Every tire dealer’s goal is to better understand what their customers want. This can improve sales, maximize overall profitability and drive more traffic to their stores. Tire Review’s Tess Lovrak discusses how data can help dealers do so from the Tire Review Continental Tire Garage Studio at Babcox Media.

Data and analytics platforms can be used to help dealers accomplish goals by collecting and analyzing data about a dealer’s sales history, inventory and market demand and then recommending actionable improvement opportunities.

These platforms are particularly useful for small, independent dealers who maybe don’t have in-house IT teams or the time to talk with various agencies and consultancy companies.

Data platforms can analyze one store, or several stores owned by the same person, to provide recommendations on what tires the dealer should be stocking. For a retailer looking to open a new shop who is unfamiliar with a market, the platform can determine which tires to order based on the market, leading to a highly productive opening day.

So, if people are seeing success from these platforms, why isn’t every tire dealer using them? Well, there are a few obstacles to overcome before there is a real expansion of these data platforms.

One is most of the tire industry still runs on older software, which makes automatic replenishment and data analysis difficult. Even if the industry can overcome that hurdle and the data can be extracted, many of the existing platforms are too difficult to use or too generic for the tire industry.

Distinct SKUs have also skyrocketed and sellout visibility across the tire supply chain can’t be easily tracked once a tire leaves a factory.

But don’t worry, it’s not all dreary, and there are still ways to take advantage of these new tools given that technology exists at an affordable price. A sophisticated data analytics platform can help with inventory and replenishment, pricing, profits and more.