Glossary of Not-So-Common Retailing Terms
by Larry Slusser on April 2nd, 2008
Have you heard some terms that you do not know what they mean? Do you appear to have the ‘dear in the headlights’ look when someone mentions a term that you should know, but do not? Below is a list of 20 not-so-common retailing terms. If you are just entering into the retail business, these terms will help to indoctrinate your lingo in the retailing industry.
Ad Impressions: Ad impressions are simply the number of times an ad is made available for consumers to view the product or service. These are also known as banner impressions.
Asset Protection: Assets protection is also known as loss prevention. Loss prevention is where steps are taken to stop or reduce the possibility of loss from shoplifting, employee theft, poor safety procedures, and errors in paperwork.
Business-to-Government: Business-to-Government, or B2G, is that the company’s primary focus is on working with government agencies. This can be at the national, state or local level.
Balanced Scorecard: The balanced scorecard is the strategic management system that is measurement-based. It was developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. The balanced scorecard aligns the business activities with the strategic goals, monitoring the performance of the goals over time. It also details what needs to be measured to ensure the effectiveness of the strategies.
CLV: CLV, or customer lifetime value, is the current value of the potential future income that is generated by an individual purchaser.
Co-op Advertising: Co-op advertising is also known as the Cooperative Advertising or Cooperative Program. The co-op advertising is the ad costs divided between two or more companies.
Depth of Assortment: This is the number of brands or styles within a product line or classification of merchandise, also known as product depth.
Fractional Tagging: This is where the EAS tags are applied to a percentage of units during production.
GAF: GAF is an acronym for General merchandise, apparel, and furniture. These are the items that stores sell which are normally sold at department stores.
Halo Effect: This is connected to the electronic article surveillance system in that people will have the perception that untagged merchandise is protected with the EAS, simply because other items within the store are protected.
Journal Roll: This otherwise known as the journal tape that is either paper or electronic, recording the transactions from the cash register.
Keystone Markup: Also known as retail pricing, the keystone markup is the equivalent of the cost of the merchandise and doubling it to determine the retail price.
Mazur Plan: This is where the retail store activities are divided into four sections-merchandising, publicity, store management and control.
Narrow and Deep: This is a sales approach where the retailer will only sell a few selected items but have a lot of the product available.
Objective-and-Task Method: A budget technique that relates the sales objective with the advertising budget. This is also referred to as the advertising budget preparation.
Push Money: This is the employee sales incentive in the form of cash premiums, prizes, or additional commission for effectively pushing or increasing sales for an identified product or merchandise.
Step Theory: The step theory is where a customer will go through a decision making process-attention, interest, desire and action.
Universal Vendor Marking: This is where manufacturers will pre-mark the merchandise that is easily read by both people and machines.
Variable Markup Policy: This is a policy that allows for adjusting markups that is based on a classification of particular merchandise.
Wheel of Retailing: Wheel of retailing is a theory that is used to explain the institutional changes that occur when innovators enter the retail industry.