When it comes to shopping events, Black Friday stands out as one of the most anticipated dates for scoring deals. Typically occurring the day after Thanksgiving, the weekend kicks off the holiday shopping season with a frenzy of discounts. But Boxing Day, celebrated on December 26, is also well-known for its post-Christmas clearance sales.
This Black Friday, US eCommerce sales increased by a hefty 14.6% in 2024, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse. While Black Friday leads in overall revenue generation for retailers, Boxing Day presents unique opportunities for clearing post-holiday inventory.
For a consumer, which sale event is likely to offer the most attractive deals?
At DataWeave, we analyzed discounts across retailers and categories to uncover the answer.
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked pricing data across major retailers for Black Friday and Boxing Day. To provide a comprehensive analysis of Black Friday pricing strategies, we explored a matched products dataset, comparing identical 14,000+ SKUs across retailers within key categories.
Categories included: Consumer Electronics, Home & Furniture, Apparel, Health & Beauty, Grocery
Retailers included: Amazon, Target, Walmart, Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Overstock, Home Depot, Best Buy, Saks Fifth Ave, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus
Timeline: November 26 (Black Friday), December 26 (Boxing Day)
Average Discounts: Black Friday vs Boxing Day
Our analysis reveals that Black Friday generally offered steeper discounts across most categories, although Boxing Day wasn’t far behind. Here’s a breakdown:
While Black Friday led in most categories, Apparel saw a slight edge on Boxing Day, with discounts averaging 40.22% compared to 37.67% on Black Friday. Electronics, Beauty, and Home, however, remained more lucrative during Black Friday.
Top 5 Products Higher Discounts on Black Friday
Diving deeper into specific products, here are our top 5 picks offering better discounts during Black Friday.
Appliances like an Immersion blender set offering a discount of 88.29%, significantly higher than its Boxing Day offer of 86.62%.
High-end electronics like the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 also saw substantial markdowns at 84.60%.
In beauty and fashion, both La Roche Posay’s retinol serum and Vera Bradley’s satchel offered discounts above 80%.
Even everyday essentials like paper towels enjoyed generous discounts, with markdowns reaching 82.35% during Black Friday compared to 76.47% on Boxing Day.
Top 5 Products With Higher Discounts on Boxing Day
Boxing Day revealed some remarkable deals across diverse categories, with certain products offering significantly better value than their Black Friday counterparts.
The JBL Go 2 portable speaker emerged as the standout, with an extraordinary 82% Boxing Day discount compared to just 20% on Black Friday—a dramatic 62% difference.
Home furnishings showed strong Boxing Day performance, with the Costway accent armchair set reaching 80.30% off.
In Conclusion
Black Friday reigns supreme in driving early holiday sales, offering deeper discounts and drawing larger crowds. However, Boxing Day remains critical for retailers to offload surplus inventory and attract post-holiday shoppers.
By combining insights from both events, retailers can refine their strategies to maximize revenue and enhance customer satisfaction. For shoppers, the decision comes down to timing—shop early for better deals or wait to capitalize on clearance markdowns. The products and categories with more attractive offers tend to vary between these two sale events. Hence, as a shopper, it’s a good idea to keep track of prices all through the holiday season to take advantage of the best deals.
For a deeper dive into the world of competitive pricing intelligence and to explore how our solutions can benefit apparel retailers and brands, reach out to us today!
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are major retail events in Canada, with 43% and 29% of the population making purchases during these sales respectively, according to a YouGov report. Consumer electronics continue to lead the Canadian retail market during these events, with 55% of surveyed shoppers choosing to buy tech products on Black Friday. Household appliances come in second, with 25% of shoppers opting for these items, while 18% prefer to shop for furniture deals.
These statistics highlight the importance of delivering value during the Thanksgiving sales week. Retailers must cater to shoppers’ expectations with competitive pricing, attractive deals, and a seamless shopping experience. So, what unique offerings did Canadian retailers present to shoppers this season?
To understand the pricing and discount dynamics during BFCM 2024 in Canada, DataWeave analyzed discounts across leading consumer electronics and home & furniture retailers. Using our AI-powered pricing intelligence platform, we analyzed 37,108 SKUs across these categories for major retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Canadian Tire from the 10th to 29th November. We focused on the top 500 products ranked for each search keyword on each retail site, using targeted terms aligned with categories like “sofa” and “wearables”.
In the following insights, the Absolute Discount represents the reduction of the selling price compared to the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). The Additional Discount reflects how much lower the selling price is during Black Friday compared to its price a week before the sale. This metric reveals the actual or effective value of the sale event, beyond the standard discounts typically offered.
Consumer electronics saw robust participation from major retailers, with Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart leading the charge. Here’s how they stacked up in terms of discounts:
Best Buy emerged as the frontrunner in absolute discounts at 31.2%, while Amazon impressed with a notable 19.7% additional discount, indicating a strong Black Friday-specific markdown strategy.
Walmart offered steady competition, particularly in audio and video products, which reached an average absolute discount of 37.2%. However, it’s average additional discount was only 3.1%, indicating muted BFCM-specific price reductions in this category.
Subcategory Insights
Diving deeper into consumer electronics subcategories, we observed varied discounting strategies.
Audio & Video stood out as the most discounted subcategory, with Walmart leading at 37.2%.
In Wearables, Walmart again took the top spot with 36.4%, while Amazon offered higher additional discounts (22.4%).
Discounting for computers and gaming was less aggressive, highlighting strategic pricing to maintain profitability in these high-demand segments.
Brand Performance
Brand-level data highlighted how key players used Black Friday to drive visibility and sales.
Dell led in average absolute discounts (36.7%) followed by Samsung at 36.68%
Audio brand JBL offered significant absolute discounts at 35.9%.
Apple and Lenovo offered comparatively fewer discounts but maintained strong visibility, as seen in their increase in the Share of Search during the sale period.
MSI (laptop brand) and Bose (audio and earphone brand) experienced significant increases in visibility, with Share of Search increases of 5% and 3.6%, respectively.
Notably, HP faced a decline (-3.2%) in the Share of Search, suggesting missed opportunities to align promotions with consumer interest.
Home & Furniture
Retailers in Focus
The home and furniture category saw competitive discounting, with Walmart, Canadian Tire, and Home Depot vying for consumer attention.
Walmart took the lead with the highest absolute discounts at 36.8%. The retailer’s additional discounts were more conservative at 3.6%. This is similar to their discount levels in Consumer Electronics.
Canadian Tire offered stiff competition, providing 31.6% absolute discounts and 25% additional discounts.
Home Depot matched its absolute and additional discounts, maintaining consistency at 24.1%.
Subcategory Insights
Home and furniture subcategories revealed targeted discount strategies.
Bedding emerged as the most discounted subcategory at Walmart (50.6%) and Canadian Tire (35.3%).
Kitchenware saw competitive pricing, with Walmart leading at 42.9%, followed by Canadian Tire at 33.9%.
Canadian Tire focused on lighting, offering the highest absolute discounts in this subcategory (38.2%)
Brand Performance
Brand-level analysis revealed stark contrasts in discounting approaches.
Furniture brands Homcom led in absolute discounts (36.4%), while South Shore stood out with the highest additional discounts (30.2%).
Value-oriented brands like furnishings brand Mainstays and mattress and bedding brand Zinus offered more modest discounts, focusing on consistent affordability.
Zinus (mattresses and sofa brand) experienced a significant 7.9% increase in the Share of Search, driven by aggressive promotions.
Home furnishings brands like Costway and Safavieh faced declines, reflecting the importance of aligning promotional strategies with consumer expectations.
Insights for Retailers and Brands
This Black Friday, Canadian retailers effectively balanced deep discounts with category-specific strategies to maximize sales. However, the fluctuating Share of Search highlights the critical need for brands to align promotions with consumer interest.
For brands and retailers looking to stay ahead of the competition, DataWeave’s pricing intelligence platform offers unparalleled insights to refine discounting strategies and boost visibility. Contact us to learn how we can help you stay competitive in this dynamic retail landscape.
Americans spent a whopping total of $10.8 billion online this Black Friday. As Thanksgiving Week 2024 wraps up, one thing is clear: the consumer electronics category continues to dominate seasonal shopping trends. Fueled by a blend of enticing deals and high consumer demand, the sector delivered competitive discounts across subcategories like wearables, gaming, and mobile devices.
At DataWeave, we analyzed discounting trends in the U.S. consumer electronics market during this year’s sales events. Using our AI-powered pricing intelligence platform, we tracked pricing and promotions for 22383 SKUs across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy from November 10 to 29. We focused on the top 500 products ranked for each search keyword on each retail site, using targeted terms aligned with categories like “gaming” and “apple.” Here’s what we uncovered.
Retailers Battle It Out with Competitive Discounts
Discount trends reveal clear leaders in terms of markdowns:
Walmart offered the deepest average absolute discounts at 36.9%.
Amazon and Target followed closely, highlighting a diverse range of deals designed to appeal to budget-conscious shoppers
Best Buy, the specialist consumer electronics retailer, offers the lowest discounts this Black Friday at 26.2%.
Note: The Absolute Discount represents the reduction of the selling price compared to the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). The Additional Discount reflects how much lower the selling price is during Black Friday compared to its price a week before the sale. This metric reveals the actual or effective value of the sale event, beyond the standard discounts typically offered.
Subcategory Spotlight: Where the Best Deals Happened
From audio & video to wearables, each retailer carved out competitive advantages across subcategories.
Both Amazon and Walmart offered high discounts in audio & video and wearables, but Walmart led, with discounts up to 46.3%.
Best Buy, meanwhile, offered high absolute discounts on Mobile Devices(34%) and Storage (31%), followed by high discounts on wearables and Audio & Video.
Amazon maintained a balanced approach, excelling in audio & video and mobile devices.
Brand-Level Insights: HP and Samsung Dominate
The biggest winners this year were brands that strategically leveraged Black Friday discounts to boost visibility and sales:
HP took the top spot with average discounts of 36.9%, followed by Samsung at 31.4%.
Despite its premium reputation, Apple offered an average discount of 29.3%, signaling a shift in strategy to attract deal hunters.
Share of Search: Shifting Consumer Attention
Search trends reveal how discounts shaped brand visibility:
Microsoft saw the largest spike in share of search (+8.6%), thanks to aggressive pricing on gaming consoles and accessories.
Marshall and Amazon also saw significant gains in visibility.
Surprisingly, HP experienced a sharp decline (-9.8%), indicating missed opportunities despite steep discounts.
In the previous analysis, we focused on the top 500 products within each subcategory for each retailer, showcasing the discount strategies for their highlighted or featured items. However, to identify which retailer offered the lowest or highest prices for the same set of products, it’s necessary to match items across retailers. For this, we analyzed a separate dataset of 340 matched products across retailers to compare their pricing during Black Friday. This approach provides a clearer picture of price leadership and competitiveness across categories.
Here are the key takeaways from this analysis.
Category-Level Highlights
Amazon leads with the highest average discount (41.35%), offering the most value to consumers. It is followed by Target (39.37%) and Walmart (36.15%).
Best Buy, the specialist consumer electronics retailer, ranks last with an average discount of 31.53%, emphasizing a less aggressive pricing strategy compared to competitors.
Subcategory Highlights
Wearables: Amazon offers the steepest discounts (55.40%), followed by Best Buy (50.60%) and Walmart (45.75%).
Mobile Devices: Amazon also leads (37.94%), with Walmart (29.30%) in second place and Target trailing at 19.48%.
Gaming: Target takes the lead (37.47%), with Amazon and Best Buy offering similar discounts around 30%.
Computers: Target again emerges as the leader (39.18%), narrowly surpassing Walmart (36.13%).
Brand Highlights
Apple: Amazon dominates with 53.06%, closely followed by Walmart (50.55%), while Target and Best Buy hover around 43%.
Nintendo: Target edges out Amazon (37.62% vs. 36.54%), with Best Buy (33.21%) and Walmart (25.92%) trailing.
Beats by Dr. Dre: Amazon leads (46.07%), with Target (37.14%) as the runner-up. Best Buy and Walmart offer comparatively modest discounts around 25%.
Bose: Walmart emerges as the value leader (23.90%), surpassing Target (16.09%) and Best Buy (15.29%).
