Assessment First. Software Second.
Store Assessment
A margin analysis of your store's current business: where your pricing stands today, what it is costing you, and what your options are
Most stores cannot say, in a sentence, what pricing strategy they are following. Prices were set over years, by different people, with different reasoning — and nobody has measured the result since.
The Store Assessment answers that question from your own data: a margin analysis of your store's current business. It reads the items in your point of sale, works out which of your vendor's pricing programs your shelf prices actually follow, and shows what every other option would do to your price tags and your margin. You see the number before you change anything.
The short version
1. It reads your store
Your items, your costs, your shelf prices and twelve months of your own unit sales. No survey, no sample, nothing typed in by hand.
2. It prices the options
Every pricing level your vendor offers, and six to eight plans built from your own catalog, each priced right through to the rounded shelf price.
3. It puts a number on each one
How many retail prices change, which way they move, what happens to your sitting margin, and what the option is worth in annual gross profit.
Every dollar figure in an assessment is a projected annual gross profit change, calculated from your last twelve months of sales and assuming comparable sales volume and costs. It is the right way to compare one pricing option against another on your own items — it is not a forecast of realized profit, and it does not account for how your customers, your costs or your market move afterwards. That is what sitting margin is for: you measure the result after the prices are on the shelf.
What the assessment tells you
Read from your own items — not from a survey or a sample
Where you are today
Items, sales, gross profit and your current sitting margin over the last twelve months, and how much of your catalog is vendor items. The same margin rules the Profit Analyzer uses, so the numbers match what you already look at.
Which strategy you are actually following
Not the one you meant to follow — the one your shelf prices show. The assessment finds the program level your prices sit closest to, measured by how few price changes it would take to get there.
How you compare with every level available
Each of your vendor's price levels, and its suggested retail, priced against your items: how many price tags would change, how many go up and down, and what each one does to your sitting margin.
Where the opportunity is
Department by department, and by how closely customers watch the price. Items nobody prices-shops can carry margin that price-sensitive items cannot — the assessment finds those groups in your own selling history, and leaves your price-sensitive items alone.
What it is worth, in dollars
Every option carries its yearly gross profit change, weighted by what you actually sold in the last twelve months — alongside the number of price tags it would take to get there.
What to look at before you trust it
Items whose selling unit looks wrong — a price that cannot be reconciled with the suggested retail — are set aside into one reviewable group, held at their current price in every projection, rather than quietly inflating the result.
Potential plans, built from your items
The assessment builds six to eight sample pricing models out of your own catalog and selling history. Each one prices groups of items at one of your vendor's levels, and each is measured on what it would actually cost you to adopt.
Every plan is measured the same two ways: how many price tags change, and what happens to your sitting margin.
| Plan | What it is |
|---|---|
| Fewest changes | Every group on the level that changes the fewest prices |
| Program as it stands | Everything on your level, with no adjustments |
| Hold margin | The fewest price changes that keep today's sitting margin |
| Margin +1 or +2 points | The fewest price changes that raise the sitting margin that much |
| Best value per change | Where each further price change starts earning noticeably less |
| Blind items work harder | Fewest changes, except low-awareness items go as high as allowed |
| Most margin within awareness limits | Every move that adds gross profit, within the awareness limits |
A margin analysis of one store, in full
| Plan | Projected gross profit per year | Future sitting margin | Prices changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Program as it stands | 38.3 % | 12,047 | |
| Fewest changesclosest to the goals set here | 39.3 % | 4,812 | |
| Margin +1 point | 39.8 % | 5,547 | |
| Blind items work harder | 40.2 % | 9,519 | |
| Best value per change | 40.6 % | 8,733 | |
| Margin +2 points | 40.8 % | 9,595 | |
| Most margin within awareness limits | 41.4 % | 16,286 |
How a plan decides each group's price
A plan works down your vendor's own taxonomy — a department, then the product groups inside it — and splits each group by how closely customers watch the price and whether the item sells for under ten dollars. Each of those groups is priced at one of your vendor's levels.
