Retail analytics insights
Guides, frameworks, and strategies for retail teams that want to move from dashboards to decisions.
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Units Per Transaction: A Cleaner Demand Signal Than Total Sales
UPT moves 2 to 3 weeks before revenue does. Get the formula, what to exclude, benchmarks by format, and how to diagnose a store running below its cluster.
Same-Store Sales Decomposition: Traffic, Conversion, ATV
Comp equals traffic times conversion times ATV. See the base rules that change the answer and a worked decomposition of four stores that all look flat.
Inventory Turns by Store: The Variance Math Nobody Runs
Turns is COGS over average inventory at cost. Get benchmarks by vertical, how to read turns against fill rate, and why chain-level 6.2 hides $5M in capital.
Store Conversion Rate: Why Your Footfall Counter Is Lying
Door counters inflate traffic 18 to 35%, so your conversion rate is wrong. Get benchmarks by format and three ways to fix the denominator, cheapest first.
Basket Penetration: The Cross-Sell KPI Most Retailers Ignore
Basket penetration reads attach behavior 6 weeks before category sales does. Get the formula, baselines by pair type, and the alert thresholds worth acting on.
Forecast WMAPE by SKU Tier: One Number Hides Three Problems
WMAPE of 22% is 14% on A-items and 41% on C-items. Get the formula, why not MAPE, benchmarks by tier and horizon, and why bias matters more than error.
Days of Supply: The Forward-Looking Inventory KPI Most Retailers Skip
Days of supply is on-hand over daily demand. Get benchmarks by vertical, forward vs trailing DOS, and the week-4 math that predicts your markdown exposure.
Build vs. Buy Retail Analytics: A CIO's Decision Framework
Most retail CIOs inherit a half-built data platform. Here's the decision framework for when to keep building, when to buy, and how to stop accumulating technical debt the business can't service.
The Hidden TCO of Building Your Own Retail Data Lake
The official build budget is engineering hours. The real all-in cost of running an internal retail data platform routinely lands between $1.2M and $2.8M a year. Here's where it goes.
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