What are merchandising skills?

Question

Zippia Team · Accepted Answer

Merchandising skills are a mixture of hard and soft skills related to ensuring the retailer's merchandise is available in the right quantities at the stores and displayed in the right way to drive its sales. These duties can include submitting warehouse inventory reports, clearing any unwanted products from displays, and monitoring the sales performances of products.

The top skills of a successful merchandiser include:

Data Analysis: Merchandisers generate and analyze a huge amount of data daily. This includes sales, product sell-throughs, margins, and inventory reports.
Sales Forecasting: Merchandisers need to forecast sales on special occasions and peak trading periods and adjust inventory levels at the stores accordingly.
Spotting Trends: To forecast sales accurately, the merchandiser should be good at spotting trends in the market and making decisions based on them.
Planning & Budgeting: Merchandisers generate the required data needed to plan and budget future sales and purchasing budgets.
Advanced Excel Knowledge: Excel is an essential tool that retail merchandisers use daily. They are expected to know basic Excel functions and advanced functionalities to organize and deal with the vast amount of data generated from the retail merchandising system.
Financial Acumen: Merchandisers should understand basic financial metrics, such as gross margins for their daily job. Analyzing and managing margins through effective markdown planning is part of their KPIs.