---
title: "Practical Guide: How Can Brand Owners Achieve Store Self-Ordering and Display Maintenance?"
description: "In recent years, due to rising labor costs and the spread of internet technology, many brand owners have attempted to enable terminal stores to place orders and maintain displays autonomously. Except for a few industry leaders leveraging their channel coverage, product mix, brand power, and digital capabilities, most brand owners have not achieved satisfactory results. The core issue is not technology or operational skills but the store owners' willingness to use the app. This article explores how mid-sized enterprises can address the willingness problem through selection, incentives, verification, and process design."
author: "高级研究员 海游"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-08-13"
language: "en"
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# Practical Guide: How Can Brand Owners Achieve Store Self-Ordering and Display Maintenance?

> In recent years, due to rising labor costs and the spread of internet technology, many brand owners have attempted to enable terminal stores to place orders and maintain displays autonomously. Except for a few industry leaders leveraging their channel coverage, product mix, brand power, and digital capabilities, most brand owners have not achieved satisfactory results. The core issue is not technology or operational skills but the store owners' willingness to use the app. This article explores how mid-sized enterprises can address the willingness problem through selection, incentives, verification, and process design.

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In recent years, due to rising labor costs and the spread of internet technology, many brand owners have begun to try to enable terminal stores to place orders and maintain displays autonomously. Except for a few industry-leading brands that have leveraged their channel coverage advantages, product portfolio advantages, brand power advantages, and digital capability advantages to achieve some success, most brand owners' independent implementation capabilities are not ideal.
The reason, in my view, is: first, it is certainly not a technical issue; the software industry's R&D or imitation and replication capabilities are obvious to all. Second, it is certainly not a matter of terminal stores' operational skills; nowadays, from the elderly to children, everyone is proficient in using various apps.
So why do many mid-sized enterprises often encounter situations where stores do not use or cannot continuously use the app during promotion? The answer is unique: **the store owner's willingness to use is not high. Today, we will focus on the "willingness" issue and briefly discuss how mid-sized enterprises can achieve store self-ordering and display maintenance.**
**01 The foundation of willingness is selection**
I have a viewpoint: **Any new initiative in the FMCG field should not be rolled out comprehensively; it should be promoted selectively, from easy to difficult.** So first, we need to consider which stores are most suitable for implementing self-ordering functions at this stage. Here are several dimensions for brand owners to consider:
**1. Sales and profit dimensions**: Sales volume guarantees store traffic, and profit guarantees close cooperation with stores.
This gives rise to four quadrants: 1) High sales and high profit, with high-margin products selling well; 2) High sales and low profit, with low-margin products selling well; 3) Low sales and high profit, with high-margin products selling less; 4) Low sales and low profit, with all products selling less. If promoting the app, it should be rolled out in stages based on these quadrants.
**2. Relationship dimension**: Visit frequency and market expense investment are the carriers of customer relationships; business is the carrier of customer relationships; distributors or brand owners are the carriers of business. Therefore, it is necessary to sort out customer relationships and measurement thinking from top to bottom, quantify customer relationship standards (business work years, visit frequency, expense investment), etc. The better the relationship, the more pleasant the cooperation.
**3. Hardware configuration**: Many convenience stores have independent inventory management systems. The biggest challenge for store owners in self-ordering is not understanding their inventory status, leading to stockouts without awareness. Therefore, prioritizing stores with inventory systems is the best solution. Of course, if the brand owner's system can be integrated with the store's inventory system and provide safety stock alerts, that is even better.
**4. Store owner selection**: It is necessary to profile store owners, describing which types of store owners prefer using the app and at what times they use it. Ultimately, choose those with high compatibility to cooperate first.
**02 Activation of willingness is incentives**
**From installation to use, from sporadic to frequent, from frequent to benefit, from benefit to habit, this closed loop** requires the push of incentives. Designing a reasonable incentive system is the foundation for stable operation of the loop.
**1. From installation to use**: There are three incentive targets: the app promotion salesperson, the terminal store owner's installation, and the terminal store owner's usage. This requires a reasonable incentive logic and space. For example, installation should meet target customer standards and ensure that the installer is the person responsible for in-store purchasing. The store owner should receive product information or coupons immediately upon installation, and the first few uses should be designed with coupon usage and return coupon models.
