Retailer category strategy
How broad a range each retailer carries in each market, the five strategies Eebz uses, and how they decide which of your products a retailer should stock.
Retailers don't treat every category the same. One retailer wants to be the place to buy gaming headsets and carries hundreds, niche models included. Another stocks a handful of best sellers next to the consoles. A third lists a headset only when a deal comes along. Retailer category strategy records which approach each retailer takes in each market, so Eebz knows what a fair range looks like there.
Retailer Category Strategy is one of Eebz's 12 foundation models. It works with ranging, the rating you give each product. Ranging says how widely a product should go; category strategy says how far each retailer reaches. Together they give the range you should have at each retailer.
Where the idea comes from
Category strategy comes from category management, which grew out of US grocery retail in the late 1980s. Instead of buying product by product, retailers began to run each category as a business of its own, planned jointly with their suppliers. Brian Harris is credited with the concept, and The Partnering Group, the firm he founded in 1990, worked with the Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) initiative on its Category Management Report, published in 1995. A central step in that process is giving each category a role, most often destination, routine, occasional or seasonal, and convenience, and letting the role decide how much range, space and price investment the category gets. Eebz applies the same thinking online, where shelf space is not the limit but range depth still is: the strategy says how deep a retailer's range in a market should go.
The five strategies
| Icon | Strategy | Range | What it means | Ranging expected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Destination+ | Category champion | The complete range, niche products included | AAA to B | |
| Destination | Full range | The full mainstream range, catalogue included, but not the niche specialist lines | AAA to A | |
| Routine | Good range | A good range of big sellers and a reasonable catalogue | AAA and AA | |
| Convenience | Limited range | A limited range of top sellers and some catalogue | AAA | |
| Profit | Opportunistic | Top sellers only, and only when there is an opportunity | None |
The icon is a shelf: the more boxes on it, the broader the range. C, exclusive, products are not expected under any strategy. They belong only where you have agreed them.
A retailer can take a different strategy in each market. An electricals retailer might be a Destination+ for laptops and a Convenience retailer for gaming headsets.
Why it matters
- Gaps you can trust. A product is only flagged as missing where the retailer's strategy says it should be. A Convenience retailer without your B product is not a gap; a Destination+ retailer without it is.
- Listings that age correctly. A retailer with a narrower strategy moves on from a product sooner, so its listings reach late life and end of life earlier, and Eebz reads them less often once they are out of stock. See product and listing lifecycle.
- A range plan per retailer. Line up your ranging against each retailer's strategy and you have the range each retailer should carry, and the case for every missing line.
Where to see it
Category strategy is set per retailer, per market. Open a retailer, go to Markets, then open a market and one of its categories. Assortment strategy, in the Retailer panel of the sidebar, shows the strategy icon. Click it to see which of the five strategies is selected.
Eebz sets each retailer's strategy with its Category Strategy model. If you think a retailer's strategy for a market is wrong, tell your customer success manager.
Last updated November 2026