When someone walks into a brick-and-mortar store, they may or may not know precisely what they’re looking for. It may be that they are looking for a specific category of products or want a specific brand. They might need to ask an associate for help, or they may just head to the section they need and start comparing products on the shelf.
The digital shelf is how and where a brand’s products are displayed online. In essence, it mimics the way someone shops in a brick-and-mortar store. Most marketers, however, consider digital shelf analytics a part of the entire shopping experience. You can describe it as covering the whole consumer journey, from finding your business to purchasing your product. That includes everything from search engines to how consumers navigate your website, how they find your products, and how they buy them.
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PROMINENT COMPONENTS OF DIGITAL SHELF ANALYTICS
Importance of Digital Shelf for Brands
A Digital Shelf Analytics solution is tailored to leverage brands to create a successful omnichannel strategy. Its smart automation simplifies the process and keeps you up-to-date on a wide variety of important digital shelf metrics through its features such as Pricing and Promotions, Content Review and Scorecard, Visibility across marketplaces, stock availability, and sentiment analysis. Let us closely look at how and why Digital Shelf Analytics monitors your product’s performance, and offer you multiple insights on the same.
- 81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying (Source: GE Capital Retail Bank)
- 77% consumers lookout for reviews while browsing local businesses (Source: Bright Local)
How do in-store shelf metrics mimic digital shelves?
Roadblocks to Maintaining a Digital Shelf
- Poor Visibility
The right Digital Shelf Analytics tool resolves the issue of visibility with ease. It tracks your products’ performance across different marketplaces and allows you to identify areas where the product is lagging behind. Its data-driven algorithm aids you in making data-driven decisions and taking corrective measures to improve visibility across the platforms.
- Stock Out
Maintaining accurate stock levels has become a necessity. If the product is out of stock for a long period of time, you may lose out on a large chunk of sales. Kinator, our digital shelf analytics tool, tracks on-shelf availability and provides alerts for SKUs that are going to go out-of-stock soon.
- Inaccurate Pricing
Pricing a product too high or too low affects the brand’s image. With the digital shelf analytics tool, stay ahead of the curve and have complete transparency over your brand’s and your competition’s pricing.
Winning Digital Shelf
1. Optimize your online visibility for top rankings
The race to be noticed is immense, and it is indeed very competitive. And like mentioned above, 45% of users don’t even scroll past two pages. Organic strategies and paid advertising can complement each other to deliver the desired results faster when it comes to visibility.
Organic ranking would include maintaining your account health and having accurate product content that reaches customers at the right time. Additionally, paid advertising will help you move up the visibility ladder faster, as well as drive sales lift, which will again translate into organic growth.
In order to enhance the visibility of your products, you need adequate data to analyze what is working for you, and what the gaps are that need to be filled. Stock reviews, ratings, content, and promotions directly impact visibility. Combine these metrics to optimize your visibility for top rankings.
Advanced digital shelf analytics allow you to compare all the necessary KPIs of yours and your competitors’ to make data-backed decisions and have scalable growth.
2. Maintain detailed and accurate product content
If we take Amazon as a base, 90% of users discover products on Amazon now. So, it becomes essential to focus on your product’s content copy.
A basic hygiene check for your listings is very crucial-
- A precise and concise title with SEO-rich keywords
- Primary Image, Packshots and Lifestyle Images
- Making use of all the sections available in each retailer’s product content, such as bullet points, enhanced content, Amazon’s A+ content, videos, Q&As, etc.
- Content optimization for all channels, devices, and screen resolutions.
With Paxcom’s content score feature, you can perform regular content audits to identify, quickly compare, and address product display page content shortcomings. With it, you can generate scorecards that determine whether your product’s information is complete and accurate to improve discoverability and buyability, as well as identify gaps that need to be filled.
3. Maintain optimum inventory level to decrease supply chain inefficiencies
The consumer has looked at your product details and your great images. They click the link to “buy” the product, and all of a sudden, an “out of stock” message appears, and now the consumer feels frustrated, or worse, they feel that they wasted their time and switched to your competitor instead. Shoppers are alienated from brands when their favorite products are out of stock. A brand or retailer loses out, too, as they are essentially turning away a customer who is ready to buy from them. Having a data-driven solution to solve the problem of being out of stock or overstocked is the most effective way to solve this problem.
As per YouGov’s recent survey, it has been recorded that 65% of online shoppers have been disappointed by out-of-stock items in the past 12 months.
As part of Paxcom’s OOS alert feature, you can be notified when your in-stock rates are low for all your online retailers, so you can restock ahead of time and not miss out on any sales.
Paxcom’s OOS dashboard screenshot
4. Maintain competitive pricing and keep an eye out for your competitors
The price is still the primary factor influencing shoppers when it comes to selecting a product in today’s fiercely competitive eCommerce market. In part because of this, sophisticated players like Amazon periodically review their pricing to ensure that they are strategically priced. Moreover, brands and retailers can lose sales by overpricing products or lose margins by underpricing them. Striking a perfect balance is what you need to do with comparison shoppers and dynamic marketplaces.
You need to track competitor prices and utilize analytics software to take advantage of any pricing or assortment gaps left by competitors. Ensure that your tool is equipped with data points, including historical sales data, operation costs, and SKUs. Benchmark your pricing against exact competitors and similar products for a robust strategy.
5. Ratings & Reviews
The ratings and reviews brands receive reflect how our products and services are perceived by our customers. This can allow us to identify potential issues. Reviews are taken into account by many algorithms when determining relevance and popularity rankings, which, in turn, impact sales.
The importance of ratings and reviews is that they give us insight into consumers’ reactions to our products.
- Are we getting enough reviews?
- What is the sentiment of those reviews?
- What is the product’s likability?
Most retailers, however, fail to track customer reviews, even negative ones. It can be detrimental to the customer’s perception of a brand and product if negative customer reviews are not visible. You should strengthen your customer reviews. Your brand should have a sentiment analysis technology that consolidates all consumer-generated content, such as reviews and ratings, into one platform to simplify management. With these tools, you can identify areas for improvement, set goals for positive and negative reviews, and compare the customer’s experience with that of competitors.
P.S. By collaborating with our eCommerce experts, brands can lower churn, gather feedback, and create reports that are specific to their needs.
6. Invest in technology and tools to strengthen digital shelf presence
Every brand needs data to know what actions will drive the most noticeable results on the digital shelf. Brands and retailers that make use of technology for competitor and customer data win the eCommerce race. Amazon, Walmart, Flipkart, and Target are just a few examples of retailers who have leveraged data and analytics to gain an edge. It is one area that has been less explored but is fast gaining importance. To stay competitive and thrive in the evolving retail environment, brands and retailers need advanced digital shelf analytics.
Paxcom’s eCommerce Analytics Solution
Paxcom’s eCommerce analytics software, Kinator, visualizes any available data in an interactive, visual format to help brands make intelligent, strategic decisions. With a customizable dashboard that can be accessed anywhere, anytime, it is possible to filter by Channel, Category, Brand, Focus SKU, Timeframe, City, and more.
Additionally, it may take a dedicated eCommerce team or a lot of resources to properly handle the digital shelf across all retailers that you do not have access to; Our eCommerce experts can help you fill in the gaps and start working towards implementing actionable plans to grow their businesses.
Schedule a demo to see how Paxcom can help you with digital shelf analytics.Contact us at info@paxcom.net.
