Services to Manufacturers and Wholesalers

Retailers render invaluable services to wholesalers and producers:

• Help in distribution of goods: A retailer's most important service is to make products available to final consumers, who may be scattered over a large geographic area. In doing so, retailers provide place utility.
• Personal selling: Selling most consumer goods needs some personal-selling effort. By taking this on, retailers relieve producers of the task and help actually convert prospects into sales.
• Enabling large-scale operations: Because retailers handle the small individual sales to consumers, manufacturers and wholesalers are freed from that trouble and can operate on a relatively large scale, concentrating on their other activities.
• Collecting market information: Being in direct and constant touch with buyers, retailers are an important source of information about customers' tastes, preferences and attitudes — very useful for a firm's marketing decisions. …