Cricut: Amazon sets a high benchmark (54.13%), with Target far behind (36.43%) for this viral portable printer brand. Best Buy (12.32%) and Walmart (10.79%) offer significantly lower discounts.
What This Means for Retailers and Brands
Retailers looking to stay competitive should focus on strategic discounting and enhanced brand visibility. Brands must align with consumer expectations by:
Leveraging platforms like DataWeave to analyze discount trends.
Optimizing pricing and assortment strategies for seasonal demand.
For more insights into consumer electronics pricing, contact DataWeave to discover how our AI-powered solutions can drive success in today’s fast-paced market. Stay tuned for more category-specific analyses in the coming weeks!
As the holiday shopping season kicked off, savvy shoppers embraced the spirit of the season, drawn by enticing deals. The apparel category is forecasted as the second highest earning category (Source: Statista), expected to generate revenues up to $43.9 billion, closely following consumer electronics. To understand the pricing strategies of top retailers amidst the sale season, DataWeave analyzed the pricing trends for the Apparel category this Black Friday.
We leveraged our AI-powered data platform to analyze the discounting across key retailers. Our analysis focused on the Apparel category, examining how Amazon, Walmart, Target, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus and Macy’s differentiated themselves through their discounts.
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts of apparel products among leading US retailers during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across during the sale.
Subcategories reported on: Footwear, Kid’s Clothing, Men’s Clothing, Women’s Clothing, Activewear, Plus Size Clothing, Accessories
Timeline of analysis: 10 to 29 November 2024
We focused on the top 500 products ranked for each search keyword on each retail site, using targeted terms aligned with categories like “athleisure” and “plus size clothing”. Our methodology distinguished between standard discounts and Black Friday-specific ‘additional discounts’ or price reductions during the sale compared to the week before, to reveal true consumer value.
Key Findings
This year’s fashion discounts were unprecedented. Let’s take a look.
Retailer Level Insights
Nordstrom leads with the highest average absolute discount at 59%, followed by Saks Fifth Avenue at 35.5% and Bloomingdale’s at 41.5%. Macy’s shows the lowest average discount at 24.1%, while Amazon has an average discount of 30.4%.
Amazon ranks lower in both average absolute and additional discounts compared to competitors, indicating a more conservative discounting strategy.
Subcategory Analysis
Kids’ Clothing saw the deep discounts (up to 55% at Nordstrom), reflecting growing pressure on family budgets and heightened competition to attract budget-conscious parents.
Plus-Size Clothing emerged as a major focus, with Nordstrom leading at 53.22% average absolute discounts, signaling that retailers are increasingly prioritizing size inclusivity and appealing to a broader consumer base.
Footwear experienced robust discounting, particularly at Bloomingdale’s with 37% average absolute discounts, showing a competitive approach to attract customers looking for seasonal footwear deals.
Activewear displayed substantial discounts, with Walmart offering up to 41% on average, aligning with the trend of consumers looking for practical and comfortable attire during the winter season.
Brand Level Insights
Apparel brands, meanwhile, also offer telling insights.
Top Discounting Brands: Aqua leads with an average absolute discount of 44.58%, followed by Boss at 42.33% and Burberry at 37.84%.
Lowest Discounts: Athletic Works shows the lowest average absolute discount at 31.23%, with a minimal additional discount of 3.73%.
Competitive Advantage: Brands like Ralph Lauren and Boss show strong discounts, indicating aggressive marketing during the sale.
Share of Search Insights
Top Gainers: Adidas and Nike each saw an increase of 1.20% in their share of search during Black Friday/Cyber Monday, highlighting their strong brand presence and consumer interest.
Top Losers: Reebok experienced a sharp decline, losing 2.60% in its share of search, while Levi’s also dropped by 0.60%.
Search Trends: The data suggests a strong consumer preference for activewear brands like Nike and Adidas and a decline in interest for traditional apparel brands like Levi’s.
Who Offered Most Value This Black Friday
In the previous analysis, we focused on the top 500 products within each subcategory for each retailer, showcasing the discount strategies for their highlighted or featured items. However, to identify which retailer offered the lowest or highest prices for the same set of products, it’s necessary to match items across retailers. For this, we analyzed a separate dataset of 418 matched products across Apparel specific retailers to compare their pricing during Black Friday. This approach provides a clearer picture of price leadership and competitiveness across categories.
Here are the key takeaways from this analysis.
Category-Level Analysis
At the overall category level, Macy’s emerged as the lowest-priced retailer, offering the highest average discount of 28.72%, followed closely by Nordstrom (26.06%). The steep decline in average discounts from Saks Fifth Avenue (14.42%) and Neiman Marcus (7.93%) highlights a clear gap in discounting strategies.
Macy’s and Nordstrom are aggressively competitive on pricing in the overall apparel category, likely capturing consumer attention with substantial discounts.
Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus may rely more on brand perception and luxury positioning rather than heavy discounting.
Subcategory-Level Analysis
Neiman Marcus tops the ranking with an impressive 60.85% average discount, outperforming Macy’s (52.86%) and Nordstrom (43.04%) for Men’s Clothing. We see a similar trend with Neiman Marcus offering more value across Women’s Clothing as well, compared to other retailers.
The competition in footwear was intense, with Neiman Marcus narrowly securing the top spot at 31.03%, slightly ahead of Saks Fifth Avenue (30.28%) and Macy’s (30.07%).
Saks Fifth Avenue led by a significant margin in the Activewear category, offering 39.89% average discounts, indicating a strong push in this growing segment.
Macy’s followed at 32.16% in Activewear, while Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom had comparatively lower discounts of 26.40% and 19.52%, respectively.
Brand-Level Analysis
Kate Spade New York: Neiman Marcus leads with the highest discount of 55.23%, reflecting strong price leadership in premium fashion, closely followed by Saks Fifth Avenue at 51.66%.
Coach: Neiman Marcus dominates with a significant 75.85% discount, showcasing an aggressive promotional strategy for this luxury brand.
Spanx: While Neiman Marcus leads with 28.22%, discounts across other retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Nordstrom are clustered within a competitive range of 17–19%.
Montblanc: Macy’s takes the lead with 20.32%, signaling its competitiveness even in high-end accessories, with Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom closely behind.
Ugg: Saks Fifth Avenue leads with 31.42%, focusing on maintaining price leadership for this popular brand, while other retailers remain competitive with discounts around 25–30%.
What’s Next
To win over price-conscious shoppers, retailers need to stay competitive and consistently offer the lowest prices.
For a deeper dive into the world of competitive pricing intelligence and to explore how our solutions can benefit apparel retailers and brands, reach out to us today!
Stay tuned to our blog for more insights on different categories this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
As shoppers flocked online and to stores during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the grocery category stood out as a key battleground for retailers. With inflation affecting consumer spending, discounted groceries have become a critical driver for both shopper savings and retailer competitiveness.
In fact, according to the NRF, one of the top shopping destinations during Thanksgiving weekend were department stores (42%), online (42%),and grocery stores and supermarkets (40%). Clearly, consumers are looking to stock up in bulk on their groceries to maximize their savings.
To understand the pricing dynamics in the grocery category, DataWeave analyzed grocery discounts across leading grocers, uncovering significant trends that shaped consumer choices during this holiday shopping period.
Our research encompassed retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart, examining their discounting strategies across subcategories, alongside trends in share of search for leading CPG companies.
Key Grocery Market Stats for Black Friday-Cyber Monday 2024
Retailer Discounts: Walmart offered the highest average absolute discount at 27.6%, followed by Amazon at 20.4% and Target at 14.0%
Subcategory Insights: Beverages Category at Walmart saw the deepest discounts, with an average of 33.4%
Top Gaining Brands: Cesar experienced the largest increase in share of search during the sales period (+3.89%)
This blog will dive deeper into grocery discount trends and brand-level strategies, offering insights for retailers looking to stay competitive in the grocery sector.
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts offered by major U.S. grocery retailers during the Thanksgiving weekend, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We focused on key subcategories within the grocery segment, capturing trends in discounting strategies.
In the following insights, the Absolute Discount represents the reduction of the selling price compared to the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). The Additional Discount reflects how much lower the selling price is during Black Friday compared to its price a week before the sale. This metric reveals the actual or effective value of the sale event, beyond the standard discounts typically offered.
Key Findings
Retailer-Level Insights
Walmart emerged as the leader in grocery discounting, offering the highest average absolute (27.6%) and additional (18%) discounts.
Amazon adopted a mid-tier discounting strategy, with average absolute discounts of 20.4%.
Target, while more conservative, maintained competitiveness in select subcategories like baby products.
Subcategory Insights
Pantry Essentials saw Walmart leading with an average discount of 31.2%, appealing to budget-conscious consumers stocking up for the holidays.
Fresh Produce showed consistent discounting across retailers, with Amazon slightly ahead at 27%.
Beverages stood out for significant discounting at Walmart, with an impressive 33.4% average discount.
Brand-Level Insights
Lay’s led in absolute discounts (37.52%) and additional discounts (26.23%) showcasing aggressive pricing in the snacks subcategory.
Good & Gather maintained its competitive edge with strong discounts, appealing to price-conscious consumers seeking value.
Brands like Blue Buffalo (pet food brand) offered significant absolute discounts, but with a low additional discount of just 2%, the overall impact of the sale event on effective value was limited.
Share of Search Insights
Cesar (dog food brand), Tide (laundry staple) and Doritos saw significant gains in share of search, reflecting successful promotional strategies.
Brands like Pampers (baby diapers brand), Healthy Choice, (frozen foods brand) and Pedigree (pet food brand) experienced a decline, indicating less effective engagement during the sale period.
Who offered the lowest prices?
In the previous analysis, we focused on the top 500 products within each subcategory for each retailer, showcasing the discount strategies for their highlighted or featured items. However, to identify which retailer offered the lowest or highest prices for the same set of products, it’s necessary to match items across retailers. For this, we analyzed a separate dataset of 1433 matched products across retailers to compare their pricing during Black Friday. This approach provides a clearer picture of price leadership and competitiveness across categories.
Here are the key takeaways from this analysis.
Category-Level Analysis
Walmart is the lowest priced retailer overall for the grocery category, with an impressive average discount of 44.60%. This significant discount advantage makes Walmart a leading option for value-seeking consumers.
Target follows with strong discounts of 36.73%, indicating solid pricing in comparison but less aggressive than Walmart.
Interestingly, Amazon was the most expensive in Grocery, with an average discount of only 6.3%.
Subcategory-Level Analysis
Walmart leads in various subcategories such as Pet Products (21.12%), Dairy & Eggs (13.79%), Household Essentials (13.05%), Frozen Foods (15.07%), and Meat & Seafood (17.60%), showcasing its extensive value across the board.
Target excels in Beverages (14.58%) and Baby Products (15.00%) with competitive discounts, standing out in these specific subcategories.
Kroger provides notable value in Pantry Essentials (20.04%) and Fresh Produce (15.85%), although its overall average discount is lower than Walmart’s.
Amazon consistently ranks lower in terms of average discounts across most subcategories, highlighting it as less competitive for consumers seeking the lowest prices.
Brand-Level Analysis
Walmart also holds the top position for several key brands like Cheetos (14.92%) and Dannon (8.81%), making it the best option for consumers looking for budget-friendly choices across popular brands.
Target takes the lead for brands like Betty Crocker (25.20%) and Chobani (11.37%), showing that it can offer value for specific products.
Kroger maintains strong discounts for brands such as Delmonte (9.19%), but it does not outpace Walmart in the overall grocery brand comparison.
Amazon generally lags behind in average discounts for most brands, with Dannon (1.12%) and Chobani (2.43%) showing significantly lower discounts.
Walmart is the lowest priced retailer in the grocery category and provides substantial value across a wide range of subcategories and popular brands. This ties in with Walmart’s ELDP pricing strategy. The retailer leads in overall average discounts and maintains its position as the go-to for price-conscious consumers. Target offers strong value in certain subcategories and brands but falls short of Walmart’s broad value based pricing advantages.
What’s Next
For grocery retailers, competitive pricing and targeted promotions are critical to driving sales during key shopping events. As consumers continue to prioritize value, staying ahead in the discounting game can significantly impact market share.
