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A product role says what a SKU does for your business - whether it drives footfall, carries margin, or just rounds out the range. Retailgrid can classify every SKU into a role automatically, so your pricing rules, promo planning, and competitor monitoring can act differently on the SKUs that actually matter - without you maintaining role tags by hand.

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The roles

Every SKU gets one of six roles, or sits in Unclassified until there’s enough signal to place it:

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Classify your assortment

The Product Role Classification agent assigns a role to every SKU in a grid:
  1. Click Agents in the grid toolbar.
  2. Select Product Role Classification from the All Agents modal.
  3. Run it. The agent reads each SKU’s sales and margin signal and writes a Product Role column back to the grid.
The defaults work out of the box. For teams that want to tune how aggressively SKUs fall into each role, an Advanced Settings panel exposes the classification thresholds, each with sensible bounds. Roles are a starting point, not a verdict - review them and pin the role on any SKU you’d set differently. A pinned role sticks through re-classification and is kept in an audit trail, so a later run won’t quietly overwrite it. Because the role is a normal grid column, you can filter, group, and colour by it like any other.

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How roles are used

  • Pricing rules - scope a Dynamic Pricing rule to a role using conditions (a tighter competitor-parity rule for KVIs, a firmer margin floor for Profit Drivers), or use the role column as the group in a Price Relations rule.
  • Pricing Strategy - the Pricing Strategy deck frames its category-role narrative around these roles.
  • Monitoring - filter a grid to KVIs or Traffic Drivers to watch the SKUs where price position matters most.

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Common pitfalls

  • Thin history - SKUs with little sales history land in New or Unclassified until there’s enough signal. Re-run once more data has loaded.
  • Roles drift - an item’s role can change as demand shifts. Re-classify periodically rather than treating a one-time run as permanent.
  • Review before you act - the classifier gives a structured guess. Confirm the roles on your highest-impact SKUs, and pin the ones you’re sure of, before you scope pricing rules to them.