Picture this: shoppers crowd the store, filling their carts with holiday gifts and groceries. But your product lingers in the backroom rather than making its way efficiently to shelves, endcaps, and displays where shoppers can, you know, shop them.

Where did it all go wrong? The last 100 feet.

“The last 100 feet is so crucial,” said one of our CPG experts. “You can have

the best program in the world, but it doesn’t matter if inventory isn’t right.”

But what can you do about the last 100 feet, especially with so little time before the holidays?

Call in some help. 

Merchandising services, like this product from Customer Impact, give brands a ready source of labor during the holiday season. On your brand's behalf, such services can deploy workers to stores where they'll audit shelves, clean up SKUs, and, yes, make sure your products are on the sales floor where they belong.

And with labor shortages expected across the retail industry this year, providing your own labor may be more important than ever. 

Supply chain upheaval means shoppers are witnessing high levels of out-of-stocks online, and many retailers are forced to make tough choices when it comes to stocking limited inventory. In many cases, shelves are taking priority over curbsides and clicks.

But for brands, staying in stock in the digital space is no joke. Online retailers—Amazon, in particular—often hand out steep penalties to suppliers that don’t stay in-stock.

With this dynamic playing out online, brands cannot afford to "set and forget" their online ad spend this holiday season. Instead, they should take an active approach—shifting ad spend to reflect inventory levels across ecomm platforms. 

If you’re running low on inventory at, for instance, Amazon, then shift your ad spend to Walmart.com or another online retailer with plenty of stock.

“Don’t waste ad dollars when you may run out of stock on a particular platform,” another CPG expert said. “You are paying the [online retailer] to punish you when you run out of stock!

"The name of the game in Q4 is inventory and savvy ad spending.”

This holiday season especially, carefully manage the interaction between online stock levels, OOS penalties, and ad spend. They’re linked—and a holistic approach will keep down costs and improve sales.

Bonus tip: keep an eye on your competitors’ online stock levels. If they’re out of stock (or running low), invest your ad spend there...and reap the rewards.

During the sales phase, your team negotiated a program with the retail buyer, including specific pricing and promotional considerations.

Now it's execution time. And that's no time to hide your eyes from what's happening in stores.

Unfortunately, operational realities don’t always stick to the program. The most common (and costly) offenders include incorrect prices, displays, and POS materials (both analog and digital). In the chaos of holiday retail, it’s not uncommon to see, for instance...

• Incorrect prices on SKUs
• Missing or incorrect shelf tags
• Missing displays
• Displays stocked with the wrong product

Yet these were negotiated—possibly even purchased—by your brand.

You have them coming.

Mistakes made by retail partners may be isolated to one store or spread across many (if not all) locations. If you can take quick action, you can prevent a catastrophic loss of sales.

But you can’t spot compliance issues if you don’t look for them, and you can’t fix compliance issues if you can’t prove them to the retailer.

So be deliberate.

Look for, find, and fix operational problems with your retail partner before they get out of hand. Auditing solutions like those in our marketplace make this faster and more affordable than you might expect.