For detailed insights into grocery discounting strategies and to explore how DataWeave’s solutions can help retailers optimize their pricing, contact us today!
Stay tuned to our blog for further analyses of other categories during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The Home & Furniture category continues to thrive, propelled by consumer interest in creating personalized and functional living spaces. In 2023, the U.S. furniture and home furnishings market was valued at approximately $641.7 billion in 2023 and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.1% from 2024 to 2032. Black Friday and Cyber Monday play a crucial role in fueling this growth, offering consumers a mix of premium and affordable options across subcategories.
To better understand market trends and discount strategies this Black Friday, at DataWeave we tracked over 18,149 SKUs across major home & furniture retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Overstock, from November 10 to 29, 2024. Using our AI-powered pricing intelligence platform, we focused on the top 500 products in subcategories like kitchenware, furniture, decor, lighting, outdoor items, and bedding.
In our analysis, the Absolute Discount represents the reduction of the selling price compared to the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). The Additional Discount reflects how much lower the selling price is during Black Friday compared to its price a week before the Black Friday sale. This metric reveals the actual or effective value of the sale event, beyond the standard discounts typically offered.
Also check out our insights on discounts and pricing for the health & beauty category this Black Friday.
Retailer Performance: Who Led the Discount Race?
Retailers showed varying discount strategies for Home & Furniture products. Walmart emerged as the leader in absolute discounts (37.5%) while Amazon offered the highest additional discount of 14%. Best Buy maintained competitive pricing across all subcategories, while Overstock and Home Depot offered relatively modest discounts.
Subcategories in Focus
Breaking down the discounts by subcategory provides deeper insights into consumer priorities and retailer strategies:
Kitchenware saw strong competition, with Walmart (30.40% absolute discounts) and Amazon (29% absolute discounts) dominating.
Lighting became a discount hotspot, with Walmart offering up to 45.8% in absolute discounts and 25.3% additional markdowns.
Furniture remained a core focus for Target, delivering an impressive 34% average absolute discount.
Bedding stood out at Walmart, where discounts peaked at 49.6%.
Brand Spotlight: Who Stood Out?
Among top-performing brands, furniture brand Costway offered the highest discounts, with an average of 48.4%. Meanwhile, Adesso (lighting solutions), Mainstays and Safavieh (both home furnishings brands) balanced discounts and premium appeal.
Search Visibility: The Winners and Losers
Share of search dynamics revealed significant shifts in brand visibility during Black Friday:
Furniture brand Costway (+1.2%) and home improvement player Black+Decker (+1.5%) gained visibility.
On the flip side, premium brands like Safavieh known for rugs and home furnishings (-16.8%) and furniture brand Burrow ( -1.7%) saw declines.
Who Offers the Lowest Prices?
In the previous analysis, we focused on the top 500 products within each subcategory for each retailer, showcasing the discount strategies for their highlighted or featured items. However, to identify which retailer offered the lowest or highest prices for the same set of products, it’s necessary to match items across retailers. For this, we analyzed a separate dataset of 735 matched products across Home & Furniture specific retailers to compare their pricing during Black Friday. This approach provides a clearer picture of price leadership and competitiveness across categories.
Here are the key takeaways from this analysis.
Category-Level Highlights
Amazon emerges as the lowest-priced retailer across Home & Furniture categories, with the highest average discount of 27.50%, closely followed by Walmart (26.09%).
Overstock and Wayfair trail with average discounts of 22.93% and 20.71%, respectively, while Home Depot offers the least aggressive pricing at 18.14%. This is notable, as all 3 players are known specialists in the category.
Subcategory Highlights
Amazon stands out as the leader in multiple subcategories, including Appliances, Furniture, Decor, and Outdoor, offering competitive average discounts of around 26-29%.
Overstock leads in Bedding and Kitchenware, with strong average discounts of 24.26% and 20.72%, respectively.
Wayfair is notable for Lighting, with an average discount of 19.95%, and is also competitive in Outdoor and Furniture categories.
Walmart consistently ranks high in several subcategories like Appliances and Bedding, providing solid discounts of around 22-23%.
What’s Next
For home & furniture retailers, driving maximum value during mega sale events like Black Friday involves offering bundles and sets to meet customer demands and trend expectations. Gaining insights into competitor discounts and pricing can help furniture retailers get an edge amid this environment.
Want to know how DataWeave’s intelligence platform can empower your business during peak sales events? Contact us to discover more about competitive insights, price intelligence, and data-driven decision-making. Stay tuned to our blog to see more coverage on Black Friday 2024.
The U.S. health and beauty retail sector shows remarkable resilience amid economic uncertainties, with the skincare market projected to hit $21.83 billion in 2024. Black Friday data reinforces this trend, with health and beauty products seeing a 14.6% surge in web traffic compared to last year.
At DataWeave, we conducted an in-depth analysis of Black Friday discounting trends in the U.S. health and beauty sector. DataWeave’s AI-powered pricing intelligence platform was used to monitor pricing and discounts across Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Target, and Amazon during Black Friday 2024. The study covered 19985 SKUs from November 10-29. We focused on the top 500 products ranked for each search keyword on each retail site, using targeted terms aligned with categories like “skincare” and “fragrance”.
The results? Beauty leads across categories in discount depth this year, with some retailers offering significant markdowns.
The Beauty Boom: More Than Just Looking Good
If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, it’s that self-care isn’t just a luxury – it’s a necessity. This Black Friday proved that beauty has become an indispensable part of consumers’ lives, with retailers offering unprecedented discounts and crafting strategic promotions to capture the growing demand.
The Absolute Discount represents the reduction of the selling price compared to the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). The Additional Discount reflects how much lower the selling price is during Black Friday compared to its price a week before the sale. This metric reveals the actual or effective value of the sale event, beyond the standard discounts typically offered.
Ulta Beauty led with 45% average discounts, followed by Sephora at 38.1% and Walmart at 35.2%. In terms of additional Black Friday discounts, Ulta maintained dominance at 35%, with Sephora following at 28%.
Hair care emerged as the standout category, with Ulta Beauty offering up to 56% discounts, reflecting sustained demand for at-home beauty routines. Skincare saw fierce competition, with Sephora emphasizing premium discounts (37%) while Walmart focused on value pricing (32.5%).
Fragrance and Makeup attracted consumers with targeted promotions from Walmart and Ulta Beauty, signaling strong demand for gifting items.
Major beauty brands echoed the sentiment. Premium skincare brand Clinique leads with 50.6% average discounts. Meanwhile, drugstore staples like Revlon (29.1%) and Maybelline (24.4%) balanced accessibility and affordability, driving mass-market appeal. Popular beauty and makeup brand L’Oreal Paris also offered a modest 22.8% average discount, reinforcing its position as a value-oriented brand.
The more interesting story? The massive shift in brand visibility, as our share of search rankings denote:
Shampoo and hair care brand Tresemmé saw an unexpected 5.5% jump in the share of search results
Beauty brand Herbal Essences gained 5.1% in share of search well
Declines in share of search were noted for brands like L’Oreal Paris (-1.8%) and Pantene (-0.6%), indicating missed opportunities in promotional visibility.
Insight: What’s driving this beauty boom? TikTok and social media continue to fuel beauty purchases, with viral products driving significant search and sales spikes. Plus, the “skinification” of hair care has turned basic shampoo shopping into a full-blown beauty ritual.
Who Offered the Lowest Prices?
In the previous analysis, we focused on the top 500 products within each subcategory for each retailer, showcasing the discount strategies for their highlighted or featured items. However, to identify which retailer offered the lowest or highest prices for the same set of products, it’s necessary to match items across retailers. For this, we analyzed a separate dataset of 1133 matched products across Health & Beauty specific retailers to compare their pricing during Black Friday. This approach provides a clearer picture of price leadership and competitiveness across categories.
Here are the key takeaways from this analysis.
Bloomingdale’s emerges as the overall leader, offering the highest average discount of 14.87%, closely followed by Bluemercury (12.41%).
Ulta Beauty ranks third (10.94%), demonstrating competitiveness across key subcategories, while Sephora trails with the lowest average discount (7.33%), reflecting a more premium positioning.
Ulta Beauty leads in Hair Care with the highest discount (22.62%), while Bluemercury dominates in Skin Care (13.81%), Makeup (22.98%), and Fragrance (10.6%).
Sephora consistently offers the lowest discounts across all subcategories, reflecting their premium positioning.
Bluemercury offers the lowest prices for luxury brands like Kiehl (27.02%) and Laura Mercier (34.87%), with Bloomingdale’s closely trailing.
Bloomingdale’s leads for Bumble and Bumble (13.59%) and Hourglass (23.41%), showcasing strong promotional efforts.
Sephora maintains a more restrained discount strategy, with notable leadership only for Estée Lauder (7.18%).
Ulta Beauty shines in offering the steepest discount for Briogeo (33.26%), emphasizing competitiveness in key brands.
What’s Next for Holiday Discounting?
For retailers, the message is clear: traditional holiday playbooks need a serious update. For shoppers, it means unprecedented opportunities to score deals in categories that traditionally held firm on pricing.
Want to stay ahead of retail trends and optimize your holiday shopping strategy? DataWeave’s commerce intelligence platform helps brands and retailers strategically navigate these shifts. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you make data-driven decisions in this rapidly evolving retail landscape.
Stay tuned to our blog for forthcoming analyses on pricing and discounting trends across a spectrum of shopping categories, as we continue to unravel the intricacies of consumer behavior and market dynamics.
Black Friday, once confined to a single weekend, has evolved into a shopping season that now stretches well before Thanksgiving. With inflation hovering around 3% and consumer confidence showing signs of recovery, retailers are adapting their promotional calendars to capture early-bird shoppers and maintain a competitive edge.
Major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, have capitalized on this trend by launching promotions weeks in advance, signaling the traditional holiday rush is now a month-long event. At DataWeave, we put these deals under a microscope.
Our Methodology
Using DataWeave’s advanced, AI-powered pricing intelligence platform, we tracked early Black Friday deals across Consumer Electronics, Home & Furniture, Health & Beauty, and Apparel categories. We monitored dedicated Black Friday deal pages on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Sephora to gather and analyze discount data a week prior to Black Friday weekend.
Who’s Offering the Best Deals Across Categories?
Our pre- Black Friday analysis reveals a clear pattern of premium brands offering deeper discounts across categories ahead of the holiday. Here are some key findings around retail players:
Walmart emerges as the most aggressive discounter across categories, leading in Health & Beauty (57.07%), Apparel (48.97%), and Consumer Electronics (43.35%).
Amazon maintains consistent but lower discounts (28-29%) across categories, suggesting potential deeper cuts ahead.
Best Buy and Sephora, both category specialists, play it conservative compared to mass retail players.
Let’s look at each category more closely to get a detailed snapshot of the deals this Thanksgiving week:
Health & Beauty
Our analysis reveals that it’s not electronics, but the health & beauty category that leads with the widest discount range pre Black Friday, making it the category to watch out for.
Walmart takes the lead with an aggressive 57.1% average discount in this category, capitalizing on its value-oriented reputation.
Beauty specialist Sephora holds modest beauty discounts (32.81%) compared to other retailers.
Amazon offers the broadest range of SKUs (571) in the category.
Among the health & beauty brands we analyzed, cosmetics brand Tarte and viral K-Beauty skincare brand COSRX stand out with discounts above 40%, appealing to cost-conscious beauty enthusiasts.
Consumer Electronics
Our pre- Black Friday analysis reveals interesting insights about consumer electronics deals this season.
Walmart, once again, emerges as the frontrunner in the category with 43.4% average discounts.
Best Buy plays it conservative in electronics (30.75%), despite being a category specialist, but offers the most extensive SKU coverage (3030).
Amazon’s consistent 29.7% discount across 1,749 SKUs suggests they’re probably holding back their best deals for Prime members during Black Friday.
Brand-specific data for the category reveals significant deals on Speck (48.07%) and smart TV brand Insignia (39.22%), making accessories and mid-tier electronics attractive for early shoppers. Core computing (HP at 32.14%) and electronics brands maintain more conservative discounts. It remains to be seen if this changes on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Apparel
Our analysis of the apparel category reveals several highlights:
In the apparel category too, Walmart dominates with an impressive 49% average discount, effectively targeting price-sensitive shoppers in the fashion segment.
Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, both known for apparel, offer significant discounts at 43.2% and 37.8% respectively.
Amazon’s expansive SKU coverage (1344) is countered by a modest 29.5% discount, showing its focus on variety over depth of discounts.
Premium fashion brands dominate the highest discounts this Black Friday in the apparel category. Vince Camuto leads with over 45.1% average discount. Notably, Levi and Nike’s aggressive 44.43% and 43.50% discounts suggests significant inventory positions or intent to capture market share.
Home & Furniture
Our analysis reveals an interesting trend across the category.
In the home & furniture category too, Walmart leads at 41.8% average discounts. Target follows closely, but with significantly lesser SKUs on offer.
Amazon’s 28.1% discount, though the lowest among major players, spans a substantial 1,982 SKUs, reinforcing its position as a marketplace for diverse needs.
Top 3 Products With the Highest Discounts Across Retailers
To provide a clearer picture of the early Black Friday landscape, we analyzed the top 3 products with the most substantial discounts in consumer electronics and health & beauty categories. These insights highlight how retailers are leveraging strategic discounts on high-value items to attract early shoppers.
Top Discounted Products in Consumer Electronics
Premium TVs dominate the discount scene, with LG’s 83″ OLED offering up to 44.5% off on Amazon, closely followed by a 44.4% discount on Best Buy, showcasing aggressive competition. The same product has much lower discounting on Walmart, but notably, the product is retailed at $3999.9, at least $1000 less than other retailers, highlighting Walmart’s commitment to offering lowest prices.
Gaming consoles, like the PlayStation 5 Slim Bundle, show moderate discounts (ranging from 15% on Walmart and Target to 25% at Best Buy), appealing to tech-savvy shoppers.
Notable competition is evident in price matching across major retailers, particularly in TVs and high-value electronics like the Nikon Z 8 camera, where Walmart offers the deepest discount at 13.75%, edging past Amazon and Best Buy.
Top Discounted Products in Health & Beauty
Viral skincare staples like Tatcha’s Water Cream show tight discounting consistency, with Walmart offering 19.47% off compared to Amazon’s 20% and Sephora’s 20.83%.
Trending haircare brand Olaplex displays greater disparity, with Walmart leading with a 33.33% discount, surpassing Amazon and Sephora. Luxury brand, Yves Saint Laurent’s Satin Lipstick is one of the highest discounted items across retailers.
Looking Ahead
Our analysis suggests that while some early deals offer genuine value, particularly in premium beauty and high-end electronics, many retailers might be holding their best discounts for Black Friday.
For shoppers, the key is being selective: jump on premium brand discounts now (since they’re likely to remain the same though the weekend), but wait on mid-range electronics and home goods where better deals are likely to emerge on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
For retailers, the imperative is clear: dynamic pricing intelligence is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge while protecting margins. Competitive insights will be critical as the holiday season progresses to balance market share against profitability.
Stay tuned for our Black Friday Cyber Monday analysis next week, where we’ll track how these early discounts compare to the main event’s deals!
Brands are investing millions of dollars in digital retail media to make their products stand out amid unrelenting competition.
The ad spend on digital retail media worldwide was estimated at USD 114.4 billion in 2022, and the current projections indicate that it will grow to USD 176 billion by 2028. This amounts to a 54% increase in just six years.
The current surge in digital retail media advertising has led brands to find an effective way to monitor the efficacy of their ad spend. While Share of Search has long been used to measure brand visibility effectively, the metrics often missed tracking ads on retail sites.
DataWeave’s Share of Media solution helps solve this problem.
What is the Share of Media?
At DataWeave, Share of Media is a metric used to measure a brand’s presence in sponsored listings and banner ads on eCommerce platforms. It captures how often a brand appears in paid promotions compared to competitors, offering insights into advertising visibility and effectiveness.
These days most marketplaces seamlessly blend banner ads and sponsored listings into organic search results. Let’s take a closer look.
Banner Advertising
Banner advertising strategically places creative banners across websites—often at the top, bottom, or sides. Some eCommerce platforms also integrate these banners into product search listings.
What makes banner ads so special is the unique ability to allow marketers to use various types of media in a single ad, such as images, auto-play videos, and animations. Brands can also present curated collections of products. This flexibility provides marketers with creative opportunities to differentiate from competitors, capture customer interest, and encourage conversions.
Sponsored Listings
Sponsored listings are paid placements within search engine results or eCommerce platforms. They are usually marked as ‘sponsored’ or ‘ad,’ and they often appear at the top of search results and alongside organic product listing results.
Unlike organic search results, sponsored listings are prioritized based on the advertiser’s bid amount and relevance to users’ search queries.
Sponsored listings offer a strategic advantage by enabling businesses to connect directly with consumers who are actively searching for their products. This targeted approach ensures that marketing efforts are focused on individuals with high intent of making a purchase, maximizing the potential return on investment.
The Power of Banner Ads and Sponsored Listings
Banner ads and sponsored listings are great choices for boosting customer engagement and product sales. Here are four key advantages they offer:
Enhanced Visibility: Digital retail media strategically places your brand where it will stand out—outshining competitors and grabbing the attention of high-purchase-intent consumers.
Precision in Reach: These ads target specific keywords or categories, allowing for highly focused advertising based on demographics and search intent.
Minimal Conversion Friction: Smooth transitions from ads to a brand’s native store or product listing on the marketplace keep conversion friction to a minimum.
Brand Awareness and Recall: Consistent exposure to your brand through banner ads and sponsored product listings can leave lasting impressions and build brand recognition.
The bottom line is that it’s increasingly important for brands to monitor their Share of Media.
How to Monitor Your Brand’s Share of Media
DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) platform extends beyond the traditional Share of Search metrics and provides robust support for monitoring the Share of Media.
DataWeave monitors the Share of Media in two ways: keywords and product categories. Users can view Share of Media insights through aggregated views, trend charts, and detailed tables. The views are designed to show brand visibility and the overall competitive landscape. For example, the screenshot below, taken from DataWeave’s dashboard, showcases the Share of Media across keywords, categories, and retailers.
Share of Media by Keyword
The Share of Media metric captures a brand’s advertising presence within search listings for a designated keyword. This provides a comprehensive view of a brand’s visibility and promotional efforts across retail platforms, helping brands validate and gauge the effectiveness of their ad spend.
For example, the screenshot below shows the trend of manufacturer’s Share of Media by keyword—‘baby food.’
Share of Media by Category
The Share of Media metric measures the presence of brands’ banner ads and sponsored listings across product categories on retail sites. This helps brands see which product categories require more investment, making it easier for them to spend their ad budget wisely.
The screenshot below illustrates manufacturers’ Share of Media by category across retailers.
Share of Media: An Essential Ecommerce Metric
As retail media continues to evolve, our analytics must follow—after all, knowledge is a competitive advantage. In the dynamic world of eCommerce, where competition is fierce and consumer attention is scarce, understanding your share of media is crucial.
Analyzing the Share of Media can give brands a competitive edge. By regularly monitoring and analyzing this metric, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your brand’s visibility, attract more customers, and ultimately drive sales growth. With a deeper understanding of their target audience and market dynamics, brands can refine promotional efforts to drive more effective results and optimize return on ad spend (ROAS).
For more information on how Digital Shelf Analytics can enhance your brand’s digital shelf presence, request a demo or contact us at contact@dataweave.com.
Your budget-conscious customers are hunting for value and won’t hesitate to switch brands or shop at other retailers.
In saturated and fiercely competitive markets, how can you retain customers? And better yet, how can you attract more customers and grow your market share? One thing you can do as a brand or retailer is to set the right prices for your products.
Competitive or competition-based pricing can help you get there.
So what exactly is competitive pricing? Let’s dive into this strategy, its advantages and disadvantages, and how it can be used to stay ahead of the competition.
What is Competitive Pricing?
Competitive or competition-based pricing is a strategy where brands and retailers set product prices based on what their competitors charge. This method focuses entirely on the market landscape and sets aside the cost of production or consumer demand.
It is a good pricing model for businesses operating in saturated markets, such as consumer packaged goods (CPGs) or retail.
Competitive Pricing Models
Competitive pricing isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy. The approach includes various pricing models that can be customized to fit your business goals and market positioning.
Here’s a closer look at five of the most common competition-based pricing models:
Price Skimming
If you have a new product entering the market, you can initially set a high price. Price skimming allows you to maximize margins when competition is minimal.
This strategy taps into early adopters’ willingness to pay a premium for new project categories. As competitors enter the market, you can gradually reduce the price to maintain competitiveness.
Premium Pricing
Premium pricing lets you position your product as high-quality or luxurious goods.
When you charge more than your competitors, you’re not just selling a product—you’re selling status and an experience. This strategy is effective when your offering is of superior quality or has unique features that justify a higher price point.
Price Matching
Price matching—also known as parity pricing—is a defensive pricing tactic.
By consistently matching your competitors’ prices, you can retain customers who might otherwise, be tempted to switch to an alternative.
This approach signals your customers that they don’t need to look elsewhere for what they need and can feel comfortable remaining loyal to your brand.
Penetration Pricing
Penetration pricing is when you set a low price for a new product to gain market share quickly. The opposite of price skimming, this strategy can be particularly effective in price-sensitive or highly competitive industries.
By attracting customers early, you can also deter some competitors from entering the market. This bold move can establish your product as a market leader from the get-go.
Loss Leader Pricing
Loss leader pricing is a strategic sacrifice that can lead to greater gains in the long run.
By offering a product at a low price—sometimes even below cost—you can attract new customers to your brand and strengthen your current customers’ loyalty.
Eventually, you can cross-sell other higher-margin products to your loyal customer base to cover the loss from your loss leader pricing and increase sales of other more profitable products.
Key Advantages of Competitive Pricing
Although it’s not the only pricing strategy available, competitive pricing has some significant advantages.
It is Responsive
Agility is synonymous with profit in industries where consumer preferences and market conditions shift rapidly.
Competitive pricing allows you to adapt quickly—if a competitor lowers their prices, you can respond promptly to maintain your positioning.
It is Simple to Execute and Manage
Competitive pricing is straightforward, unlike cost-based pricing, which requires complex calculations and spans various factors and facets.
By closely monitoring competitors’ prices and adjusting your prices accordingly, you can implement this pricing strategy with relative ease and speed.
It Can Be Combined with Other Pricing Strategies
Competitive pricing is not a standalone strategy—it’s a versatile approach that can easily be combined with other pricing strategies. For example, say you want to use competitive pricing without losing money on a product. In this case, you could use cost-plus pricing to determine a base price that you won’t go below, then use competitive pricing as long as the price stays above your base price.
Key Disadvantages of Competitive Pricing
While competition-based pricing has its advantages, it’s not without its pitfalls. Here are some potential disadvantages of competitive pricing.
It De-emphasizes Consumer Demand
If you focus solely on what competitors are charging, you could overlook consumer demand.
For example, you could underprice items that consumers could be willing to purchase for more. Or, you might overprice items that consumers perceive as low-value, which can reduce sales.
You Risk Price Wars
If you and your competition undercut each other for customer acquisition and loyalty, you will eventually erode profit margins and harm the industry’s overall profitability. It’s a slippery slope where everyone loses in the end.
There’s Potential for Complacency
When you base your prices on beating those of competitors, you might neglect to differentiate your offerings through innovation and product improvements. Over time, this can weaken your brand’s position and lead to a loss of market share. Staying competitive means more than just matching prices—it means continuously evolving and adding value for the consumer.
4 Tips for a Successful Competitive Pricing Strategy in Retail
Here are four competition-based pricing tips for retailers:
Retailer Tip #1. Know Where to Position Your Products in the Market
For competitive pricing to work, you must understand your optimal product positioning in the overall market. To gain this understanding, you must regularly compare your offerings and prices with those of your key competitors, especially for high-demand products.
Then, you can decide which competition-based pricing model is suitable for you.
Retailer Tip #2. Price Dynamically
Dynamic pricing is a tactic with which you automatically adjust prices on your chosen variables, such as market conditions, competitor actions, or consumer demand.
When it comes to competitive pricing, a dynamic pricing system can track your competitors’ price changes and update yours in lockstep.
