I wish I could better execute my digital shelf fundamentals so my sales results would be significantly higher. But the online retail landscape is so complicated these days that I lack the appropriate visibility and don’t have resources to take the required actions.
If this statement sounds familiar, rest assured, you’re not alone.
The complexity of digital commerce remains a barrier to growth for most brands.
Managing online sales requires more than 50 processes and interactions between brands, retailers, and digital agencies. Most of these processes are new to digital commerce versus what many CPG executives “grew up with" in the traditional offline trade.
Below are just a few examples of new processes that are required when operating in the digital commerce space:
- Creating and delivering Digital Content
- Managing Availability, e.g., location-based out-of-stocks and taking gap-closing measures
- Getting found in Search results, both organically and through paid sponsorship
- Establishing Pricing & Promotions strategies for eCommerce
- Generating and analyzing Ratings & Reviews
- Adopting, analyzing and prioritizing Retail Media activations
- And many more; See the table below for a detailed (yet still not comprehensive) list
Examples of new processes required by Digital Commerce
Source: eStoreMedia
Given the complexity of digital processes and huge volumes of raw data being collected online, it’s no surprise that brands struggle to execute with excellence, and ultimately underperform in terms of sales results.
Brands that manage digital commerce complexity gain a competitive advantage
The complexity of digital commerce is universal. It’s not a problem that businesses can easily manage or, better yet, eliminate. Complexity is not a static problem, but an ongoing challenge. As companies evolve, and digital commerce grows and matures, new complexities tend to emerge.
The graphic below illustrates some of the challenges brands continue to face when managing the digital shelf despite years of selling online.
Complexity makes brands struggle with digital shelf execution
Source: eStoreMedia
This is why companies that understand digital shelf complexity early on, and work to address it through technology and process automation, can oftentimes gain a competitive advantage.
By deploying a digital shelf analytics solution, like our eStoreCheck tool, brands eliminate a ton of time related to data collection and crunching the numbers, and become more efficient at managing digital commerce. Automated digital shelf tools and technology deliver timely data and insights to give you the confidence to make better and faster decisions.
How an analytics solution, like eStoreCheck, cuts through the complexity to help you manage the digital shelf
As we’ve already demonstrated, many new processes need to be established and managed when doing business on the digital shelf. Not only that, but brands have many different levers to pull in order to optimize digital shelf performance:
- Assortment & Availability
- Price & Promotions
- Content / PDPs
- Search
- Ratings & Reviews
- Retail Media
Each of the above listed levers come with their own set of metrics and KPIs that you need to monitor, manage and benchmark against to improve your digital shelf performance. Things like: Share of Page 1; Content compliance; Number of images and video; Length of product title; Average star rating; and so on. Many of these metrics are unfamiliar to traditional brand managers and “newbies” to the digital world, making the online environment even more difficult to tread.
This is where having a digital shelf solution comes into play, helping you manage the complexity. Digital shelf tools harvest millions of data points from retailer websites, run them through quality checks, crunch the data and calculate metrics. In other words, the digital shelf tool does all the heavy lifting, collecting and analyzing data on critical eCommerce KPIs.
A digital shelf analytics solution, like eStoreCheck, can help brands manage the complexity
Source: eStoreMediaWhat makes eStoreCheck unique is that we’re the only digital shelf monitoring platform that is AI‑empowered to provide enhanced, predictive analytics for brands that sell online. You get timely and complete category insights, with dynamic benchmarking and unrivaled scalability across thousands of online retailers (3,000+ at last count) in the world’s largest digital markets.
eStoreCheck also lets brands weight scorecard metrics based on your own company objectives, which allows you to track execution and fix gaps. This scorecarding ultimately is rolled up into what we call your Perfect Store Execution “OneNumber.”
Our ‘Perfect Store’ model is proven to drive online sales by managing digital shelf complexity
Source: eStoreMedia
You can then drill down on OneNumber to understand where exactly you’re meeting targets versus underperforming, so you can focus on what matters most to improve your digital shelf performance. eStoreCheck makes it easy to analyze performance by geography, retailer, category, and SKU.
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