Merchandising Kazakhstan: everyone did their job, so where are the sales?

Picture a simple situation. A coffee supplier agrees with an agency that a merchandiser will visit a supermarket on Tuesdays and Fridays. The schedule is agreed, the route is planned, the hour of work is paid for. On paper, everything looks flawless.

On Tuesday the merchandiser arrives on time, but the delivery hasn't come yet. The goods arrive on Wednesday morning, when nobody is scheduled to be in the store. The next visit is only on Friday. And on Friday the merchandiser calls in sick. An everyday situation, but the consequences are painful.

The product sits in the stockroom for almost a week and never reaches the checkout zone — the very place where impulse products sell fastest. The boxes wait in the back room while the demand they were delivered for is served by someone else.

And here is the key point: formally, everyone fulfilled their obligations. The merchandiser came on schedule. The distributor delivered. The store accepted the delivery. Everyone reported, everyone closed their area of responsibility. But the sales never happened — and nobody is to blame.

The system is built in such a way that this kind of failure is sometimes inevitable. The only question is how often it happens and how much it costs.

Visit-based merchandising rests on a silent assumption: that several independent schedules will happen to line up at the right place and the right time. All of these have to coincide at once:

•the delivery schedule;

•the merchandiser's schedule;

•stockroom receiving hours;

•access to the goods;

•the section manager's working hours;

•no sick days and no unplanned replacements.

Each of these factors lives by its own logic and its own calendar. Nobody designs where they intersect. Well, not quite: we know agencies that tried to account for a dozen parameters when planning visit-based merchandising, and some even set up "firefighter" teams to cover for absent staff.

It's like a bus and a train running on different timetables. Each is formally on time, each has its own discipline. But that's no help to a passenger who needs to change from one to the other: they are still stuck at the station, because there is a forty-minute gap between the first one arriving and the second one leaving.

In merchandising, the product plays the role of that passenger. When the timetables don't match, it stays "at the station": in the back room, out of the shopper's sight.

That's why the question "how many times a week do you visit the store?" is gradually losing its management value. It measures the contractor's activity, not the business result. The right question is different:

You don't need a bigger budget to feel the difference between the models. It's enough to redistribute the one you already have.

Say a manufacturer pays for one hour of merchandiser time per week. In the traditional visit-based model, the merchandiser comes once and works the whole hour in one go: checks the shelf, puts out whatever is available, and leaves until the next visit. Between those hours, the store is a black box for the brand — it somehow runs on its own and produces a result that can only be influenced at the next visit.

In the dedicated in-store model, the same hour is spread over five working days — roughly twelve minutes of daily attention to the product. In practice the time isn't spread evenly: delivery days need more, quiet days need less. But the principle changes radically.

The manufacturer stops buying a visit. It starts buying the constant presence of its product in the field of view of a person who is in the store every day anyway. It is no longer a scheduled one-off intervention, but continuous control of the shelf.

During the day, a dedicated merchandiser can:

•check the shelf in the morning and quickly fill the main gaps;

•re-check availability during afternoon peak traffic;

•receive and shelve incoming products on the day of delivery;

•check price tags and promo compliance;

•rotate stock by FIFO and remove items close to expiry;

•restore the display before the evening rush;

•once a week, when the order window opens, make adjustments if something didn't work — because every store has such a merchandiser, and their main KPI in the end is sales;

•and make local corrections: write off phantom stock and fix mis-sorting. Nobody but the brand needs this. Nobody but merchandisers will do it.

The key difference in one sentence: the product doesn't wait for next Tuesday or Friday. Response to a failure is measured in hours, not days.

In retail it's tempting to treat delivery as a completed stage: the truck has arrived, the invoice is signed, the goods are "in the store". But from the shopper's point of view — and therefore from the revenue point of view — that's an illusion.

A delivery is like passing the baton in a relay. Until the product is on the shelf, the last runner hasn't crossed the finish line. The distributor has run its leg. The store has received the goods. But the race isn't over until the product is where the shopper can pick it up.

Formally, the product has been delivered. Economically, it doesn't exist yet — for the shopper, it simply isn't there.

At MagMerch we record two checkpoints:

•the date and time the goods actually arrive at the store;

•confirmation that the product is on the shelf.

The gap between them is the real execution time — the very interval that remains invisible in the visit-based model. We call this metric Shelf Lead Time: the time from the product's arrival at the store to its confirmed display.

The standard depends on the category. For beverages, a reasonable range is 2–3 hours. For dairy products such as yoghurts, it's up to an hour — not strictness for its own sake, but a reflection of the category's logistics. A refrigerated truck brings one or two boxes, the store quickly receives them, the section manager hands them to the merchandiser, and the product goes straight into the chiller. Half an hour from truck to shelf is a normal, well-tuned path.

But three days waiting for the next visit is no longer logistics. It's a direct loss of sales and of remaining shelf life: the product ages in the back room before it has even started selling.

