VisitsTracker › Merchandising
Proof the store was actually worked
Merchandising contracts are won and lost on coverage. Time inside the store becomes the visit, photographs carry the time and place they were taken, and the call file fills itself in, so the report to the brand is a record rather than a reconstruction.
No card needed. Set up in an afternoon.
The twelve-minute call is flagged as short. Sometimes that is a two-facing fix and sometimes it is a car park, and the record does not pretend to know which.
Time in store
The number the brand is actually buying
A merchandising contract is priced on visits and duration. Both come out of being inside the store rather than out of a form filled in on the way home.
- Arrival, departure and duration per store, with nothing for the merchandiser to tap.
- Short calls are flagged against the time the contract specifies, not against a guess.
- A run of stores in one shopping centre is separated by boundary, not by one radius over the lot.
The three unvisited stores are the report. The thirty-four are the part that gets presented.
The photographs
A picture that cannot be from last month
Photo evidence is most of what a merchandising team is paid to produce, and it is worth nothing if the brand cannot tell when it was taken.
- Capture stamps the time and the position, so a photograph cannot be recycled or staged elsewhere.
- Before and after attach to that store visit, not to a group chat somebody has to search.
- The brand opens their own page and sees their own stores, with your branding on it.
Coverage
The stores nobody reached
Every merchandising business already knows its visit count. Very few can produce, on a Tuesday, the list of stores that have had nothing this cycle.
- Measured against the call file you imported, per cycle, per merchandiser.
- Sits at the top of the coverage screen rather than in a report somebody has to request.
- Splits by fascia and by area, so a gap is attributable while there is still time to fill it.
Also in the box
Store visits you can show the brand you work for
Checklists per fascia
Different retailers want different things done. Checklists attach to the store, so the job is followed rather than remembered, and an incomplete one is visible.
A page per brand you work for
If you merchandise for several brands, each gets a standing link to their own stores and their own photographs, with your branding and nothing of anyone else's on it.
It works in a store with no signal
Steel shelving and basements are where signal dies. Everything queues on the phone and syncs later, keeping the time it actually happened.
Mileage between stores
Distance measured from the same readings, so the expense claim and the call file cannot disagree about where somebody was.
Where a retail execution platform still wins
This does not read a shelf. If your contract is scored on planogram compliance or share of shelf, a retail execution platform with image recognition answers something we do not, and you should buy one. What we answer is the question underneath it: was the store visited, for how long, by whom, and can you show that to the brand six months later. Plenty of teams need only that, and pay a great deal for a platform to get it.
Straight answers
Questions people ask
Do merchandisers have to check in at each store?
No. Time inside the store boundary is the visit. A merchandiser who never opens the app still has an accurate day on the record, which is the point.
Can we load our call file?
Yes. Import stores from CSV with their addresses and the boundaries are drawn for you. Coverage is then measured against that list rather than against a route somebody remembers.
Does it score planograms?
No. Photographs are stored with the time and place they were taken and a person reads them. Machine reading of shelf compliance is a different product.
Can the brand see the photographs?
Yes, on a standing link scoped to their own stores, with your logo on it. No account needed at their end, which is why it actually gets opened.
What about stores inside a shopping centre?
Boundaries are drawn per store rather than as one radius over the centre. Where two are genuinely adjacent the visit is marked as ambiguous and the other candidate is kept on the record.
Also part of VisitsTracker
The rest of the product
Try it on one merchandiser for a week.
Put it on one phone, run a normal week, and see what comes out the other end.