It’s Monday morning at retail businesses across the nation, and merchants arrive at their desks to find a 75- to 100-page report. They spend the next several hours trying to process all the information in the report, tagging pages in the quest to understand what happening in the business. It’s an exercise that boils down to productivity equaling dexterity. But as most retailers will attest to, it doesn’t. And, truth be told, it’s just not possible to scale a business flipping through a heap of pages hoping to spot nuggets of opportunity.
That’s where DynamicAction comes in. The company’s retail analytics system is specifically built to enable ecommerce, store and omnichannel teams to take action “at the speed of Amazon” through new metrics, automated diagnostics and both out-of-the-box and ad hoc analytics and visualizations. It also alerts retail teams to areas of opportunity and improvement.
In September, DynamicAction was named 2017 Digital Commerce Startup of the Year at the National Retail Federation’s annual Shop.org conference.
The company, headquartered in Silicon Valley, has been working from its earliest days to enable retailers across the globe to make more profitable data-driven decisions. “From the first time we began noodling our idea on the back of an envelope through today, our passion has been to provide a solution that yields one true view of customers, product, inventory and profit across stores, digital, mobile and marketplace. We wanted to enable retailers to make their best people better, their smarter decisions faster … and their business more profitable,” says CEO John Squire.
“The magic of what DynamicAction does is connect all the data sources retailers use to give them that one view. Then we run over 1,000 proprietary algorithms and decision criteria against those data sources to pinpoint margin-eating disconnects in a retailer’s business, prescribe precise actions and accurately rank those actions by financial impact.”
Case in point: a U.K.-based luxury handbag manufacturer that was trying to get a better handle on how to connect and engage with first-time, entry-level shoppers. With an eye toward steering shoppers toward the brand’s most high-end, aspirational products, marketers were messaging first-time customers with materials that showcased luxury items at premium price points. They weren’t coming back and buying a second item because the products seemed way beyond their budget.
Working with DynamicAction, the retailer quickly learned how critical it was to move a first-time customer from trial to a second purchase; in most cases, the second purchase led to them becoming a loyal customer.
By creating a very different marketing message to anyone who bought an entry-level product — one that showed them it was possible for them to come back and buy — the brand was able to change the trajectory of cultivating customers and increased profits 24 percent in the first two months.
Currently, the company works with numerous retailers including Eddie Bauer, DXL Group, El Corte Ingles and Brooks Brothers; DynamicAction helped Brooks Brothers, the oldest apparel clothier in the United States, identify $2.3 million in sales opportunity, avoid “analysis paralysis” and more easily focus teams to grow more quickly.
In most instances DynamicAction’s system can be bolted on the software retailers are already using to run product information management systems, warehousing, customer relationship management and the like. Squire says the system leverages artificial intelligence to connect millions of data points across the enterprise and allows the retail experts closest to their respective businesses to make rapid, profitable decisions.
“The data just keeps coming at us and consumers seem more challenging than ever to satisfy. And looking ahead two or three years, there’s really no reason for us to believe that shoppers will want any less, or that the terabytes of data will slow down,” he says.
“The economics of retail are not going to be easier. They’re only going to get harder … next-generation retail is going to need to have more and more technology that helps people orchestrate both the machines and the decisions that they’re going to use to create a meaningful and memorable customer experience.”