eStoreMedia e-Commerce Perfect Store Model; a framework to enable brands to succeed in the fast-growing online channel.
The growth of e-commerce has left product manufacturers and global brands struggling to deal with the evolving needs of retailers, and shifting shopper expectations. Despite years of experience built-up working with traditional retail channel partners as a sales, or marketing leader, you can find yourself starting with a blank sheet of paper when it comes to planning and executing an effective e-commerce program.
Don’t worry you are not alone – nearly all of the global consumer products manufacturers we’ve come across were in the same situation. That’s why we developed the e-How to empower your organization to win the digital shelf – to help brands plan, execute and iteratively improve e-commerce performance over time.
The e-Commerce Perfect Store borrows heavily from the lean start-up model. It is based on identifying the actions you need to take to ensure your products are easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to buy in online retailers. In this way, you can maximize the potential to drive online sales through an ongoing iterative process of constant improvement or gap closing.
The five steps of the process are:
- Strategy: Establish the key success drivers in your product categories. Getting the strategy right is the essential first step and it includes making decision on choice of online stores, assortment, price & promotions, rating & reviews, search optimization and iMedia planning, as outlined in our How to empower your organization to win the digital shelf eBook.
- Design: Shape the plan including, assets, success criteria and targets. Once you have clarity on the key e-commerce drivers for your brands, you can get more into the detail about how your team will actually create your online channel assets and how to monitor progress.
- Delivery: Provide your retailers with in-depth guidelines and all the necessary assets. This is where having tools for e-commerce content management and syndication can help. You want to be able to standardize and automate as much as possible of the process.
- Measure: Monitor your online retail partners to ensure they implement you guidelines, and to identify competitive treats and opportunities. This is where you identify gaps in distribution, content execution, pricing, search ranking and more to identify where improvements are needed.
- Close Gaps: Iterate to improve your presence and performance in online retailers, and further improve your online sales in collaboration with key online retailer partners.
Product manufacturers that follow this process to plan and organize e-commerce strategies see significant improvements across the board. If you’d like to find out more download the e‑Commerce Perfect Store eBook titled "How to Design your e-Commerce Strategy".
