Digital Shelf Automation is an integrated set of tools and services for empowering Product Manufacturers to streamline e-commerce planning and execution, in order to optimize performance and maximize sales in the digital channel.
e-Commerce is task-intensive. Optimizing listings, content, price, promotions, and search performance across multiple online retailers involves 100s of daily tasks and the coherent exchange of data and assets between brand teams, agencies and e-commerce sites.
With online channel expansion and e-commerce growth putting pressure on already scarce digital skills, product manufacturers need solutions to automate day-to-day monitoring and gap-closing tasks, to keep pace with growing complexity and an expanding workload.
Digital Shelf Automation, from eStoreMedia, is an integrated offering encompassing our e‑commerce strategy framework, and our content management, performance measurement and gap-closing automation tools. It was designed to enable brands to optimize e-commerce execution for growth.
Plan and Optimize Strategy
Success in e-commerce is driven by better access to data and improved use of insights to inform strategy and tactics. However, raw data alone is not enough. In fact, the proliferation of data, generated by the steady migration of shoppers from physical retailers to digital channels, risks overwhelming product manufacturers.
A coherent methodology, such as the e-Commerce Perfect Store Framework, helps brands focus on the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and targets for an effective e-commerce strategy. Moreover, it also supports automation in combination with our integrated suite of tools and technology, including eStoreCheck, eStoreContent, and AMZ Navigator.
Plans developed under the e-Commerce Perfect Store Framework are managed in eStoreCheck’s Expectation Hub module. The tool enables brands to develop overarching global plans, and tailor them for individual markets. Each market can have different KPIs and targets based on e-commerce maturity, product assortment, competition, and the functionality of online retailers in the market. On the flip side, global and local KPIs and targets in Expectation Hub provide the foundation for OneNumber goal setting when monitoring performance and reporting results, also in eStoreCheck.
Create, Manage and Syndicate Content
Alongside data and analytics, one of the biggest challenges facing e-commerce teams is keeping up with the demand for rich content to represent products across online retailers and e-commerce sites.
eStoreContent is eStoreMedia’s e-commerce Product Information Management (PIM), designed specifically for online channel content management. It empowers brands to maximize the potential of their rich product content by streamlining and integrating content creation, management, distribution and audit processes in one product. It includes:
- Creation and Approvals
Automatically generate rich product cards tailored to specific online retailers around the world, with live preview prior to approval and publication.
- Rich Media Support
Combine multiple media types from your content asset library, including text, images, video, animations or iconography, to create engaging product landing pages.
- Multi-language Capability
One-click content translation to support content management across geographies and markets.
- Content Syndication
Automated content transformation, delivery and syndication based on individual e-retailer specifications for management of global, regional and local market e-commerce content requirements.
- Performance analytics
Ongoing audit and analysis of content implementation and impact, and speedy identification of changes to e-commerce sites that affect content requirements.
Monitor, Analyze and Automate
With e-Commerce Perfect Store expectations agreed, products listed, and content syndicated to individual e-commerce sites, ongoing monitoring is needed to measure implementation and identify execution gaps across online stores. eStoreCheck is the leading digital shelf performance analytics solution for brands. It delivers complete category, daily insights, and dynamic benchmarking across thousands of online retailers in the world’s largest e-commerce markets.
eStoreCheck identifies gaps versus expectations, including issues such as products out of stock, missing or out-of-date content, losing search rank to a new competitor and much more. The insights support the ongoing battle to maintain and improve online channel presence and performance.
Data collected from online stores by eStoreCheck also triggers automated gap-closing for many of the day-to-day tasks previously carried out manually by e-commerce teams. For example:
Availability and Price Gaps.
Emails are auto-generated for Key Account Managers, listing products out-of-stock, and price outliers for each e-retailer prompting them to act on the most important issues.
Content Gaps
Syndication gaps are identified and fed to eContent, Product Information Management (PIM) and the syndication platform for automated re-distribution of missing content to relevant online retailers.
Performance gaps are reported to the content agency/internal content team with suggestions for e-content improvement.
Win on Amazon
As a native e-commerce platform, Amazon is unlike most other online retailers – it’s an evolving platform with ambitions of global retail dominance that no product manufacturer can ignore. It also provides access to more data than other online retailers.
Succeeding on Amazon involves optimizing a bewildering array of levers including listings, content, promotions, ratings and reviews, search and traffic to engage consumers, outsmart competitors, and secure the BuyBox to drive sales performance.
AMZ Navigator is eStoreMedia’s specialized Digital Shelf Automation solution for Amazon. It delivers actionable insights, product content management, and competitor intelligence, providing brand owners with a single reporting platform for understanding all aspects of their execution on Amazon, including BuyBox retention and performance.
Actionable insights and competitor intelligence enable product manufacturers to rapidly identify, prioritize and automate Amazon performance optimization actions to maximize BuyBox exposure and grow sales on the e-commerce platform.
To find out more about how eStoreMedia Digital Shelf Automation can deliver competitive advantage for all your products online drop us an email at contact@estoremedia.com.
