Buyer's Toolbox vs Retail Directions Merchandise Planning

Buyer’s Toolbox is retail merchandise planning software for teams handling financial plans, open-to-buy management, forecasting, and reporting. Its Advanced Planning features include merchandise financial planning, sales forecasts, scenario planning, seasonal and assortment planning, and multi-currency support. Reports cover variance, open-to-buy, sell-through, and scenario comparisons, with drill-downs across business levels. ERP connections can import sales, stock, receipts, merchandise hierarchy, locations, and custom data, then return forecasts, open-to-buy information, reports, KPIs, and scenario outputs. The software supports cloud-hosted and on-premise deployment, including locally hosted and Azure environments. Access controls include roles and permissions, isolated and sandbox environments, and plans stored in a SQL database with a documented schema. The maker offers a no-cost proof of concept using a prospective customer's data, typically run within one or two weeks. Advanced Planning starts from $995/mo (annual), with an initial two-quarter engagement followed by quarter-to-quarter terms. Pricing for extensions such as Basic Allocation & Replenishment and Data Science is handled in a planning consultation.

Retail Directions Merchandise Planning is a web-based merchandise management solution for planning, buying, and managing retail ranges with live sales, gross margin, and inventory data. Retailers can budget sales and profit by time, location, and item, and plan finances by category. Purchasing covers orders for direct delivery, cross-dock, and break-bulk, plus purchase and on-demand allocations. Store replenishment algorithms and stock redistribution support balancing or consolidating inventory across stores. Markdown and promotion planning are included. SalesCube provides margin and sell-through analysis across three dimensions. Retail Directions describes one integrated database shared by its retail solutions and lists partner integrations with Adyen, Afterpay, humm, Laybuy, Slyp, and Zip. The web product is paid, with pricing on request. The company says retailers in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom use its platform.