MBA: Retail business, Merchandising, and E-commerce (2026)

Learn retail formats by type and location, including warehouse clubs, mass merchandise, dollar stores, and organic groceries, and doorstep delivery and e-commerce, with Costco and Sam's Club illustrating bulk pricing.

Explore how to select optimal retail locations and perform trading-area analysis to capture primary customers, weigh solitary, planned, and unplanned store formats, and build a long-term competitive advantage.

Apply Reilly's law of retail gravitation to estimate a store's trading area by balancing population and travel distance, revealing how far customers will travel to your location.

Explore Huff's gravity model for retail, showing how store size and distance shape shopper attraction and probability. Apply distance decay and size factors to compare stores and estimate catchment.

Emphasize omnichannel retail by aligning online and offline channels to offer a consistent, seamless experience and loyalty benefits, with price parity and web rooming and showrooming.

Explore how omnichannel retail blends showrooming and webrooming, balancing store touch and online reach with price consistency, varied assortment, and efficient inventory to boost repeat purchases.

Explore how multichannel and omnichannel retail strategies integrate online and offline touchpoints to boost revenue and enhance personalization. Learn how brands like Warby Parker master seamless cross-channel experiences.

Explore Warby Parker’s omni channel strategy that blends online and offline touchpoints, featuring a home trial program and integrated retail stores to build a strong eyewear brand.

Warby Parker's omnichannel model blends retail stores and online channels, with stores as the first touchpoint. The lecture analyzes revenue mix, store growth, and retention metrics.

Understand the basic income statement structure, from net sales and cost of goods sold to gross profit, then subtract operating and other costs to reach net profit.

Explore the Warby Parker contribution margin analysis by tracking COGS, CAC, and service costs per customer. See how average revenue per customer, depreciation, and store costs affect margins across years.

Master essential Microsoft Excel skills for product managers, including if, sumif, and vlookup, plus hlookup, pivot tables, and charting, with hands-on practice in a Google Sheets workbook.

Master Excel basics and pivot table analysis to solve retail data problems using Vlookup, sums, and filters. Learn essential shortcuts to navigate data faster on Nykaa’s omnichannel dataset.

Learn to create and analyze pivot tables in Excel and Google Sheets, using rows, columns, and values to compute store and product sales, percentages, and slicers for dashboards.

Learn how to use vlookup to link datasets using a common sku key, map categories across sheets, and apply exact matches with a table array.

Use pivot table to analyze product sales by day of week and month. Assess promotion effects and seasonality to determine sales trends over 2020–2022.

Analyze the Amazon Fresh-like dataset for the assignment to calculate total revenue by category and product, plus revenue by country, and create pivot charts and pivot tables to summarize findings.

Explore chart types like line, bar, pie, donut, column, and scatter to visualize data, and connect these visuals with pivot tables, histograms, and normal distribution concepts.

Create and analyze charts in Excel to compare actual sales against targets, using bar and line charts, axis adjustments, and a secondary axis to reveal performance trends.

Learn how customer relationship management drives customer experience, retention, and lifecycle in omnichannel retail, applying 80/20 insights, market basket analysis, rfm, and clv to grow loyalty.

Discover how to use RFM analysis to segment customers by recency, frequency, and monetary value, identify top 20 percent, and tailor offers with loyalty buckets to maximize profit.

Master RFM analysis in Excel to identify the top 20 percent of customers using recency, frequency, and monetary scores, and design targeted loyalty rewards.

Learn market basket analysis, a data mining technique retailers use to identify products often bought together, enabling cross-selling, optimal shelf layout, product bundling, and targeted promotions.

Learn association and support in market basket analysis using transaction data to see how beer and diaper appear together. Use confidence to determine whether beer drives diaper purchases.

Explore market basket analysis concepts such as support, confidence, and lift with practical examples showing how co-purchased items reveal purchase relationships.

Understand lift in market basket analysis by linking it to support and confidence, and learn how bread and butter transactions reveal positive relationships beyond randomness.

Explore market basket lift and its application to ecommerce product placement. Learn to use name manager and indirect function in Excel to reference datasets and compute sums for retail analysis.

Explore market basket analysis by calculating transaction counts, item probabilities, and lift to identify positively correlated product pairs like vegetables and baby products.

Compute CLV by multiplying average sale value, number of transactions, and retention to get lifetime value, then apply profit margins; account for COGS, CAC, and operating expenses.

Compute average revenue per user, apply the retention formula (1 divided by churn rate), and use a 20 percent profit margin to determine customer lifetime value.

Understand how store layout guides the customer journey, influences experience, and drives sales through grid, free-flow, and loop layouts, eye-level shelves, decompression zones, impulse areas, and power aisles.

Discover how plan-based store layouts and visual merchandising optimize space, boost sales per square foot, and guide customer flow in retail and online stores.

Discover how store layout and visual merchandising grab attention and boost sales through eye level product placement, floor design, lighting, and music, and maximize sales per square foot.

Explore how to design store layouts using market basket analysis to maximize lift by strategically placing six products across two rows and three shelves, and optimize with Excel solver.

Apply a real-world case study on warehouse layout optimization using ABC ranking, Pareto principle, slotting efficiency, and congestion metrics to cut walking distance and speed order fulfillment.

Build a foundation in retail finance by mastering balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. See how assets, liabilities, and equity shape cash flow.

Explore how income statements track revenue, COGS, gross margin, and net profit after tax, while cash flow statements cover operating, investing, and financing activities feeding the balance sheet.