Price-monitoring tools like DataWeave allow you to stay ahead of the game with seasonal and historical pricing trend data.
Retailer Tip #3. Combine Competitive Pricing with Other Pricing Strategies
Competitive pricing can be powerful, but it doesn’t have to stand alone. You can enhance its benefits with complementary marketing tactics.
To illustrate, you can bundle products to offer greater value than what your competitors are offering. You can also leverage loyalty programs to offer exclusive discounts or rewards so customers keep returning, even when your competitors offer them lower prices.
Retailer Tip #4. Stay in Tune with Consumer Demand
Competition-based pricing aligns you with your competitor, but don’t lose sight of what your customers want. Routinely test your pricing strategy against consumer behavior to ensure that your prices reflect the actual value of your offerings.
5 Tips for a Successful Competitive Pricing Strategy for Consumer Brands
If you’re thinking about how to create a competitive pricing strategy for your brand, consider these five tips:
Brand Tip #1. Identify Competing Products for Accurate Comparisons
The first step in competitive pricing is to know the value of what you’re selling and how it compares to that of your competitors’ products. This extends to private-label products, similar but not identical products, and use-case products.
Product matching ensures your pricing decisions are based on accurate like-for-like comparisons, allowing you to compete effectively.
Brand Tip #2. Understand Your Product’s Relative Value
Knowing how your product competes on value is key to setting the right price. If your product offers higher value, price it higher; if it offers less, price it accordingly. This ensures your pricing strategy reflects your product’s market placement.
Brand Tip #3. Consider Brand Perception
Even if your product is virtually the same as a competitor’s, your brand’s perceived value may be different, which plays a crucial role in pricing.
If your brand is perceived as premium, you can justify higher prices. Conversely, if customers perceive you as a value brand, your pricing should reflect affordability.
Brand Tip #4. Leverage Value-Based Differentiation
When your prices are similar to competitors’, you must differentiate your products by expressing your product value through branding, packaging, quality, or something else entirely.
This differentiation will compel consumers to choose your product over other similarly priced options.
Brand Tip #5. Stay Vigilant with Price Monitoring
Your competitors will update their pricing repeatedly, and you will, too.
It can be difficult and time-consuming to monitor your competitive pricing, so you’ll need a system like DataWeave to monitor competitors’ pricing and manage dynamic pricing changes.
This vigilance ensures your brand remains competitive and relevant in real time.
4 Essential Capabilities You Need to Implement Successful Competition-Based Pricing
You’ll need four key capabilities to implement a competitive pricing strategy effectively.
AI-Driven Product Matching
Product matching means you’ll compare many products (sometimes tens or hundreds) with varying details across multiple platforms. Accurate product matching at that scale requires AI.
For instance, AI can identify similar smartphones to yours by analyzing features like screen size and processor type. DataWeave’s AI product matches start with 80–90% matching accuracy, and then human oversight can fine-tune the data for near-perfect matches.
You can make informed pricing decisions once you know which competing products to base your prices on.
Accurate and Comprehensive Data
A successful competition-based pricing strategy depends on high-quality, comprehensive product and pricing data from many retailers and eCommerce marketplaces.
By tracking prices on large online platforms and niche eCommerce sites across certain regions, you’ll gain a more comprehensive market view, which enables you to make quick and confident price changes.
Normalized Measurement Units
Accurate price comparisons are dependent on normalized unit measurements.
For example, comparing laundry detergent sold in liters to laundry detergent sold in ounces requires converting either or both products to a common base like price-per-liter or price-per-ounce.
This normalization ensures accurate pricing analysis.
Timely Actionable Insights
Timely and actionable pricing insights empower you to make informed pricing decisions.
With top-tier competitive pricing intelligence systems, you get customized alerts, intuitive dashboards, and detailed reports to help your team quickly act on insights.
In Conclusion
Competitive pricing or competition-based pricing is a powerful strategy for businesses navigating crowded markets, but you must balance competitive pricing with your brand’s unique value proposition.
Competitive pricing should complement innovation and customer-centric strategies, not replace them. To learn more, talk to us today!
In retail, competition is fierce, and in its ever-evolving landscape, consumer expectations are higher than ever.
For years, our AI-driven solutions have been the foundation that empowers businesses to sharpen their competitive pricing and optimize digital shelf performance. But in today’s world, evolution is constant—so is innovation. We now find ourselves at the frontier of a new era in AI. With the dawn of Generative AI and the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), the possibilities for eCommerce companies are expanding at an unprecedented pace.
These technologies aren’t just a step forward; they’re a leap—propelling our capabilities to new heights. The insights are deeper, the recommendations more precise, and the competitive and market intelligence we provide is sharper than ever. This synergy between our legacy of AI expertise and the advancements of today positions DataWeave to deliver even greater value, thus helping businesses thrive in a fast-paced, data-driven world.
This article marks the beginning of a series where we will take you through these transformative AI capabilities, each designed to give retailers and brands a competitive edge.
In this first piece, we’ll offer a snapshot of how DataWeave aggregates and analyzes billions of publicly available data points to help businesses stay agile, informed, and ahead of the curve. These fall into four broad categories:
Product Matching
Attribute Tagging
Content Analysis
Promo Banner Analysis
Other Specialized Use Cases
Product Matching
Dynamic pricing is an indispensable tool for eCommerce stores to remain competitive. A blessing—and a curse—of online shopping is that users can compare prices of similar products in a few clicks, with most shoppers gravitating toward the lowest price. Consequently, retailers can lose sales over minor discrepancies of $1–2 or even less.
All major eCommerce platforms compare product prices—especially their top selling products—across competing players and adjust prices to match or undercut competitors. A typical product undergoes 20.4 price changes annually, or roughly once every 18 days. Amazon takes it to the extreme, changing prices approximately every 10 minutes. It helps them maintain a healthy price perception among their consumers.
However, accurate product matching at scale is a prerequisite for the above, and that poses significant challenges. There is no standardized approach to product cataloging, so even identical products bear different product titles, descriptions, and attributes. Information is often incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous. Image data contains even more variability—the same product can be styled using different backgrounds, lighting, orientations, and quality; images can have multiple overlapping objects of interest or extraneous objects, and at times the images and the text on a single page might belong to completely different products!
DataWeave leverages advanced technologies, including computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning, to achieve highly accurate product matching. Our pricing intelligence solution accurately matches products across hundreds of websites and automatically tracks competitor pricing data.
Here’s how it works:
Text Preprocessing
It identifies relevant text features essential for accurate comparison.
Metadata Parsing: Extracts product titles, descriptions, attributes (e.g., color, size), and other structured data elements from Product Description Pages (PDP) that can help in accurately identifying and classifying products.
Attribute-Value Normalization: Normalize attributes names (e.g. RAM vs Memory) and their values (e.g., 16 giga bytes vs 16 gigs vs 16 GB); brand names (e.g., Benetton vs UCB vs United Colors of Benetton); mapping category hierarchies a standard taxonomy.
Noise Removal: Removes stop words and other elements with no descriptive value; this focuses keyword extraction on meaningful terms that contribute to product identification.
Image Preprocessing
Image processing algorithms use feature extraction to define visual attributes. For example, when comparing images of a red T-shirt, the algorithm might extract features such as “crew neck,” “red,” or “striped.”
Image hashing techniques create a unique representation (or “hash”) of an image, allowing for efficient comparison and matching of product images. This process transforms an image into a concise string or sequence of numbers that captures its essential features even if the image has been resized, rotated, or edited.
Before we perform these activities there is a need to preprocess images to prepare them for downstream operations. These include object detection to identify objects of interest, background removal, face/skin detection and removal, pose estimation and correction, and so forth.
Embeddings
We have built a hybrid or a multimodal product-matching engine that uses image features, text features, and domain heuristics. For every product we process we create and store multiple text and image embeddings in a vector database. These include a combination of basic feature vectors (e.g. tf-idf based, colour histograms, share vectors) to more advanced deep learning algorithms-based embeddings (e.g., BERT, CLIP) to the latest LLM-based embeddings.
Classification
Classification algorithms enhance product attribute tagging by designating match types. For example, the product might be identified as an “exact match”, “variant”, “similar”, or “substitute.” The algorithm can also identify identical product combinations or “baskets” of items typically purchased together.
What is the Business Impact of Product Matching?
Pricing Intelligence: Businesses can strategically adjust pricing to remain competitive while maintaining profitability. High-accuracy price comparisons help businesses analyze their competitive price position, identify opportunities to improve pricing, and reclaim market share from competitors.
Similarity-Based Matching: Products are matched based on a range of similarity features, such as product type, color, price range, specific features, etc., leading to more accurate matches.
Counterfeit Detection: Businesses can identify counterfeit or unauthorized versions of branded products by comparing them against authentic product listings. This helps safeguard brand identity and enables brands to take legal action against counterfeiters.
Attribute Tagging
Attribute tagging involves assigning standardized tags for product attributes, such as brand, model, size, color, or material. These naming conventions form the basis for accurate product matching. Tagging detailed attributes, such as specifications, features, and dimensions, helps match products that meet similar criteria. For example, tags like “collar” or “pockets” for apparel ensure high-fidelity product matches for hard-to-distinguish items with minor stylistic variations.
Including tags for synonyms, variants, and long-tail keywords (e.g., “denim” and “jeans”) improves the matching process by recognizing different terms used for similar products. Metadata tags categorize similar items according to SKU numbers, manufacturer details, and other identifiers.
Altogether, these capabilities provide high-quality product matches and valuable metadata for retailers to classify their products and compare their product assortment to competitors.
User-Generated Content (UGC) Analysis
Customer reviews and ratings are rich sources of information, enabling brands to gauge consumer sentiment and identify shortcomings regarding product quality or service delivery. However, while informative, reviews constitute unstructured “noisy” data that is actionable only if parsed correctly.
Here’s where DataWeave’s UGC analysis capability steps in.
Feature Extractor: Automatically pulls specific product attributes mentioned in the review (e.g., “battery life,” “design” and “comfort”)
Feature Opinion Pair: Pairs each product attribute with a corresponding sentiment from the review (e.g., “battery life” is “excellent,” “design” is “modern,” and “comfort” is “poor”)
Calculate Sentiment: Calculates an overall sentiment score for each product attribute
The final output combines the information extracted from each of these features, which looks something like this:
Battery life is excellent
Design is modern
Not satisfied with the comfort
The algorithm also recognizes spammy reviews and distinguishes subjective reviews (i.e., those fueled by emotion) from objective ones.
Promo Banner Analysis
Our image processing tool can interpret promotional banners and extract information regarding product highlights, discounts, and special offers. This provides insights into pricing strategies and promotional tactics used by other online stores.
For example, if a competitor offers a 20% discount on a popular product, you can match or exceed this discount to attract more customers.
The banner reader identifies successful promotional trends and patterns from competitors, such as the timing of discounts, frequently promoted product categories or brands, and the duration of sales events. Ecommerce stores can use this information to optimize their promotion strategies, ensuring they launch compelling and timely offers.
Other Specialized Use Cases
While these generalized AI tools are highly useful in various industries, we’ve created other category—and attribute-specific capabilities for specialty goods (e.g., those requiring certifications or approval by federal agencies) and food items. These use cases help our customers adhere to compliance requirements.
Certification Mark Detector
This detector lets retailers match items based on official certification marks. These marks represent compliance with industry standards, safety regulations, and quality benchmarks.
Example:
USDA Organic: Certification for organic food production and handling
ISO 9001: Quality Management System Certification
By detecting these certification marks, the system can accurately match products with their certified counterparts. By identifying which competitor products are certified, retailers can identify products that may benefit from certification.
Nutrition Fact Table Reader
Product attributes alone are insufficient for comparing food items. Differences in nutrition content can influence product category (e.g., “health food” versus regular food items), price point, and consumer choice. DataWeave’s nutrition fact table reader scans nutrition information on packaging, capturing details such as calorie count, macronutrient distribution (proteins, fats, carbohydrates), vitamins, and minerals.
The solution ensures items with similar nutritional profiles are correctly identified and grouped based on specific dietary requirements or preferences. This helps with price comparisons and enables eCommerce stores to maintain a reliable database of product information and build trust among health-conscious consumers.
