How Retailers Review Products

Any given retail store can stock thousands of SKUs. For large format retailers like Whole Foods Market or Target, that number can quickly balloon into the tens of thousands. That’s a lot of products to keep track of!

To ensure the right products are making their way onto store shelves, many retailers follow a process known as a category review to assess their product needs in a specific category. Select retailers use RangeMe to discover new products and manage their inbound submissions during these review periods.

Read on to learn more about these category reviews, and how RangeMe helps both retailers and suppliers effectively manage these review periods.

Category Reviews

Retail buyers use category review periods to assess the performance of an individual category — like grocery, home, beauty and many others. During this time buyers evaluate their promotional spend, planogram (store layout), and determine their product assortment and strategy.

As a supplier, it’s important to know that buyers conduct category reviews at different times and frequencies throughout the year. For example, one retailer may conduct a frozen foods review twice a year while another may assess their frozen assortment just once. Some retailers won’t even use calendar-based category reviews and will instead look for products year-round. This means you could be waiting almost a year before your product gets seen by a certain retail buyer, but it also means you need to be prepared for reviews all year long.

We recommend keeping your RangeMe profile up-to-date so buyers approaching their category review period have the information they need when looking at new products. This will also allow those that aren’t tied to a calendar schedule to always see the best your profile has to offer. To see which fields of your RangeMe profile are most important to buyers, check out this article.

How RangeMe Helps Retailers Review Products

A growing number of retailers have chosen to use RangeMe to manage their inbound submissions, in addition to product discovery. This means that they route product submissions from their website directly to RangeMe. These retailers will also appear on the Submissions page, and RangeMe Premium suppliers can submit their brand directly to these retailers.

Many of these retailers have also chosen to share their category review schedules with RangeMe, which can be located on the Submissions page. If a retailer has not shared their review schedule on RangeMe, that doesn’t necessarily mean they do not have a review schedule.

Using RangeMe for inbound submissions allows buyers to review relevant products during key review periods, in a uniform format, all in one place. This can help make category review periods and the submissions process in general more manageable for buyers.

How RangeMe Helps Suppliers Prepare for Reviews

Because RangeMe acts as your “digital sell sheet,” it is a great tool to have when submitting your brand to retailers, both on and off RangeMe. If you are submitting your brand to a retailer outside of the platform, you can take advantage of RangeMe’s sharing feature to include a link to your RangeMe page, to easily include all of your brand’s relevant information.

As a RangeMe Premium supplier, you are able to submit your brand directly to retailers who have opted into that feature on RangeMe. This helps give your brand greater visibility and puts your products in front of relevant buyers during category review periods. Learn more about Retailer Submissions here.

RangeMe Premium suppliers also receive Category Review Alerts for select retailers who have shared their review schedules with RangeMe. These alerts can help you strategically plan and time your submissions for retailers. Learn more about Category Review Alerts here.

If you are interested in upgrading your RangeMe account to take advantage of these Premium features, you can learn more here.