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Top1. Introduction
In general, the customers or shoppers expect to see the desired products they want when they come to a store. The main reasons for visiting stores are seeing, touching, feeling products and talking with store employees or staffs before making a purchase (Chitturi, 2009; Wiegers et al., 2011; Thimou, 2019). The shop owners try to provide all customers with a positive shopping, to do this, some questions are raised; for example:
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Wow to find ways to retain and attract new customers;
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How to provide the various categories or series of new products (i.e., a wide variety of traditional and top designers in products) that are all quite different from each other with a limited budget;
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How to offer the good combination of right price and nice service that generates an experience which keeps customers coming back; and
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How to prevent “understocking” and “overstocking” problems from poor to no planning and not understanding market well enough to know what they really want.
From the last problem statement, understocking and overstocking are seen as crucial issues where the understocking is about the shop owner supply of a specific product fails to meet consumer demand. This mentions about the situation that a customer walks into a store, asks for a desired product, and then finds that the product has been run out or malfunction (a failure to function normally). They will leave dissatisfied and frustrated, and angry. If this situation happens often enough, the customer might not return and deliver negative feedback to the social networks. For overstocking situation, it is mentioned about the shop owner supply exceeds consumer demand. Knowing “knowledge risk management (KRM)” may help the shop owners to minimize the business risks (Durst et al., 2016).
An eyewear/eyeglasses business that has been focused and discussed as the case study for this research, starts to order the marketed products by mainly considering brand personalities, designers, and price. Normally, the customers get the influences from the social media, friends, and forums (Russell, 2003; Desmet & Hekkert, 2007; Lai et al., 2008). The chosen types of glasses will be promoted and displayed in their shops. For fashionable stuffs, there is no secret that women in various professional environments face a lot of challenges to select the appropriate items that should be matched to their lifestyles.
Getting or importing the latest designer glasses from other countries causes a high cost of the product and the trends of people who wear the eyeglasses cannot be interpreted easily according to different cultures, environment, and experiences. Understanding the basic requirement of the customer from feeling can help the designer to quickly create the design of the product which might be easily sold and famous.
A review of self-administered interviews from the major eyewear-supplier shops shows fail-to-analyze stage of planning and forecasting what customers really need on styles and trends of eyewear products; the owner supplies with more of glasses styles than is necessary or required. The eyewear shops tends to overstock various designs of the glasses in a hope to catch the customer interest. To overcome this problem, the eyewear shop and the manufacturer need to properly analyze and design the glasses that can suit and support the customer requirements at the present and the soon-to-come future trends. The key point of product development and analysis is to translate customer feelings into engineering design or physical characteristics.