If you are a brand owner selling online or an employee trying to scale your online retail business, there must be times when you might have come across a digital shelf monitoring tool or are currently using one to get a sense of what is happening on the different platforms on which you are selling your products.Â
Platforms typically do not provide a lot of information, leaving sellers in the dark about several data points that can actually help them improve their performance. That’s when digital shelf monitoring tools come in handy.Â
These tools help brands and sellers analyze their digital shelves by providing them with actionable data on their own and competitors’ visibility, variations, inconsistency in communication, etc.Â
These monitoring tools typically collect data from all different platforms on which brands’ products are listed, analyze the data, and give them the information they need to make timely online retail decisions.Â
Since it’s a new technology in the market, not all solutions provide you with every data point you need in order to make sense of your online business. Hence, it is very crucial for you as a seller/brand to make this decision by keeping your needs in mind and doing thorough research.Â
According to Paxcom’s experts, these ten features are must have if you are subscribing to a digital shelf monitoring tool.Â
Table of Contents
1. Stock Status
Problem: As an online seller, you must be selling multiple products via online marketplaces, and it’s not possible to keep track of your stock status on each of these channels manually.Â
Imagine customers getting interested in your offerings and visiting your product detail page but finding your product out of stock. What options do they have? Either they buy your competitor’s product, or they can come back later. They can also buy the next best available option. Hence, the brand is losing potential sales.Â
Brands often lose money while running sponsored ads on out-of-stock products.Â
Solution: With an efficient digital shelf monitoring system, you can track your out-of-stock status in time. Here is how Paxcom’s eCommerce data analytics solution can help you monitor your stock status, thus saving you time and money.Â
2. Price & Promotions Tracking:
Prices and promotions are two of the most important factors that influence a customer’s decision to purchase.
Problem: It’s mostly unrealistic for brands to keep track of their prices and promotions on all the platforms without the help of a monitoring tool. Prices on different platforms keep changing fast. Unauthorized sellers tend to sell at their prices rather than follow the pricing policy.Â
On the other hand, it’s also crucial for brands to have consistency in promotions across platforms.Â
Solution: Kinator tracks your prices and promotions 24*7, notifying you anytime a seller violates them.
3. Visibility
In a brick-and-mortar store, customers navigate through the aisles which are open to their display followed by the assistance of store managers and helping executives to find and compare products. On retail websites, search engines navigate this process by showing the best match results to customer queries/keywords used.Â
Problem: If your products don’t appear in the search results section, they don’t even exist for your potential customers. With decreasing customer patience and increasing options in the market, it’s not right for your brand to leave this loophole unresolved.Â
Solution: Here you have to start monitoring your rankings for relevant terms across retail sites. Paxcom’s digital shelf analytics solution Kinator, helps you Track how many of your SKUs show in the Top 3, 10, or 20 search results for important search keywords and Identify competition brands and SKUs that hold key visibility spots. Over time, you gain valuable insights into how and when your placement changed, so you can see the impact of product page updates,Â
competitor changes, etc.Â
4. Content ScoreCard
Problem: A product page can make or break your eCommerce success. There are times when you tend to ignore it considering it as a listing page but trust us, it’s way more than that. It’s your silent salesperson. Customers won’t stay or add your product to the cart if they don’t find the information they are looking for on the page. Also, it becomes difficult to find the products on the search results if it is not optimized with the correct keywords.Â
Solution: Regular content audits help discover and address content inadequacies and check for inconsistency across platforms. Again, manually checking these details for thousands of product pages is not just impossible but can also be inefficient. A digital shelf solution allows you to monitor these pages within minutes by comparing each against a template you provide, giving each head a score and improvement suggestions.
5. Ratings & reviews Analysis –Â
One can always go through its product ratings and reviews at any time of the day. But when dealing with a huge product portfolio, one must rely on automation tools to make this process efficient in order to not miss the highs and lows in your product popularity.Â
Problem: You will never know about your customers discussing the fault in your earphone manufacturing that happened last week highlighted in the reviews if you are not regularly monitoring it. Lack of losing track can lead to huge brand and sales losses sometimes.Â
Solution: With Kinator, you can examine your ratings and reviews from a variety of angles. Check-in on each SKU review trends and read all reviews received across platforms in one place. Also, keep a track of what shoppers are talking about your competitor’s products. Discover what your customers love more, what are they complaining about frequently, and how their preferences change over time.Â
6. Filter Options-Â
It’s easier for you to navigate and understand the information if you have filters at your disposal. You might want to only look at data of Amazon’s out-of-stock products from the last 7 days. Filters make it convenient to do that.Â
If you want to take a deeper dive into your digital shelf, you have to explore specific date ranges, channels, sellers, or pin codes according to your queries.Â
7. Customizable and User Friendly –Â
No one wants to use a software solution that requires months of training just to understand how to use it. Software needs to be user-friendly in order to make the best use of it. You use Saas solutions to make your life easier, not to make it harder. If it isn’t helping you solve your problem efficiently to meet your targets, then it’s not worth spending your budget on.
On the other hand, Customization is another feature that only a few providers are able to promise. What if you only have particular metrics to track and want to keep the frequency according to your requirement? All of this is possible with Kinator. Discover here.Â
8. Global Tracking –Â
Let’s say you plan to start selling your products in the international markets and your solution doesn’t provide you with the capability to track data from these new platforms that you are targeting. Does it make sense for you to keep subscribing to the same tool? Not really. You better make sure the solution you choose tracks e-commerce activity on the retailer sites you sell or are planning to sell.Â
Our digital shelf solution tracks 180+ platforms, 1000+ zip codes, 290k products, and 11 platforms across geographies. Book a demo here.
Final ThoughtsÂ
Saas products usually require detailed research before making a purchase. Especially when the product is an eCommerce data analytics solution that is relatively new in the market. These solutions can entirely change your eCommerce strategy and can bring a fresh perspective to making decisions. While some of them are pocket friendly and easily available, they might not be the best ones to go forward with. The digital shelf needs to be monitored on a daily basis and you need a solution that provides you with just the right data in hand you need to improve your performance.Â
Kinator is Paxcom’s eCommerce analytics software that helps sellers to track, store and analyze data from different eCommerce channels, across multiple geographies, languages, and sellers.
No more logging into multiple apps. All platforms, categories, and locations are tracked in one place.
Also Read – A Guide to Digital Shelf Optimization