A group only sets its own price when it has enough items selling to judge it; smaller groups follow the nearest group above them that could. That is what keeps a plan from drawing a conclusion about a whole department out of four items and a dozen units.
The result is then compressed: a group whose decision is the same as the one it would have inherited is dropped, and a decision that saves very few price changes for very little money is merged into the one above it. What you read is recalculated from your items after that compression, so the plan on the screen is the plan the strategy will build.
Why the number of price changes is the second measure
Added gross profit does not rise in a straight line with the number of prices you change. The first few hundred changes earn most of what the first thousand earn; the rest add very little for the same work at the shelf. So where to stop is a real question, and the assessment answers it from your own numbers rather than leaving it to taste.
You set the goals. The assessment does the arithmetic.
Rank what matters to your store and every plan recalculates immediately. The goal at the top counts most.
- Minimize price changes — the fewest price tags change
- Protect margin — the future sitting margin stays at or above the current one
- Stay competitive on price-sensitive items — the fewest increases where customers are watching
- Improve gross profit — the most gross profit dollars
Three rules are never broken, whatever the goals say: no item's price goes down if you say so, no plan is shown whose future sitting margin falls below today's, and your most price-sensitive items stay exactly where they are.
Rounding is on from the start
A store almost always rounds its prices, and the scheme makes a real difference to the result — so every number on the screen is the price that will actually be written, with the scheme you picked.
The assessment also prices the same plan under each of your rounding schemes side by side, so you can see what the choice is worth before you make it.
And then the assessment hands off to the software
It writes the starting strategy
Pick a plan and Margin Master builds it as a real pricing strategy — every step, in the order it runs, already rounding with your scheme. You see exactly what will be created before anything is saved, and it is not activated.
You make it yours
A starting point is not a finished strategy. Add margin targets, your own rounding, SKU exceptions, custom groups and minimum and maximum margins — then make it active when the prices are the ones you want.
You measure what it did
Every run reports the sitting margin it moved and the profit impact at your last twelve months of volume. Sitting Margin is how you tell whether the strategy is doing what you set it up to do.
Available for three buying groups
Each one reads the levels, codes and taxonomy its own stores price with
Ace Store Assessment
Compares Ace Retail, Level 1 and Level 2 — your zone levels where you have them, otherwise national — and selects by Vendor Department, Class and Product Group.
Ace Hardware pricingDo it Best Store Assessment
Compares Do it Best Level 1, Level 2 and the suggested retail, and selects by the Do it Best taxonomy.
Do it Best pricingTrue Value Store Assessment
Compares True Value Level 1, 1.5 and 2 against the Do it Best suggested retail, and reads a store correctly before or after its transition to Do it Best SKUs.
True Value pricingFind out what your current pricing is costing you
What you get, and what it takes to get it
What the assessment gives you
- Your current sitting margin, your item and sales totals, and how much of your catalog is vendor items
- The program level your shelf prices actually follow today
- Every price level your vendor offers, priced against your own items: price changes, direction, and future sitting margin
- Six to eight potential plans, each with its price-change count and its projected annual gross profit change
- The items whose selling unit looks wrong, set aside as one reviewable group instead of quietly inflating the result
- A starting pricing strategy written into Margin Master, if you want one - shown to you before it is saved, and never switched on by us
What it takes to run one
- Margin Master installed on a computer at the store - the 30-day trial runs the assessment
- One import of your own point-of-sale data: item, cost, current retail and twelve months of unit sales
- Your buying group and store number, so the right catalog, price levels and zone pricing sync down
- Your answers to four questions about what matters to your store, which you can change and re-read as often as you like
The assessment runs inside Margin Master, against your own database on your own computer. If you would rather be walked through it first, schedule a demonstration and we will show you the screen before you install anything.
See it on a real store
The training video walks through setting up a True Value store and running its Store Assessment, end to end, on live data. The handbook page documents every tab, measure and rule on the screen.
