Your omnichannel strategy needs precise data to succeed. With consumers shopping across multiple touchpoints—from physical stores to quick commerce platforms—understanding performance at the location level has become essential for identifying growth opportunities and optimising your retail partnerships.
We spoke with Francis Nicholas, our Chief Commercial Officer and former brand executive with 25+ years experience at companies including Procter & Gamble and Nomad Foods, about how sophisticated brands are using location-based analytics to drive growth in today's complex retail landscape.
Your Digital Commerce Evolution: From Manual Tracking to Strategic Intelligence
Francis, you've witnessed the transformation of digital commerce firsthand. How has data availability changed the game for brands?
The evolution has been remarkable. When I started in digital commerce, we tracked everything manually—literally writing down observations on rudimentary scorecards and sharing content with retailers via USB sticks!
Now, the digital shelf industry provides incredible visibility at your fingertips. The challenge has shifted from data scarcity to data abundance. This is where sophisticated analytics become crucial—helping you navigate through vast amounts of information to extract actionable insights.
What excites me most about our current platform capabilities is how we're automating complex analysis whilst maintaining the strategic depth that brands need. Our content management solutions, for instance, allow you to deploy consistent messaging across multiple global markets with precision that was impossible just a few years ago.
The Omnichannel Reality: Why Your Digital Strategy Must Extend Beyond Pure-Play
Where do you see brands today in terms of digital readiness?
The pandemic accelerated digital adoption beyond what anyone predicted five years ago. Your customers now seamlessly blend digital and physical touchpoints throughout their purchase journey, and your strategy must follow where they're going.
This shift means you can't just measure your e-commerce channel sales anymore. You need to understand what portion of your total sales are digitally influenced—both online purchases and in-store sales that began with digital research.
The most sophisticated brands are restructuring their organisations around this omnichannel reality. They're building capability programmes that improve competencies across sales, consumer marketing, revenue growth management, and field sales teams. Understanding data and analytics applications has become a core competency, not a specialist function.
Why should brands focus on omnichannel rather than just winning on major marketplaces?
Many brands have concentrated heavily on Amazon, but large marketplaces often disadvantage big brands. The vast selection makes it easier for niche players to gain visibility at the expense of established brands seeking their fair market share.
Your strategic advantage lies in winning where product choice remains limited—physical stores and quick commerce platforms. This means strengthening partnerships with retailers who operate both physical locations and online sites designed for curbside pickup, click & collect, and local delivery services.
Data Strategy: Building Your Analytics Foundation
What data do brands need to succeed in this complex environment?
Think of your data requirements as a pyramid. The foundation requires core sales and market share data to run your business fundamentals.
The middle tier focuses on performance data—tracking distribution, out-of-stocks, pricing, and promotional effectiveness both in-store and online across all your retail partners.
The top tier involves sophisticated analytics: search performance, share of voice, secondary placements, and review sentiment analysis that drive continued growth.
The reality is that data access varies significantly by retailer relationship. If you're a category captain or major brand, you're positioned to access comprehensive data that helps you understand sales distribution across main stores, convenience locations, full-basket online operations, and quick commerce platforms.
This complete picture enables effective omnichannel joint business planning with your retail partners.
Location-Based Analytics: Your Growth Acceleration Tools
What are the most impactful use cases for location-based data?
Inventory optimisation represents the most immediate opportunity. When you have store-level visibility into out-of-stock situations, you can direct your field sales teams or agency partners to address specific issues quickly. Your supply chain teams can collaborate with retailer logistics to fix systematic problems and improve demand forecasting.
For brands using direct store delivery or distributor networks—particularly in sectors like beverages and alcohol—location-based data becomes extraordinarily valuable. You can reroute field teams immediately to refill shelves in problem locations.
Media activation provides another crucial application. You should only activate retail media campaigns once you've achieved sufficient distribution and availability in target locations. There's no value in paying to create demand where you can't fulfil sales.
More sophisticated applications involve analysing performance by geography to identify regional patterns. This intelligence can guide localised messaging, region-specific creative development, or location-based retail media activation strategies.
The Power of Real-Time Intelligence
Why is daily data access becoming essential?
Your customers shop differently across channels and at different times. Physical store shopping patterns differ significantly from online behaviour, with distinct weekly peaks for each channel. Daily data granularity reveals these nuances that weekly reporting obscures.
Immediate actionability becomes critical for capturing revenue opportunities. Imagine going out of stock on Tuesday and remaining unavailable through Thursday. Weekly reporting means discovering this issue too late—after losing three days of potential sales.
Daily updates allow you to identify trends and address issues before they impact performance significantly. We're already providing yesterday's data when you start work the next morning, and our technical teams continue pushing to reduce that timeframe further.
Amazon's introduction of hourly Rapid Retail Analytics during key periods demonstrates where the industry is heading. Having immediate visibility across all your retail partners creates competitive advantage through faster response times.
Strategic Implementation: Making Location Data Actionable
How should brands structure their approach to location-based analytics?
Start with your foundation data requirements and build systematic processes around immediate actionability. Your field sales teams need clear protocols for addressing out-of-stock alerts, whilst your commercial teams should establish regular conversations with retail buyers about root causes and long-term solutions.
Develop regional analysis capabilities that identify geographical patterns in performance, consumer behaviour, or competitive dynamics. This intelligence should inform both operational decisions and strategic planning.
Most importantly, ensure your data strategy supports joint business planning with retail partners. Shared visibility into location-level performance strengthens these relationships and enables collaborative growth strategies that benefit both your brand and your retail partners.
The brands succeeding in today's complex retail environment combine comprehensive data visibility with systematic processes for turning insights into actions. Location-based analytics provide the precision needed to optimise performance across your entire retail network whilst identifying growth opportunities that broader market analysis might miss.
Ready to unlock growth opportunities through location-based analytics? eStore's comprehensive platform provides daily visibility across 3,000+ retailer websites in 70+ markets, with store-level insights that help you optimise inventory, target media activation, and strengthen retail partnerships. Our real-time intelligence enables immediate action on out-of-stock situations whilst revealing regional patterns that drive strategic growth initiatives. Discover how our location-based analytics can accelerate your omnichannel success.
