution. This data-driven approach to the retail supply chain leads to far greater and faster inventory turns, far fewer and lower discounted goods and services, and better profit margins. The authors also tease out the personnel issues and the organizational implications of this approach.

In today's retail environment, characterized by product proliferation, price competition, expectations of service quality, and advances in technology, many organizations are struggling to maintain profitability. Rigorous analytical methods have emerged as the most promising solution to many of these complex problems. Indeed, the retail industry has emerged as a fascinating choice for researchers in the field of supply chain management. In Retail Supply Chain Management, leading researchers provide a detailed review of cutting-edge methodologies that address the complex array of these problems. A critical resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of retailing, chapters in this book focus on three key areas: (1) empirical studies of retail supply chain practices, (2) assortment and inventory planning, and (3) integrating price optimization into retail supply chain decisions.

Retail requires efficient decision support to manage increasing product proliferation and various consumer choice effects with limited shelf space. Our goal is to identify, describe and compare decision support systems for category planning. This research analyzes quantitative models and software applications in assortment and shelf space management and contributes to a more integrated modeling approach. There are difficulties commonly involved in the use of commercial software and the implementation and transfer of scientific models. Scientific decision models either focus on space-dependent demand or substitution effects, whereas software applications use simplistic rules of thumb. We show that retail assortment planning models neglect space-elastic demand and largely also ignore constraints of limited shelf space. Shelf space management streams on the one hand, mostly omit substitution effects between products when products are delisted or out of stock, which is the focus of consumer choice models in assortment planning. Also, the problem sizes of the models are often not relevant for realistic category sizes. Addressing these issues, this paper provides a state-of-the-art overview and research framework for integrated assortment and shelf space planning. Full paper is published in OMEGA.

Retailers must be primed to face increasingly difficult trading conditions thanks to the rise of the internet, increasingly better informed consumers, technological advances and an often competitive environment. This established textbook, now in its third edition, helps to provide students with the necessary skills to understand and tackle these challenges. Retail Product Management explains the importance of retailing as a customer-focused activity and helps to provide students of courses such as "Retail Marketing", "Retail Management" and "The Retail Environment" with an excellent introduction to this important topic. With an emphasis on the operational side, this text incorporates features including expanded case vignettes, questions for further discussion, and application tasks. It also includes a new chapter on ethical and sustainable retail product management. Retaining the popular style and elements of the first two editions, Rosemary Varley's Retail Product Management will continue to find favour with students and lecturers involved with retailing.