The objective of every manager is to create working environment enabling employees to be highly engaged in their work. This is a challenging task. As evidenced in practice, merchandising is a business area with high staff turnover and low bonuses.
Here we’ll try to figure out how to establish a clear and consistent employee loyalty program for merchandisers.
Table of Сontents
Focus Areas in Creating a Loyalty Program
The first thing companies need to understand is the motivation of people. Each audience is motivated in different ways: monetary incentives, business goals, social benefits. Sales representatives and managers often strive to build their capabilities and move up the career ladder, merchandisers are looking for a steady income.
To understand the drivers for employees, analyze the way they work, examine their reports, talk to them. This will help determine incentives to be offered to employees.
Let’s look at three key drivers that need to be considered when creating a loyalty program: stability, transparency, meaningful KPIs.
Stability
A common reason for merchandisers to leave is irregular income.
According to a study by an outstaffing company, most often merchandisers are people from 25 to 35 years old. This means that they have a family, a child, a car. These are people who actively use loans and credit cards, or save up to buy an apartment/car. For them, their employment, first of all, is a source of income. Therefore, a steady salary is the main motivation to perform their duties efficiently.
Transparency of processes
In their work, employees should understand their duties, the structure of the process and the objectives offering bonuses upon their achievement. If merchandisers are regularly asked to do something extra in the store or their reports are ignored, or they are deprived of bonuses without giving reasons, then the employees lose motivation to perform duties well. To avoid this, it is necessary to introduce clear KPIs.
Meaningful KPIs
The company must establish KPIs for merchandisers that meet two criteria:
⦁ Feasibility. All KPIs must be achievable. If you establish a KPI to “visit 100 outlets in a day”, the employee will not be able to achieve it under any circumstances.
⦁ Manageability. KPIs should depend on the merchandiser’s performance, so that the merchandiser is able to influence them. For example, the number of visits to retail outlets or the percentage of compliance with planograms.
In general, the merchandiser should understand what he/she is doing and why this work is important. Below is an example of how you can streamline the merchandiser’s operations, make them transparent, and, accordingly, motivate the employee to perform better.
To fairly pay merchandiser bonuses, you need accurate data about their work. Managers use these numbers to calculate bonuses and incentives.
Meeting Work Plans
Merchandisers must visit a specific number of stores according to their route sheet. Every store visit needs to be documented so managers can see all employee movements and be confident in data accuracy.
Number of stores visited is the baseline KPI. It shows how many locations the merchandiser covered from their plan. What matters isn’t just the visit itself, but the plan completion percentage. For example, if 20 stores per week were assigned and the employee visited 15, that’s 75%. A good result is when merchandisers handle most planned locations, leaving a small buffer for emergencies like store renovations or illness.
Task Execution Quality
Visiting a store isn’t enough — quality work at the retail location matters. For instance, planogram compliance percentage is important to monitor. It shows how accurately the merchandiser displayed products: are items positioned correctly, are there gaps or mixed assortments?
Photo quality is often underestimated, but it’s critical for accuracy across all metrics. Blurry, dark, or incorrectly angled photos prevent the system from recognizing products and evaluating displays.
Working with POSM and Price Tags
Beyond standard product displays, merchandisers place promotional materials and monitor price tags.
Presence and correct placement of promotional materials is a separate metric. Wobblers, shelf talkers, stickers, promo stands, and displays must be in the right places according to standards. Additionally, merchandisers must monitor the presence and accuracy of price tags.
Goods Checker as a Motivation Tool
Goods Checker collects all these metrics automatically and displays them in user-friendly dashboards. Managers see statistics for each employee and team, compare results across different periods, and identify top performers and underperformers. Most importantly — this data becomes the foundation for bonus calculations.
Let’s see how Goods Checker app helps motivate merchandisers.
First of all, the application itself is an incentive. Merchandisers know that their actions are supervised by the software, and they work more efficiently. After all, the application is harder to deceive: upload old photos, skip the audit stage, etc.
According to experience of our customers, the percentage of compliance with planograms increased immediately, as soon as they introduced our application.
How does Goods Checker work? An employee comes to the store and takes a photo of the shelf. Goods Checker automatically checks the display on the photo against the planogram and marks up the photo, highlighting gaps and incorrectly displayed goods. If the layout cannot be corrected, the merchandiser can indicate the reason for this. The tagged photo will be sent to the manager, and the application generates a report based on all photos. The achieved effects include:
- The merchandiser has no doubt that the job was done correctly and he/she is eligible for a bonus.
- The merchandiser’s work has become much easier and faster: layout comparison is done automatically.
- The merchandiser knows that his/her reports are essential and used for analytics.
With Goods Checker, managers quickly get all the information about the KPIs of each merchandiser. For example, the number of outlets visited, the percentage of planogram compliance, the percentage of high-quality photos, dynamics over the period, the number of photos by month, etc. Based on these performance indicators, Goods Checker ranks employees. This is an excellent reference to manage KPIs and determine the bonuses for the merchandiser.
In addition, the Goods Checker application has enhanced fraud protection and the manager can keep track of the locations where the photos were taken.
Motivation Program is a Must to Compete Successfully in the Market
A motivation program is a good tool to retain employees and improve their performance. To develop such a program, you need to study the objectives of your employees, find any things they lack, how you can improve their work processes, and motivate them to give a hundred and ten percent. Goods Checker is a suitable tool that can help both managers and merchandisers in building a motivation program.
As an encouragement, you can use both monetary incentives (cash bonus) and social benefits (payment for sports, trips, training courses). This will assist employees in their professional development and create trust-based relations.
It is highly important to evaluate performance and revise employee loyalty programs to adjust them. If everyone is satisfied, you can use the current version further.