Building Next-Generation Competitive and Market Intelligence
Moving forward, breakthroughs in generative AI and LLMs have fueled substantial innovation, which has enabled us to introduce powerful new capabilities for our customers.
These include:
Building Enhanced Products, Solutions, and Capabilities: Generative AI and LLMs can significantly elevate the performance of existing solutions by improving the accuracy, relevance, and depth of insights. By leveraging these advanced AI technologies, DataWeave can enhance its product offerings, such as pricing intelligence, product matching, and sentiment analysis. These tools will become more intuitive, allowing for real-time updates and deeper contextual understanding. Additionally, AI can help create entirely new solutions tailored to specific use cases, such as automating competitive analysis or identifying emerging market trends. This positions DataWeave to remain at the forefront of innovation, offering cutting-edge solutions that meet the evolving needs of retailers and brands.
Reducing Turnaround Time (TAT) to Go-to-Market Faster: Generative AI and LLMs streamline data processing and analysis workflows, enabling faster decision-making. By automating tasks like data aggregation, sentiment analysis, and report generation, AI dramatically reduces the time required to derive actionable insights. This efficiency means that businesses can respond to market changes more swiftly, adjusting pricing or promotional strategies in near real-time. Faster insights translate into reduced turnaround times for product development, testing, and launch cycles, allowing DataWeave to bring new solutions to market quickly and give clients a competitive advantage.
Improving Data Quality to Achieve Higher Performance Metrics: AI-driven technologies are exceptionally skilled at cleaning, organizing, and structuring large datasets. Generative AI and LLMs can refine the data input process, reducing errors and ensuring more accurate, high-quality data across all touchpoints. Improved data quality enhances the precision of insights drawn from it, leading to higher performance metrics like better product matching, more accurate price comparisons, and more effective consumer sentiment analysis. With higher-quality data, businesses can make smarter, more informed decisions, resulting in improved revenue, market share, and customer satisfaction.
Augmenting Human Bandwidth with AI to Enhance Productivity: Generative AI and LLMs serve as powerful tools that augment human capabilities by automating routine, time-consuming tasks such as data entry, classification, and preliminary analysis. This allows human teams to focus on more strategic, high-value activities like interpreting insights, building relationships with clients, and developing new business strategies. By offloading these repetitive tasks to AI, human productivity is significantly enhanced. Employees can achieve more in less time, increasing overall efficiency and enabling teams to scale their operations without needing a proportional increase in human resources.
In our ongoing series, we will dive deep into each of these capabilities, exploring how DataWeave leverages cutting-edge AI technologies like Generative AI and LLMs to solve complex challenges for retailers and brands.
Our world is increasingly going online. We work online, socialize online, and shop online every day. As a consumer brand, you need to ensure complete awareness of your brand’s online presence across eCommerce platforms, search engines, and media.
Only by deeply understanding the customer journey can you ensure that your product is reaching your ideal customers and maximizing your brand’s market share. You need data to intrinsically understand your customer journey and make changes where you’re lacking.
As the old adage goes: ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure.’
You need digital shelf metrics to measure and start benchmarking your buyer’s journey. To find several of these types of key performance indicators (KPIs), you need a digital shelf analytics solution. These platforms allow you to track various metrics along the path to purchase from the awareness stage to the post-purchase phase across the entire internet, helping to inform online and offline sales strategies.
Digital shelf analytics will help you gain insights into how your brand is doing versus the competition, which areas are lagging behind in historical performance, and what activities are driving sales. There are innumerable ways in which you can leverage these valuable insights. But how do you know which KPIs to start tracking with your digital shelf analytics solution?
Here, we’ve summarized the top metric types your peers report, track and base their decisions on.
With these KPIs in hand, consumer brands like yours can ensure that their products are consistently visible and appealing to their target audience across online marketplaces, ultimately enhancing conversion rates, market share, and profitability.
Read this guide to learn more about the top digital shelf metrics consumer brands are tracking and how to use them in your own strategy.
1. Share of Search
Share of Search (SoS) is a KPI in digital shelf analytics that measures how frequently a consumer brand’s products appear in search results on eCommerce platforms relative to the competition for specific keywords. A good digital shelf analytics solution will be able to show this metric across all the top marketplaces and retailers, such as Amazon and Walmart, but also more niche marketplaces for industry-specific selling.
This metric provides brands with a quantifiable way to measure how frequently their products are being “served up” to customers on online marketplaces. Essentially, it measures visibility and discoverability.
With Share of Search on DataWeave, you can slice and dice your data in innumerable ways. These are a few important views you can see:
Aggregated SoS
Organic and Sponsored SoS scores
SoS scores across brands, retailers, keywords, cities
Historical SoS score trends
Once you have benchmarked your SoS and category presence relative to your competition, you need to start interpreting the data. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help interpret your findings:
Which of my key categories have the lowest SoS score?
Which products feature low on search results because they are out of stock?
Are my competitors’ products faring better due to sponsored searches?
Is my SoS low due to poor content quality?
With insights in hand, you will know which actions to take to drive the biggest impact. For example, you could increase sponsored search results or improve organic reach by optimizing product pages.
Understanding your SoS is essential to maximizing the awareness phase of your customer journey. It will help you improve your brand visibility and increase product conversions through better search and category presence.
2. Share of Media
Share of Media (SoM) is a KPI that is just as impactful, if not more so, than the SoS metric. However, only a limited number of brands track it or use it to drive strategic action. This makes it a perfect opportunity for brands looking to get an edge on the competition.
But what is SoM in digital shelf analytics? Essentially, it’s a way of measuring retail media advertising activities like brand-sponsored banners, listings, videos, ads, and promotions that sometimes blend into search results. The main types of retail media advertising exist in two categories: banner advertising and sponsored listings.
Banner advertising involves strategically placing designed banners within websites and search listings. These banners raise brand awareness and drive traffic to online storefronts.
Sponsored listings are paid placements within search results on search engines or eCommerce platforms. They are prioritized based on the total bid amount and the product’s relevance. These paid listings are marked with “sponsored” or “ad.”
These listings serve to enhance your brand’s overall visibility, help you gain more precise reach, increase conversions, and drive better brand awareness and recall with your customers.
These efforts aren’t free, however, so measuring their effectiveness is critical not only to gain all the listed benefits but to also not waste your valuable marketing budget. The SoM KPI can help a consumer brand answer questions like:
Where are the opportunities to increase paid ads?
Which categories could benefit from a promotional boost or a strategic and streamlined allocation of ad spend?
Which of my competitors have active banners and what is their share of media by keyword?
How has my ad spend trended historically in comparison to my competitor?
DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics (DSA) is among the first providers to offer Share of Media KPI tracking and analysis. This is because it requires advanced, multi-modal AI to gather, view, and aggregate listings that encompass text, images, and video. With Share of Media tracking facilitated by DataWeave, consumer brands can track and analyze the effectiveness of their own promotional investments as well as those of their competitors.
3. Content Quality
The content quality metric measures how well your product content adheres to the retailer’s specific guidelines, which are in place to steer traffic and sales on their sites.
With the help of a DSA platform’s AI and ML capabilities, you can measure different elements of your product detail pages (PDPs), such as titles, descriptions, images, videos, and even customer reviews. You need to know which elements are missing, where they are missing, and which ones are negatively affecting sales so you can take corrective action.
Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%? The quality of your content can significantly impact this number. Ensuring that your content is high-quality will help influence product discoverability, customer engagement, and conversion rates. It will also help position you ahead of the competition. If your content quality is poor, you may find yourself with lower search rankings, a higher return rate, and more abandoned carts.
Here are some questions you can answer with the help of the content quality digital shelf metric:
Is my product content at a retail site exactly what was syndicated?
Are there any retailer initiated changes to my product content?
Are my product content updates reflected on the retailer platforms?
How well does my product content comply with the retailer guidelines?
How do I optimize my product content for enhanced discoverability and conversion?
DataWeave’s content quality digital shelf analysis helps consumer brands ensure that product content on eCommerce platforms is high-quality and benchmark their product listings against the competition. It does this through a combination of AI-driven quality analysis and by presenting brands with actionable recommendations. These optimized suggestions are based on the top-performing products so you can focus your valuable time on the areas that will drive the biggest impact.
4. Pricing & Promotions
Your customers can easily shop around to find the best price for the product you’re selling. If your competitor is selling it cheaper, you’ll lose that sale.
That’s why it’s essential to understand the pricing and promotional landscape for each of your products and categories. This can be a challenge, especially if it’s a common product or comes in multiple pack sizes or variants.
It’s equally important to track pricing and promotions even at individual, physical stores. Doing so will allow you to remain competitive and responsive to local market dynamics by tailoring your pricing strategies based on regional competition. You don’t want your products to be overpriced (lost sales) or underpriced (lost profit) in specific markets.
Harmonizing insights when operating an omnichannel consumer brand is extremely difficult without the aid of a digital shelf analytics solution. Insights need to be aggregated between desktop sites, mobile sites, and mobile applications, as well as from physical storefronts.
Questions you can answer with the help of the pricing & promotions digital shelf metric include:
How do my product prices and promotions compare to my competitors?
How consistent is my product pricing across retail websites?
How does my product pricing vary across regions, ZIPs, and stores?
How do price changes influence my sales numbers?
Are there regional differences in pricing and promotion effectiveness?
DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics platform stands out with its sophisticated location-aware capabilities, which enable the aggregation and analysis of localized pricing and promotions. The platform defines locations based on a range of identifiers, such as latitudes and longitudes, regions, states, ZIP codes, or specific store numbers.
The platform can also extract promotional information, such as credit card-based or volume-based promotions. You can see variances across retailers, split by price groups, brands, and competitors. DataWeave specializes in enabling brands to conduct in-depth analyses across a wide array of attributes so you can answer just about any pricing or promotional question you have.
5. Availability
The availability KPI in digital shelf analytics measures the in-stock and availability rates for a brand’s products across eCommerce and physical locations. Similar to the pricing and promotions metric, it relies heavily on location awareness, down to individual stores. Measuring both online availability and offline in-stock rates will help you understand the big picture and take more informed replenishment action.
When you start leveraging the availability KPI with the help of digital shelf analytics, you can improve inventory management, boost product discoverability, increase the frequency with which your online product listings convert, and generally drive more sales. This KPI is essential for ensuring your customers can always find and buy the products they want.
With the availability KPI, you can start answering questions like:
What is my overall in-stock rate?
Which of my products frequently go out of stock?
How does product availability vary across different regions and stores?
What is the impact of availability on my conversion rates?
Are there any seasonal trends in product availability that I need to address?
How quickly are we resolving stockout issues across different locations?
What are my biggest opportunities to reduce stockouts?
DataWeave enables consumer brands to track their product availability metric through automated data collection from various eCommerce platforms in conjunction with physical in-stock rates. The platform provides granular, store-level insights so you can understand regional stock variations and optimize inventory distribution. By tracking historical availability data, you can identify seasonal patterns and predict future demand to pre-empt stockout issues. All of this can be configured with automatic notifications to alert you when there has been a stockout event or when a low stock threshold has been passed, facilitating timely replenishment.
6. Ratings & Reviews
The final KPI in our guide is the ratings & reviews digital shelf metric. Consumers rely heavily on genuine feedback from their peers and refer to star ratings, posted comments, and uploaded pictures to inform their buying decisions. This KPI analyzes the impact of customer feedback and reviews on your products’ performance across eCommerce platforms so you can measure overall brand perception and isolate areas of opportunity.
This metric does something other digital shelf metrics don’t; it can inform your product strategy. It can help you identify repeat complaints that your product team can address with the manufacturer or use for the design of future products.
Some questions you can answer with this powerful KPI include:
What is the overall customer sentiment towards my products based on ratings and reviews?
Which product features are frequently mentioned positively or negatively by customers?
How do my product ratings and reviews compare to those of my competitors?
Are there common issues or complaints that need to be addressed to improve customer satisfaction?
Which products have the highest and lowest ratings, and why?
With DataWeave’s digital ratings and reviews feature, you can keep a pulse on customer sentiment to take short-term action as well as decide long-term strategy. You can leverage reviews to influence product perception, refine products, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.
DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Metrics
Each one of these metrics is interconnected and collectively influences a brand’s success. For instance, improving content quality and earning higher ratings can significantly enhance your product’s visibility in search results, thereby boosting the Share of Search digital shelf metric. By focusing on a comprehensive approach that integrates these metrics, brands can ensure their products are consistently visible, competitively priced, well-reviewed, and readily available.
DataWeave gives consumer brands the means to execute a holistic digital shelf strategy. From a single portal, track and improve digital shelf metrics like Share of Search, Share of Media, Pricing and promotions, Availability, and Ratings and Reviews.
Our solutions help audit and optimize the most critical KPIs that drive sales and market share for brands so you can stay competitive in a dynamic digital landscape and foster long-term customer satisfaction.
As consumer goods brands increasingly turn to eCommerce marketplaces as a source of profitable growth, it becomes harder for teams to grapple with the complexity of revenue growth management.
This complexity emerges from multiple fonts: there are hundreds, and even thousands, of competitors to consider when formulating strategies for managing pricing, promotion, and assortment changes. The world is currently experiencing a period of unprecedented supply chain instability, shifting more consumers away from traditional retail and into eCommerce shopping. And finally, consumer buying patterns, preferences, and trends are constantly shifting.
Revenue growth management (RGM) and net revenue management (NRM) were once less complex processes; but that is no longer the case. Now, some 80% of consumer brand CEOs report that they “aren’t satisfied with their RGM results.”
Gathering data, analyzing it, and acting on it quickly stand out as major challenges that businesses must overcome to grow their market share, earn more profits, and capitalize on market shifts in real time. In this article, we’ll dive into RGM and NRM, the obstacles business teams face, and explore how using technology for digital shelf analytics can help bridge the gap.
What is Net Revenue Management (NRM) or Revenue Growth Management (RGM)?
Every consumer goods company aims to increase profits and grow market share. This requires a concerted effort in RGM and net revenue management (NRM) strategy. Whether a company has a specific team dedicated to this task or relies on the abilities of business analysts or merchandisers, this function is crucial.
It’s worth mentioning that though the terms NRM and RGM are often used interchangeably, there are subtle differences. While both net revenue management and revenue growth management focus on maximizing overall revenue for the brand, NRM typically has a narrower focus and is specific to optimizing profitability through product pricing, promotion, product mix, and cost management. RGM strategies are a bit broader and tend to look at the top line to grow market share and expand the customer base.
The Challenges Revenue Teams Face
Differentiating between ‘good growth’ and ‘bad growth’ is central to NRM and RGM. Net revenue management and revenue growth management teams need the data and tools in place to determine if growth in one area is coming at the expense of another so as not to cannibalize business. Tracking and analyzing extensive data to successfully take action on opportunities and determine whether strategies are working as intended consumes a tremendous amount of mental bandwidth. The fact that these decisions are incredibly time-sensitive only compounds the issue.
To cope, many teams in charge of NRM or RGM employ digital shelf analytics strategies to help speed up data aggregation and analysis to make sure they’re capitalizing on potential opportunities.
eCommerce has added a whole new layer of complexity to consumer goods sales. Instead of a few relatively stable prices at big-box stores, a single item for sale may experience high price volatility, with dozens of minute pricing changes occurring online each day. In some cases, consumers become blind to price volatility, letting brands increase prices, but consumer sentiment, the overall price elasticity of the product, and dozens of other factors go into determining the final price of an online product. Net revenue teams need to modernize and adapt to changing eCommerce environments to competitively price, promote, and grow their revenue.
Here are the top three challenges standing in the way of net revenue management and revenue growth management teams and solutions to address these issues.
Challenge 1: Incomplete or Inaccurate Data
Incomplete and inaccurate data are critical for Net Revenue Management and Revenue Growth Management teams to get under control when attempting to modernize in a digital-centric selling environment. As more competitors enter the market, many brands find it hard to make strategic decisions without the complete picture.
Data may be incomplete or inaccurate because a brand is analyzing only part of the market, such as Amazon or another enterprise-scale eCommerce marketplace. Additionally, they might not be analyzing all types of online media, such as branded ads, sponsored search listings, or sponsored category listings.
Most importantly, another pitfall is the lack of hyperlocal data. Generalized data across regions, states, ZIPs, and stores can skew the decision-making process and result in poor outcomes.
Overcoming Incomplete or Inaccurate Data
In order to get the full picture, consumer brands need to ensure they have a view of the entire competitive landscape across their channels. This includes gathering data down to the case pack, the unique product identifier, and the geography, including ZIP and store. They also need the respective MSRP by SKU, the unit normalized price, and the selling price at a specific moment in time. This is done by aggregating brick-and-mortar store information available online, such as when stores list curbside pickup SKUs and pricing online.
Individual teams cannot manually gather all this detailed data. The growth in eCommerce means there is simply too much data to find and aggregate. Instead, they can employ digital shelf technology to get more data from more sites. Teams can leverage AI to better match product listings, ads, and even visuals to avoid missing data on listings that lack common attributes, such as UPCs for normalization.
To add to this, advanced pricing intelligence systems can cache URLs to help teams audit and verify their data, avoiding delays and confusion when ad hoc requests arise.
Challenge 2: Difficulty in Making Sense of the Competitive Landscape
Once net revenue management and revenue growth management teams have gathered all of the available data, it’s time to make sense of it. This is a monumental challenge, and ends up being the stage where most NRM and RGM teams flounder. Disparate marketplaces include different product attributes and images. This makes it extremely complicated to sync competitors’ data to ready it for analysis, especially if this analysis is carried out manually in Excel. These are some of the attributes that teams need to harmonize in order to make sense of the competitive landscape:
Product identifiers (UPC, SKU, Internal Code)
Size, case, pack, volume, bundled offerings
Language
Currency
Stock Status (Whether the product is available or not)
Platform-specific attributes such as ‘Amazon’s Choice,’ ‘Best Seller,’ etc.
Teams also need to group and classify various categories of promotions. These can include sponsored listings, banner ads, coupons, bank offers, and others. Each of these categories needs to be tracked separately. This vast array of data points across hundreds of sites creates a big data problem for teams.
Making Sense of the Competitive Landscape
The best way to overcome this challenge is to task a digital shelf analytics system with gathering and harmonizing data automatically across the consumer goods competitive landscape. Competitive and market intelligence tools can help break down an overwhelming amount of data, matching similar products across competing brands and analyzing their various strengths and weaknesses. Once the technology matches complex product attributes and identifiers, it becomes easier for teams to gain insights and exploit findings. In a sense, the data needs to be cleaned before analysis can occur.
Technology can gather data in multiple ways, and the best systems employ several methods to get the best matches. Data consumption modes include API integrations, CSV and Excel file uploads, and proprietary scrapers that view websites independently of direct inputs. Having all the data in a single place helps net revenue management and revenue growth management teams gain indicative insights on product popularity, pricing, and sales, on their own and competitor products.
Challenge 3: Lack of Timely Visibility
The final challenge that many net revenue management and revenue growth management teams face is something of a ‘silent killer’ — timeliness. Even if they successfully gather data across the entire competitive landscape and harmonize that data into a format for easy analysis, a lack of timeliness can render even the best actions irrelevant.
Speed is of the utmost importance when there are market changes. If a product goes viral and competitors raise prices in response to increased demand, without timely visibility, the trend may be over before a consumer goods brand can successfully increase its prices for the duration of the trend. This can mean lost margins.
Another example is analyzing data and incorporating lagging promotional and sales data into analyses. This can skew pricing strategies because timely data is not accessible to inform decision-making. Many teams waste time firefighting due to a lack of timely pricing and promotional intelligence data.
Get Near Real-Time Insights for Faster Decision Making
Using technology that allows for net revenue management and revenue growth management teams at consumer goods brands to establish update frequencies can be a game changer. Teams can set update frequencies based on their need. They can set up the system to check a fast-moving product daily, while a slow-moving item might only need to be checked weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. This allows teams to focus on the highest-impact products first and address the largest exceptions before they lose out on an opportunity. Managing exceptions with a digital shelf analytics platform saves teams significant time instead of poring over low-impact changes in the data.
Digital Shelf Analytics for Net Revenue Management
Modernizing a consumer goods brand’s net revenue management or revenue growth management processes requires advanced digital shelf analytics. DataWeave provides consumer goods companies with the technology they need for quick and accurate pricing, promotional, and assortment intelligence. By tracking over 200 million products each day, users can be sure they get the widest and most timely view of the competitive landscape. DataWeave’s deep industry knowledge is baked into every aspect of its platform.
Picture this: You wake up one morning to discover that your top competitor reduced their prices overnight. And now your shopper traffic has tanked and your sales have taken a hit.
Unfortunately, this is a common scenario because your customers can compare prices online in seconds—and loyalty lies with the budget.
So, how can you protect your business? Price monitoring.
Price monitoring solutions can help you keep abreast of competitor price changes—which, of course, will help you improve your pricing strategies, retain your customers, and maximize your profits.
How? In this article, we’ll explore:
What is price monitoring
The key benefits of price monitoring for retailers and brands
What a capable price monitoring solution can do
What Is Price Monitoring?
Price monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing your competitor’s prices across various online and offline platforms. By monitoring competitors’ prices, you can understand market price trends and adjust your prices strategically—which, in turn, helps you remain competitive, increase margins, and improve customer retention.
5 Benefits of Price Monitoring
Competitor price monitoring can help you:
Gain a competitive edge: Competitor price tracking allows you to adjust your prices to remain attractive to consumers.
Maximize revenue: With timely pricing data, you’re empowered to identify optimum price points that strike a delicate balance between maximizing revenue and maintaining customer loyalty.
Retain customers: Consumers are looking for the most value for their dollar, so maintaining consistently competitive pricing is crucial for retaining loyal customers.
Understand promotional effectiveness: Price monitoring helps businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their promotions and discounts. By comparing the impact of different pricing strategies, businesses can refine their promotional tactics to maximize sales and customer engagement.
Understand market movements: By analyzing historical pricing data, you’re better positioned to anticipate future pricing changes — and adjust your strategies accordingly.
4 Essential Capabilities of Price Monitoring Software
Here are four capabilities to look for when choosing a price monitoring system.
1. AI-Driven Product Matching
Product matching is the process of identifying identical or similar products across different platforms to ensure accurate price comparisons.
If your price monitoring solution can’t reliably match your products with competitors’ across various sales channels at scale, you’ll end up with poor data. Inaccurate data will then lead you to make misinformed pricing decisions.
Product matching needs to be accurate and comprehensive, covering a wide range of products and product variations—even for including private label products.
For example, AI-driven product matching can recognize a specific brand and model of sneakers across multiple online stores—even if product descriptions and images differ. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:
Sophisticated algorithms and deep learning architecture enable AI to identify and match products that aren’t identical but share key characteristics and features.
Using unified systems for text and image recognition, the AI matches similar SKUs across hundreds of eCommerce stores and millions of products. The AI zeroes in on critical product elements in images, like a t-shirt’s shape, sleeve length, and color.
The AI also extracts unique signatures from photos for rapid, efficient identification and grouping across billions of indexed items.
DataWeave’s AI algorithm can initially match products with 80–90% accuracy. Then, humans can bring contextual judgement and make nuanced decisions that the AI might miss to correct errors quickly and push for accuracy closer to 100%. By integrating AI automation with human validation, you can achieve accurate and reliable product-matching coverage at scale.
2. Accurate and Comprehensive Data Collection and Aggregation
The insights you derive are only as good as the data you collect. However, capturing comprehensive pricing data is tough when your competitors operate on multiple platforms.
For truly effective price monitoring insights, you need consistent, comprehensive, and highly accurate data. This means your chosen price monitoring system should:
Scrape data from various sources, such as desktop and mobile sites and mobile applications.
Pull data from various online platforms like aggregators, omnichannel retailers, delivery intermediaries, online marketplaces, and more.
Handle data from different regions and languages.
Collect data at regular intervals to ensure timeliness.
DataWeave’s online price monitoring software covers all of these bases and more with a fast, automated data source configuration system. It also allows you to painlessly add new data sources to scrape.
Instead of incomplete or inaccurate data, you’ll have comprehensive and up-to-date data, allowing you to respond quickly to market changes with confidence.
