Start 2021 with confidence. Despite all the turmoil, c-stores have thrived during a worldwide pandemic, political upheaval, and a massive shift toward e-commerce. Focus on your strengths and adjust your strategy in real-time with new technology that helps you understand and serve both your loyal and new customers.

Here are four examples of how StoreKeep users utilize real-time analysis to manage by exception to adapt before their competition

Small human errors can add up to big numbers if they go unnoticed. StoreKeep’s Fuel Pricing module can be used to identify and correct these types of errors in real-time, before they add up

Everyone knows that stockouts cost money but very few c-store operators have the ability to measure the true cost. StoreKeep uses real-time integration with the inventory and POS system at each store. Real-time data allows it to track the sell through rate of every product in a store, calculate the cost of stockouts, and provide tools to attack the problem.

If you are running your promotions based on strategies rumored to be effective, while your competitors are learning the truth by measuring actual sales results, then adjusting their strategies to reality, you are gambling against the house.

He said: “This Changes Everything!”
The story of how a small c-store chain got started with Business Intelligence.

In 2020, there have been many rapid changes that made planograms obsolete overnight, but Hard Seltzer has been the champion “planogram destroyer,” causing headaches for purchasing departments across the country.

Independent c-store operators face a difficult problem: it’s an unfair game against the big chains. Why unfair? Because the big chains can afford to spend millions of dollars gathering and analyzing data, giving them greater understanding of the performance of every store, product and employee. Independents are forced to run their stores based on intuition and industry experience, without the help of computer analytics and data. Because of this advantage, large chain stores beat independents on every yardstick, they average 11 times greater EBITDA , and they double in-store sales per square foot ($66.15 vs $32.23).

C-store operators know that the big chains achieve better margins because of their analysis – but the product costs, labor required, and logistics of gathering the information made this strategy too expensive for even mid-sized chains to generate a positive ROI. Taiga has released new tools to give independent c-store operators an affordable way to perform real Category Management analysis.

When prices change frequently and your margins depend on meeting the market price, you need to be aware of price changes and stay one step ahead of your competitors.