Retailing and wholesaling consists of many organizations designed to bring goods and services from the point of production to the point of use. Retailing includes all the activities involved in selling goods or services directly to final consumers for their personal, nonbusiness use. Retailers can be classified in terms of store retailers, nonstore retailing, and retail organizations.
Wholesaling includes all the activities involved in selling goods or services to those who are buying for the purpose of resale or for business use. Wholesalers help manufacturers deliver their products efficiently to the many retailers and industrial users across the nation. Wholesalers perform many functions, including selling and promoting, buying and assortment-building, bulk-breaking, warehousing, transporting, financing, risk bearing, supplying market information, and providing management services and counseling.
The marketing concept calls for paying increased attention to marketing logistics, an area of potentially high cost savings and improved customer satisfaction. When order processors, warehouse planners, inventory managers, and transportation managers make decisions, they affect each other's costs and demand-creation capacity. The physical-distribution concept calls for treating all these decisions within a unified framework. The task becomes that of designing physical-distribution arrangements that minimize the total cost of providing a desired level of customer service.