**2. From sporadic to frequent**: Here, attention should be paid to differentiated product promotion strategies. What products are suitable for which stores? What coupons should be promoted? Of course, incentives such as daily or weekly check-ins can also be matched to meet the store's product needs, price needs, and purchase stickiness.
**3. From frequent to benefit**: To achieve benefits from frequent self-ordering, there is a benefit hub: periodic sales rebates online. Design a reasonable incentive rebate model to make the store the biggest beneficiary of the self-ordering habit.
**4. From benefit to habit**: This is a natural progression, but it should be noted that any marketing automation requires a maintenance system to support it. Establishing a periodic follow-up mechanism is a basic guarantee.
**5. The end point of willingness is not to earn more and more corporate incentives, but to generate high profits from high product sales through channel, standard, and process design with additional incentives.**
**03 The guarantee of willingness is verification**
Without verification, willingness will deviate from the operational track. Verification is the cornerstone of model assurance, but **the measurement scale of verification must be well controlled**, otherwise verification becomes the biggest killer of promotion.
**1. First-level verification mechanism**: **Check the day's orders. The verifiers are the brand owner's frontline supervisors or distributor clerks. The verification content includes: whether the maximum policy discounts were enjoyed? Whether the display standards were implemented according to company requirements? And so on.**
For example: A store owner, Zhang San, ordered 8 pieces of a product at once, but the company policy is buy 10 get 1 free. At this time, a phone call follow-up is needed to give advice; otherwise, disputes are likely to occur later, and one possible outcome is that the store owner uninstalls the app and stops cooperating.
**2. Second-level verification mechanism**: Spot-check the work of the first-level verification. The verifier role is the enterprise's regional management department. The verification content includes the implementation of policies, trends in order volume, regional display execution, etc., and then summarize, count, and provide feedback.
**3. Third-level verification mechanism**: The enterprise headquarters spot-checks, especially for deductions of store incentives, which must be 100% verified. Understand the reasons for deductions and the execution results. Especially when the first-level verifier is a distributor employee, sufficient attention should be paid to simple and crude execution due to busy schedules for exclusive or mixed distributors.
**4. Verification feedback mechanism**: Sometimes the feelings of stores are fragile. For example, if they do a display, they believe the brand owner must pay display fees. Whether the display is qualified is not their concern. This is the difficulty of grassroots operations: giving incentives cannot pass, and not giving incentives offends customers. Therefore, a verification feedback mechanism should be set up, especially at the beginning, with both online and offline reminders. For unintentional mistakes, full understanding and buffering should be given.
**04 The sustainability of willingness is process**
**Detailed, foolproof, and standardized processes are the prerequisite for app operation**, and this should be emphasized.
**1. Detailed**: For example, the display reward task package needs to define: 1) Display standards, preferably when the salesperson promotes and installs the app, collect in-store information and designate the first and second display positions. Display standards should include picture examples; 2) Photo requirements: how many photos to take? What products? Photo examples (not selfies; correct and incorrect photo demonstrations); 3) Time nodes: whether to take photos once a week or every two weeks, etc. Everything must be detailed to minimize disputes.
**2. Foolproof**: As the name implies, even a fool can operate smoothly just by clicking. The reason is simple: the store owners you face have varying levels of acceptance, so design for the lowest capability.
**3. Standardized**: Take display standards as an example: 1) Self-service signing of display standards; 2) Self-service maintenance frequency standards; 3) Self-service maintenance score standards; 4) Self-service maintenance standard upgrade and downgrade mechanism.
**Final thoughts:**
If brand owners want to achieve store self-ordering, the first thing to solve is the store's "willingness" issue. Speaking of this, many people immediately think of burning capital. Facts have proven that this approach is not advisable. Previous retail platforms and new retail, recent community group buying, and the front warehouse model of Miss Fresh a few days ago—after the capital burns out, it often ends in a mess.
The reason is simple: this project is not about quick success and grabbing market share, but about planned, orderly, progressive, and interactive work. The underlying logic of its operation is: **Design channel strategies, use incentives to guide, communicate to generate sales, generate profits from sales. The money store owners ultimately earn is not corporate expenses, but high profits from high product sales generated through channel design and incentive guidance.**
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