Explore asset and margin management in retail, linking income statements and balance sheets to optimize inventory, profitability, and asset turnover ratio using practical metrics.

Learn to apply the strategic profit model in retail by linking net profit margin and asset turnover to improve return on assets, using inventory, accounts receivable, and fixed assets.

Analyze asset and margin management by comparing Walmart and Tiffany, calculate asset turnover and net profit margin to derive return on assets, and explore inventory ratios for retail efficiency.

Calculate key margins and ratios, such as gross margin, net profit margin, inventory turnover, and asset turnover, from the dream company's income statement and balance sheet.

Explore why retailers monitor ROE, ROIC, GMAT, and gross margin to measure profitability and inventory efficiency, and assess store performance via sales per square foot.

Explore a data-driven case study on selecting optimal store locations using geospatial data, normalization and inverse scoring, and a weighted composite score to rank 100 pin codes.

Explore the essentials of inventory and replenishment, balancing carrying, stockout, and ordering costs to avoid stockouts and overstock in retail and e-commerce.

Explore the end-to-end process of inventory management and warehousing, balancing stock levels to optimize customer experience, cash flow, shrinkage control, and fast fulfillment.

Explore direct cycle inventory and indirect inventory, including raw materials, work in progress, finished goods, in-transit stock, safety stock, and buffer stock, and understand storage costs and stock-out prevention.

Balance stock levels to avoid overstocking and stockouts, and apply the inventory optimization framework to improve cash flow, holding costs, and customer experience.

Analyze inventory cost structure including purchasing cost (COGS), transactional and holding costs—storage and expiry—emphasizing economies of scale and safety stock to maximize profit via forecasting.

Learn how to tailor safety stock using ABC and ABC XYZ inventory optimization, balancing lead time, forecast accuracy, and margins with service level targets to avoid one-size-fits-all approaches.

Explain how to determine safety stock and reorder points to buffer against demand uncertainty and lead time uncertainty, and introduce the economic order quantity for replenishment planning.

Explore how service level measures the probability of avoiding stockouts and balancing inventory with stockout costs, guided by factors like profit margins, space, core products, and alternatives.

Learn to reduce safety stock by managing demand and lead time with dynamic pricing, lean supply, and smaller batches; compare fixed, time-based, and average max methods.

Learn how to use economic order quantity to minimize total inventory cost by balancing ordering and holding costs, and determine the optimal order quantity Q to manage the reorder level.

Apply EOQ to a retailer case: compute the economic order quantity for 200 demand with €20 holding cost per unit, €100 cost per unit (order plus holding), and 10% interest.

Understand how lead time and demand variation shape inventory strategy, safety stock decisions, and service levels. Learn to use statistical distribution to balance timing and stock.

Compute EOQ with no lead time using demand rate, ordering cost, and 20% holding cost, then incorporate lead time to determine replenishment level and ordering interval.

Explore how order size constraints affect the economic order quantity by calculating total cost for multiples of 30 and identifying the optimal order quantity.

Explore economic order quantity with bulk discounts by analyzing how quantity-based price breaks affect setup cost, ordering cost, and holding cost to identify the minimum total cost at 901 units.

Compute the economic order quantity for production by balancing setup and holding costs, using production rate and daily demand to minimize total storage and production costs.

Understand how backorders modify the economic order quantity, reorder point, and cost tradeoffs, including carrying and shortage costs and the critical ratio for optimal ordering.

Explore economic order quantity with back orders, showing how negative inventory, shortage costs, and opportunity costs shift the EOQ and reorder point to optimize replenishment.

Explore a case study on dynamically optimizing online grocery inventory to prevent stockouts and waste, using safety stock, reorder points, days of inventory remaining, and shelf life.

Learn to optimize gmroi by balancing gross margin, cost of goods sold, and average inventory, while tracking sales to stock ratio and return on asset across merchandise and corporate levels.

Master abc analysis to prioritize inventory, identify high-revenue sku, and allocate stock across a, b, and c categories to maximize sales and profitability.

Define category management as maximizing sales and profit for a specific category through optimized inventory, demand forecasting, and assortment of fast-moving staple merchandise and fashion merchandise.

Explain common issues with ABC analysis, such as ignoring profitability, shelf life, and holding costs. Show how ABC X, Y, Z analysis adds lead time considerations for better safety stock.

Explore ABC-XYZ inventory optimization: apply the 80/20 principle to focus on A products driving about 60% of sales, and assess X, Y, Z demand variability.

The lecture explains the direct-to-consumer model, contrasting it with traditional retail where manufacturers bypass middlemen to reduce costs through direct shipping and logistics partnerships.

Discover how private label and white label brands use contract manufacturers to sell your own-branded supplements and nutrition products, from MOQs and quotes to branding and licensing.

Choose private label or white label products based on audience, then secure licenses and contract manufacturers, brand and list online, and market with influencers to scale.

Examine how product bundling impacts revenue and average order value through a real-world case study, using a/b testing, cross-sell analysis, and market basket insights.

Explore how delivery speed impacts customer loyalty in a case study, using data to identify thresholds and an optimal delivery time, plus retention, NPS, tickets, and loyalty score.

Learn to reduce e-commerce returns by building a return risk score from discount, delivery time, past returns, and product rating, then use pivot tables to identify high-risk categories.

Develop a dynamic discount strategy for an e-commerce platform by using user type, cart value, discount type, and price sensitivity to boost conversions while maintaining margins.