Range Review: The Exact Process to Refresh Your Retail Range Every Quarter
Walk into any independent retail business that’s losing margin, and you’ll usually find the same root cause. A range that hasn’t been reviewed in months. Slow sellers still taking up shelf space. New trends ignored. Top performers under-stocked.
However, a proper range review fixes all of that. In fact, it’s the single most effective quarterly habit any small to medium retailer can build. When done well, it sharpens your margin, clears dead stock, and resets your range to match what customers actually want right now.
The reality is, range review isn’t a complicated process. Instead, it just needs structure. Below is the exact six-step process I use with retail clients to refresh their range every 90 days, without the chaos.
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Why a Quarterly Range Review Matters:
Retail moves fast. At the same time, customer preferences shift, trends rise and fall, and supplier pricing changes constantly. Meanwhile, your competitors keep refining their offer. In short, if your range stays static, it slowly becomes irrelevant.
A structured quarterly range review keeps your business commercially sharp. Specifically, it delivers:
- Cleaner stock holding, with less cash trapped in slow sellers.
- In addition, higher margin, because you protect your winners and cut your drag.
- Moreover, a range that actually reflects current customer demand.
- Better supplier conversations, backed by performance data.
- Ultimately, stronger buying decisions for the next quarter.
Above all, a range review forces you to make commercial decisions on purpose. Not by accident. Not by default. In practice, this is the kind of disciplined thinking that sits at the core of our retail category management services.
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Step 1: Pull Clean Sales Data:
Every range review starts in the same place. Specifically, your numbers.
Pull a clean sales report covering the last 13 weeks, broken down by SKU. In addition, capture units sold, retail dollars, cost of goods, gross margin dollars, gross margin percentage, and current stock on hand.
In practice, this is the part most small retailers skip. Instead, they go straight to gut feel. However, gut feel without data is just guessing in a nicer outfit.
If your POS doesn’t make this easy, export to Excel and structure it manually. Importantly, the effort pays back inside one quarter.
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Step 2: Sort Your Range Into Five Performance Tiers:
Once your data is clean, group every SKU into one of five tiers.
- The top 20% of sales with strong margin. These are non-negotiable. Protect them, keep them in-stock, and merchandise them properly.
- Priority SKUs. Solid sellers with steady turn. They round out the range and support the bestsellers. Keep them, but do not expand them blindly.
- Newer lines with potential. In general you should give them three months to see how they perform. Either give them more support, or set an exit date.
- Core/Extended List. The extended range of products that you sell
- The bottom 15 to 20% of sales. Aged, slow, or simply wrong for your customer. These need a clearance plan, not another reorder.
Importantly, this tiering is the foundation of every other decision in the range review. When done well, the rest of the process becomes obvious. For deeper context on how leading retailers structure their range tiers, Inside Retail Australia has published a strong piece on the eight key points to master range planning.
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Step 3: Test Margin, Stockturn and Sell-Through:
Sales alone don’t tell the full story. For example, a high-selling SKU on a thin margin can quietly drain profit. By contrast, a lower-volume hero with strong margin and fast stockturn might be your most valuable line.
Therefore, layer in three commercial filters:
- Gross margin percentage versus your category target.
- Additionally, stockturn (cost of goods sold divided by average stock at cost).
- Furthermore, sell-through rate over the 13-week window. Generally this would sit at a 40% sell through from the first time a product is purchased.
As a result, you’ll quickly see which products are doing real work for your business and which are just busy. This is why range review stops being a stocktake and starts being strategy.
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Step 4: Pressure-Test the Range Against Customer Need:
Numbers tell you what happened. By extension, customer behaviour tells you why.
At this point, step back from the spreadsheet and ask three honest questions.
- Does my range still match who my customer is today?
- Are there obvious gaps a customer might walk in and not find?
- Where are competitors moving that I am currently ignoring?
For example, if your store sits in a fast-changing demographic, last year’s range might already be 12 months behind. Equally, if a major competitor has just dropped a price point you don’t compete in, that’s a gap, not a problem. Shopify’s Australian retail team has a useful overview of assortment planning across channels if you want to pressure-test your thinking further.
This step keeps your range review grounded in the real market, not just last quarter’s report.
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Step 5: Make the Cuts (Without Hesitating):
However, this is where most retailers stall. Cutting product feels like admitting defeat. In reality, it’s the opposite. Every SKU you cut frees cash, space, and attention for products that will actually perform.
As a rule of thumb, if a product hasn’t turned in 90 days, sits below a 40% sell through rate (Different product categories and subcategories can be subjected to different thresholds) hasn’t hit margin, and isn’t part of a clear customer need, it’s a candidate for exit.
Furthermore, build a structured exit plan for those lines. Markdown, bundle, promotional clearance, supplier return, or staff sale all work. The goal is speed, not perfection. Ultimately, decisively cleared dead stock is better than well-loved dead stock.
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Step 6: Plan What Replaces the Gaps:
Cutting is only half the job. By contrast, the cuts create space, and that space needs to be filled with purpose.
Before you reorder anything, decide the following:
- What gaps did the review expose in price points, categories, or customer needs?
- Similarly, which existing bestsellers deserve more breadth (more colours, sizes, variants)?
- In addition, which new lines, suppliers, or trends could realistically take that space?
- Ultimately, what is the buy budget, and how should it be split across bestsellers, priority SKUs, newness, core/extended and replace discontinued products?
Importantly, walk every new buying decision back to the data and the customer insight from earlier steps. This is how a range review compounds quarter on quarter. Each cycle builds on the last.
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Building Range Review Into a Rhythm:
A single range review will improve your business. By extension, a quarterly rhythm transforms it.
Set the dates in advance. Block out a full day per quarter. Additionally, use the same template each time so the analysis becomes faster and more comparable. Moreover, loop in your team, your key suppliers, and any commercial partners who can sharpen the thinking. You can find more practical retail frameworks on the Pharologue retail strategy blog.
Ultimately, the businesses that scale are the ones that turn good practice into recurring habits. Notably, range reviews are one of the highest-leverage habits any independent retailer can build.
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Final Thought:
A messy range tells customers you’re not paying attention. By contrast, a sharp, well-edited range tells them you understand them.
The reality is, range reviews are not an admin task. Instead, it’s a profit lever. Pull it every quarter, properly, and you’ll see the impact in your margin, your cash flow, and your customer experience. To learn more about Pharotique CMG and the approach behind this process, visit the about page, or contact a retail consultant directly to talk through your own range.
This is how serious retailers operate. Now you can too.
For tailored range review and quarterly assortment refresh support, book a consult with Christopher today.
Written by Christopher Salib
Founder, Pharotique Category Management Group
Pioneering Category Excellence – Strategic. Independent. Proudly Australian.
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