Business Tools & Best Practices for Collegiate Retailing Excellence

That’s the CRA

The Collegiate Retail Alliance (formerly the Retail Alliance) is a business coalition of independent college stores that have joined together to develop and deploy the industry’s best practices in order to better serve their customers and deliver more value to their colleges and universities.

How the CRA Helps Member Stores Compete and Serve

The CRA offers competitive advantages to independent college stores that were previously available only to large chain operations.  Member stores enjoy the advantages of combining their size, expertise, and buying power to develop and deploy the industry’s best practices.

Collaboration

Members do more than share innovative ideas; they collaborate to find and implement practical, best-practice solutions to common problems and support each other’s efforts for the benefit of all. Member-driven project teams work together with RATEX Business Solutions Inc. and the CRA’s supply channel partners to develop, test, and deploy many of the industry’s best business practices.

Technology

VisualRATEX™, the proprietary retail management software system owned by the CRA and designed with member input, is a superior store management solution that integrates all store operations and seamlessly supports participation in CRA partner programs.

Partnerships

The CRA negotiates innovative strategic partnerships with leading industry suppliers that result in the industry’s best terms and conditions and state-of-the-art processes. Current partnerships enable stores to offer money-saving used textbooks, expand their course material options to eBooks, save on freight costs, and much more.