Hands-On Retail Pricing Execution

As retailers adopt more-sophisticated price planning tools to contend with more-complex assortments and more merchandise with shorter life cycles, they face practical challenges in executing their plans. Forrester found that while many retailers expect a quick return on sophisticated pricing technologies, few have figured out the investments they must make to execute pricing plans effectively. Before transferring prices and promotions to point of sale (POS), most retailers have to stage them in merchandising apps to route for authorization and to check for compliance with complex rules expressing the firm's accumulated wisdom about market segmentation and merchandise hierarchy. A few vendors have started to address the problem by incorporating pricing ladder rules and approval routings into their pricing and promotion planning solutions, but the scope for automating price labeling remains largely unexploited.