Out of Stocks

Improving On-shelf Availability (OSA) has rightly been an obsession for retailers and brand owners alike for many years. Shoppers expect to find the product in store so when there are gaps on shelf the consequences are poor for suppliers and retailers. Most shoppers will choose an alternative product and eventually even change their retail store when faced with persistent issues of OSA.

Clearly the stakes are high.

So why have OSA issues hovered stubbornly at around 8% over the last 10 years? It is a fact that OSA is a straightforward measure of a symptom whose cause is a problem with complex roots. On-shelf Availability is simply a shopper’s eye view of that problem – is the product on the supermarket shelf and available to buy?

When this measurement is applied to the 30,000 to 50,000 products in a typical grocery store the result is typically shown as a percentage. So, if OSA is 92%, that means that, on average, 8% of the total products ranged by the retailer are not available to buy at any given moment. That’s bad news for the brand owner offering incentives to the retailer for an optimized assortment to be displayed in-store. It also has a detrimental effect on the retailer, which suffers a hit to its brand health in the eyes of the shopper.

StayinFront Retail Data Insight’s data-driven approach explores the root causes of OSA problems and considers how an insight-led approach can make major inroads.