Exact figures for specific clients are covered by NDAs, but any manager can reproduce the logic of the estimate. The good news is that it doesn't require any confidential data.

Take the monthly sell-out of a specific SKU. Divide it by thirty. You get the approximate value of one day of sales for that item. It's a rough proxy, but it's enough to discuss the scale of losses.

Now imagine a fast-moving or promo item is missing from the shelf for seven days. The potential risk approaches a quarter of that SKU's monthly sales!

Yes, the market partly cushions the blow: some shoppers will choose a different flavour, a different pack or a neighbouring SKU of the same brand. But at the same time, things will happen that never make it into a visit report:

•part of the demand will go to a competitor — and may not come back;

•the promo will run for nothing, while its budget has already been spent;

•the freed-up shelf space will be taken by someone else's product;

•the store will see weak turnover of the missing SKU and draw conclusions that don't favour the brand;

•the manufacturer will lose arguments in the next shelf negotiations.

The last point is the most insidious. A product missing from the shelf distorts the data the retailer later relies on for listing decisions. The brand is penalised for sales that never happened — because the product was physically out of the shopper's reach.

That's why seven days without a fast-moving SKU is a management problem that hits revenue, promo effectiveness and negotiating position all at once.

In-house staff have legitimate sick leave, holidays and other absences. That's normal. The problem isn't the absence itself.

The problem arises where it makes no economic sense for a manufacturer to keep a back-up employee for a team of 5–6 in-house merchandisers. A "spare" merchandiser is a cost that only pays off at scale. As a result, when the main employee is absent there is simply no replacement, and the shelf is left unattended until they return — or the gaps get "plugged" by pulling other merchandisers off their routes. Quality drops, accountability gets blurred.

A large agency has different economics. The reserve is spread across dozens of clients and hundreds of merchandisers and stores, so it can afford one. The system always has:

•trainees ready to go out on a route;

•extra staff for peak days;

•a temporary talent pool;

•people who can be quickly reassigned between stores;

•staff who are on holiday today and can take an extra shift for additional pay.

The mechanics change too. If a merchandiser doesn't show up, the store manager reports it not to the manufacturer but to the agency, and the replacement becomes the operator's job. The manufacturer shouldn't have to find out who is ill, who is on holiday and why someone didn't come. That's not its management concern. It cares about one result: the product on the shelf within the working day. Everything else is the contractor's internal business.

If you are responsible for sales, Modern Trade, KAM, purchasing or merchandising, ask your team seven questions to check what you are actually measuring.

•How many hours pass between the product actually arriving at the store and appearing on the shelf?

•What percentage of deliveries are shelved on the day they arrive?

•Over the last month, how many days were your ten key SKUs missing from the shelf itself, not from the stockroom?

•Who exactly is responsible for replacing a merchandiser who doesn't show up?

•What are you really measuring: the number of visits, or the actual availability of the product to the shopper?

•What percentage of order adjustments were made by merchandisers this month?

•What is the plan vs. actual for sales by store?

The answers will show more than a standard route-completion report. Because a visit report records effort, while these seven questions measure results.

For a senior manager there is a personal angle too. The leader who is first in the company to replace the formal KPI "number of visits" with measurable time-to-shelf and merchandisers' impact on sales demonstrates a rare skill: managing business results rather than subordinates' activity. Projects like this later become an argument for promotion, for a move into a regional role, or for defending a new budget before senior management. Changing the metric is not only an operational decision, but a career one.

There is no need to change the whole system at once — and you shouldn't. It's enough to test the hypothesis on a limited scope.

A pilot could be structured like this:

•two cities: Almaty and Astana;

•2–3 stores of different formats in each city;

•duration: one to two months;

•an honest comparison with your own team, distributor or current agency.

In the pilot, it makes sense to measure:

•Shelf Lead Time;

•out-of-stock level;

•volume of expired products;

•cost of servicing one store;

•speed of fixing issues;

•actual on-shelf availability;

•sales dynamics over the period;

•% of auto-order adjustments.

After such a measurement, the decision is based not on a presentation or on faith in a contractor, but on comparable facts. That is the main value of a pilot: it moves the debate about models from beliefs to numbers.

Beyond individual contracts, there is a bigger question. The Kazakhstan market still lacks a common platform where agencies, buyers, KAMs, manufacturers, distributors and retailers could agree on shared execution standards together. Each player measures results in its own way, and comparing those results is almost impossible.

We need a professional association that can:

•build shared, comparable KPIs;

•collect and systematise market practices;

•clarify the responsibilities of each participant in the chain;

•develop Retail Execution standards;

•accumulate industry expertise;

•train new teams on common rules.

I am ready to share my experience, speak, analyse cases and help bring market players together. It's a conversation that benefits everyone — because common standards raise the bar for the whole category, not just for one contractor.

In the meantime, I suggest starting with one honest question:

If you'd like to compare your current model with daily dedicated in-store merchandising, the MagMerch team is ready to prepare a presentation and propose a pilot structure for your stores.