Grocery Store Planogram. Types of Product Placement

Shelf layout determines the entire store's success and significantly impacts the customer's decision to purchase a product. Therefore, a deep understanding of how to create a product layout and the lack of such understanding can create two dramatically different situations in a store: high demand and sales or overstocked merchandise and zero sales.

What should you know about in-store product layout?

Layout of products is the planned product placement on the shelves in the store. The racks are not filled with goods chaotically. The layout of goods is designed in advance with the help of planograms, considering the different characteristics of goods, shelves, and the sales area.

Why are grocery planograms important for stores?

A planogram is a visual product placement scheme on retail equipment in a store. Retail planograms allow you to plan the layout of each SKU, category, or brand. It is possible to see the whole picture of merchandising in a store and track and analyze the layout efficiency.

All shelves are different. Sales of merchandise from shelves at eye level are some of the highest. Therefore, eye-level shelf product placement is essential for brands that want to be noticed by customers. The competition between brands on shelves is so great that they have to make agreements with stores about their share of the shelves. A larger shelf share and more faces increase the likelihood of purchase and make the product stand out among the competitors.

Share of Shelf is a metric that compares brand faces to the total number of faces available; that is, the share of shelf shows and measures the popularity of a product on the shelf.

How do I calculate a product's shelf share?

Of course, creating layouts on a store planogram considers all agreements with brands or suppliers and the share of their products on the shelf. The brand's on-shelf share and location can give you an advantage over your competitors. Of course, more face time increases the likelihood that a customer will purchase a product. The more brand shares on the shelf, the higher sales are expected.

The layout is like a game the store and the customer play. And when it looks like a customer is just shopping for necessary products. In reality, it can actually turn into buying products that the customer didn't plan to buy. Working with layouts aims to get customers' attention and motivate them to buy the product.

Strategic product placement allows you to predict sales and customize your layouts according to customer needs, brand agreements, and specific merchandising principles. Use special services to work with grocery planograms and set up the layout of products according to merchandising rules and product parameters. One such easy-to-use tool is PlanoHero service.

How to customize product layout in PlanoHero?

Different types of equipment and product dimensions require different approaches to display. When creating a grocery planogram in PlanoHero, set the depth/height of the layout, the number of faces of each SKU, the type of packaging, and the compression ratio for products in soft packaging. Additionally, the service functionality calculates shelf stock based on the products on display. Thus, the merchandiser gets information about how many days a particular product will be available.

Layout Blocks on a Grocery Planogram

The PlanoHero service allows you to create separate zones on the planogram in the form of product blocks. Blocks can be connected to a certain brand, product category, or supplier. The functionality of the PlanoHero software allows you to set up such blocks separately from the other layouts and change the size of the block itself. In the created brand block on the planogram, you can automatically lay out products using the auto-layout function.

Product Autolayout on the Grocery Planogram

Autolayout allows you to form a store planogram automatically in a few clicks. The service can form a regular autolayout by distributing products equally on the planogram. Products can be grouped vertically by brand, category, and supplier. Products are sorted on each shelf from left to right. You can sort items by size and price, ascending or descending. In PlanoHero, you can customize the "Golden Shelf" parameter, and the goods with the highest turnover will be placed on the shelf at the customer's hand and eye level. In addition to grouping and sorting products, you can limit the number of faces for each item.

Sales-based autolayout calculates the recommended layout percentage for each product relative to its historical sales. Each item's layout percentage is calculated based on the period and four coefficients: turnover rate, number of sales, profit, and number of checks.
 

 Autolayout based on target percentages. Set your own planned percentage of shelf space for brands and product categories. Items are then automatically displayed based on planned percentages.

Layout Rules

Layout rules is a module of the PlanoHero planogram software that allows you to create your own layout rules and apply them to any store in the chain. You can group products on the shelves by brand and sort them by size. Then, within a brand level, group goods, for example, by country, and sort them by price. Thanks to the rules, you can customize the product layout by grouping goods simultaneously by different parameters.

Planogram Layout Based on Analytics

Monitoring the effectiveness of layouts with the help of analytics allows you to understand the store's customers' activity and identify the products in the highest demand and the number of sales. The PlanoHero program can help you set up the whole process of an automated layout. With the help of this tool, you can create a layout on a grocery planogram in a few clicks and set up an efficient product placement.

Final words

The grocery planogram layout displays products in the most advantageous places on the shelf to encourage the customer to purchase the product. Effective in-store product placement increases brand awareness and maximizes sales. When developing a merchandising strategy, consider the historical sales of the products, in-store customer traffic, the retail space, and how the same items are sold in other stores. Furthermore, product placement occurs according to the merchandising and marketing strategy being developed.