3. Seamless Normalization of Product Measurement Units
You can’t compare apples to oranges—or price-per-kilogram to price-per-pound.
For price monitoring to be accurate, there must be a way to normalize measurement units—so that we’re always comparing price-per-gram to price-per-gram. If we compare prices without taking into account measurement units, our data will be misleading at best.
Let’s take a closer look. Say that your top competitor sells 12oz cans of beans for $3, and you sell 15oz cans for $3.20. At first glance, your larger cans of beans will appear more expensive—but that’s not true. If we normalize the measurement unit—in this example, an oz—the larger can of beans offers more value to customers.
Unit of measure normalization facilitates sound price adjustments based on accurate and reliable data. For this reason, every business needs a price tracking tool that can guarantee accurate comparisons by normalizing unit measurements—including weight, volume, and quantity.
4. Actionable Data and an Intuitive User Experience
Knowledge is only powerful when applied—and price monitoring insights are only useful when they’re accessible and actionable.
For this reason, the best price monitoring software doesn’t just provide insights based on accurate and comprehensive data, but it also provides several ways to understand and deploy those insights.
Ideal price monitoring solutions provide customized pricing alerts, intuitive dashboards, detailed reports, and visuals that are easy to interpret—all tailored to each particular team or a team member’s needs. These features should make it easy for team members to compare prices against those of competitors in specific categories and product groupings.
Your price tracking tool should also permit flexible API integrations and offer straightforward data export options. This way, you can integrate competitive pricing data with your pricing software, Business Intelligence (BI) tools, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
4 Ways Retailers Can Leverage Price Monitoring
Retailers can use price monitoring tools to remain competitive without compromising profitability—here’s how:
1. Track Competitors’ Prices
Competitor price monitoring helps you avoid being undercut—and, as a result, maintain market share. By tracking competitor prices in real-time, you can adjust prices to remain competitive, especially in dynamic markets. Ideally, you should monitor both direct competitors selling the same products and indirect competitors selling similar or alternative products. This way, you’ll have a complete picture of market prices and can make more informed pricing adjustments.
2. Understand Historical and Seasonal Price Trends
As a retailer, you may want to analyze historical data to identify price patterns and predict future price movements—especially in relation to holidays and seasonal products. Knowing what’s coming, you’re better positioned to plan for pricing changes and promotional campaigns.
3. Implement Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing is the process of adjusting prices based on real-time market conditions, product demand, and competitors’ prices—allowing you to respond faster to market changes to maintain optimized prices.
4. Optimize Promotional Strategies
Price monitoring tools can track retail promotions across numerous online and offline sales avenues, providing insight into the nature and timing of competitors’ promotions. This data can help you determine which promotions are most effective—and which aren’t—allowing you to improve your own promotions and discounts, and allocate marketing resources where it matters most. This is especially beneficial during peak sales periods.
3 Ways Brands Can Employ Price Monitoring
Here are three ways brands can use price monitoring to remain profitable, protect brand equity, and gain a competitive edge.
1. Maintain Consistent Retail Prices
Minimum advertised price (MAP) policies are designed to prevent retailers from devaluing a brand while ensuring fair competition among retailers. Price monitoring applications allow your brand to track retailers’ prices to detect MAP policy violations. Data in hand, you can maintain consistent pricing across online sales channels, physical stores, and retail stores’ digital shelves — and, critically, protect your brand equity.
2. Improve Product and Brand Positioning
When you understand how your products’ prices compare to those of competitors, you can set prices to improve brand positioning. For example, if you want to position your brand as luxurious and high-quality, you need to set higher product prices than budget-friendly alternative products.
3. Ensure Product Availability
You can use a price monitoring solution to track product availability to ensure products are always in stock, even across different physical stores and online marketplaces. If a product is frequently sold out, you can adjust production levels or help retailers to improve their inventory management.
Key Takeaways: E-commerce Price Monitoring
Price monitoring software allows you to compare your products’ prices with competitors. This valuable data can help you:
Optimize revenue through timely price changes and dynamic pricing Avoid being undercut by competitors
Improve pricing strategies and promotions to increase sales and retain customers
Virtually every cuisine in the world uses eggs. They’re in your breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert — which is perhaps why the global egg market is expected to generate $130.70 billion in revenue in 2024 and is projected to grow to approximately $193.56 billion by 2029.
More specifically, the United States is the fourth-largest egg producer worldwide. The country’s egg market is projected to generate $15.75 billion in 2024 and increase to $22.51 billion by 2029.
Health-consciousness among consumers: Consumers value eggs for their essential nutrients and rich protein content.
Demand for convenience foods: Consumers’ preferences are shifting toward quick and easy foods, which drives demand for shell eggs and pre-packaged boiled or scrambled eggs.
Population Growth: A growing worldwide population increases the demand for eggs.
Affordability and accessibility: Eggs are an affordable and accessible nutrient-dense food source for many.
Despite these factors contributing to the U.S. egg market’s growth, recent times have seen egg prices fall dramatically.
Based on a sample of 450 SKUs, DataWeave discovered that egg prices in the U.S. fell by 6.7% between April 2023 and April 2024, dipping to its lowest (-12.6%) in December 2023.
So, what’s causing the decrease in egg prices?
The Rise and Fall of Egg Prices: A Recent History
In 2022, avian influenza severely impacted the United States. The disease affected wild birds in nearly every state and devastated commercial flocks in approximately half of the country.
The 2022 incident was the first major outbreak since 2015 and led to the culling of more than 52.6 million birds, mainly poultry, to prevent the disease from spreading uncontrollably.
With almost 12 million fewer egg-laying hens, the United States produced around 109.5 billion eggs in 2022 — a drop of nearly two billion from the previous year.
Consequently, the cost of eggs soared, peaking at $4.82 a dozen — more than double the price of eggs in the previous year.
The avian flu continues to affect egg-laying hens and other poultry birds across the United States. As of April 2024, farms have killed a total of 85 million poultry birds in an attempt to contain the disease.
Despite the disease’s effects, production facilities have made significant efforts to repopulate flocks, leading to a steady increase in supply – and a much anticipated decrease in egg prices.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an increase in producer egg prices in 2022, reaching a peak in November 2022, at which point they began to fall.
Retailer’s egg prices followed suit. The egg price chart below depicts retailers’ declining egg prices over one year, from April 2023 to April 2024, with Giant Eagle showing the most significant price reductions and Walmart the least.
What Does the Future Hold for Egg Prices?
The USDA reported recent severe avian flu outbreaks in June 2024. These outbreaks are estimated to have affected 6.23 million birds.
With a reduction in egg-laying hens, egg prices are likely to increase — time will tell.
Nonetheless, the annual per capita consumption of eggs in the U.S. is projected to reach 284.4 per person in 2024 from 281.3 per person in 2023. So for now, producers and retailers can rest assured of the growing demand for eggs.
How Can Retailers Adapt to the Unpredictability of Egg Prices?
Egg prices were down to $2.69 for a dozen in May 2024. However, they are still significantly higher than consumers were used to just a few years ago—eggs were, on average, $1.46 a dozen in early 2020.
Additionally, while the avian flu puts pressure on producers, inflation and supply chain disruptions exert pressure on retailers.
With such challenging egg market conditions, what can retailers do to maintain customer loyalty amid reduced consumer spending while maintaining profitability?
1. Give the Customer What They Want: Increase Offerings of Organic, Cage-Free, and Free-Range Eggs
As mentioned, Data Bridge Market Research’s trends and forecast report highlighted a significant increase in consumer health consciousness. Additionally, animal welfare increasingly influences consumers’ purchasing decisions when buying meat and dairy products.
DataWeave data shows that the prices of organic, cage-free, and free-range eggs—such as those by brands like Happy Eggs and Marketside—have fallen less than those of non-organic, caged egg brands.
2. Increase Private-Label Offerings
Private labels typically offer retailers higher margins than national brands. These margins can shield consumers from sudden wholesale egg price swings, helping to preserve brand trust and consumer loyalty without sacrificing profitability.
Moreover, eggs are particularly suited to private labeling, given their uniform appearance and taste and the lack of product innovation opportunities.
Undoubtedly, this is why sales of private-label eggs dwarf sales of national egg brands in the United States. Statista reports that across three months in 2024, private label egg sales amounted to $1.55 billion U.S. dollars, while the combined sales of the top nine national egg brands totaled just $617.88 million U.S. dollars.
3. Price Intelligently
With the current and predicted fluctuations in egg prices over the foreseeable future, price competitiveness is paramount to margin management and customer loyalty.
This is especially true when lower prices are the primary factor influencing the average consumer’s choice of supermarket for daily essentials purchases.
AI-driven pricing intelligence tools like DataWeave give retailers valuable highly granular and reliable insights on competitor pricing and market dynamics. In today’s data-motivated environment, these insights are necessary for competitiveness and profitability.
Final Thoughts
Egg prices have fluctuated significantly due to the impact of avian flu. Despite recent price drops, future egg price increases are possible due to ongoing outbreaks. Retailers should adapt to unstable egg prices by increasing organic, free-range, cage-free, and private-label egg offerings while leveraging AI-driven pricing tools to maintain margins and customer loyalty.
Cinco de Mayo is a vibrant celebration of Mexican-American and Hispanic heritage, marked by lively parades, festive tacos, and refreshing tequila across North America. For the service industry, brands, and retailers, this day offers a golden opportunity to roll out enticing promotions on beloved Mexican foods and beverages, drawing in large crowds and boosting sales.
Americans love to indulge in Mexican cuisine during Cinco de Mayo. Take avocados, for example: despite inflation, avocado sales soared to 52.3 million units this year, marking a 25% increase from last year, according to the Hass Avocado Board’s 2023 Holiday Report. Such festive events see a significant sales spike, largely driven by appealing discounts and special offers.
So, what discounts did retailers roll out this Cinco de Mayo?
At DataWeave, our cutting-edge data aggregation and analysis platform tracked and analyzed the prices and deals on Mexican food and alcohol products offered by leading retailers. Our in-depth analysis sheds light on their pricing competitiveness during Cinco de Mayo, revealing how pricing strategies differed across various subcategories and brands.
We conducted a similar analysis in 2022, allowing us to compare the prices of identical products this year versus last year. This comparison helps us understand the impact of inflation over the past two years on the prices offered today.
Our Methodology
For our analysis, we monitored the average discounts offered by major US retailers on over 2,000 food and beverage products during Cinco de Mayo, as well as in the days leading up to the event. Many retailers kick off their Cinco de Mayo promotions a week before, so we included the entire week leading up to May 5th in our analysis.
To truly demonstrate the value of Cinco de Mayo for shoppers, we concentrated on price reductions and additional discounts during the event. By comparing these with regular day discounts, we were able to highlight the genuine savings and benefits that Cinco de Mayo promotions offer to budget-conscious consumers.
Our Findings
Safeway led the pack with the highest average additional discount of 4.91%, covering 38.6% of their food inventory for Cinco de Mayo. Total Wine & More followed closely, offering an average discount of 3.46% across 70.8% of its tequila, whiskey, mezcal, and other spirit products during the Cinco de Mayo week.
In contrast, Target provided minimal additional discounts, averaging just 0.8% over a small fraction (11.6%) of its SKUs. Similarly, Kroger’s additional discounts were also 0.8%, but they were spread across over 60% of its tracked products. Walmart (1.4%) and Amazon Fresh (1.2%) offered relatively conservative discounts during the sale period.
During Cinco de Mayo, various brands rolled out attractive discounts to entice shoppers. Among beverage brands, The American Plains vodka led the way with the highest average discount of 20.80%. Coffee brands also joined the festivities with significant discounts: Death Wish Coffee at 14.30%, Dunkin’ at 11.10%, and Starbucks at 5.70%. Notably, Dunkin’ and Death Wish Coffee introduced complimentary beverages such as whiskey barrel-aged coffee and spiked coffee products to celebrate the event.
In the wine category, Erath stood out with a 10% additional discount. However, brands like Jose Cuervo and Franzia offered more modest discounts of 0.70% and 1.80%, respectively.
Food brands associated with traditional Mexican ingredients or products, such as tortillas, salsas, and spices, provided higher discounts compared to mainstream snack brands. For instance, McCormick (25%), El Monterey (13.3%), and La Tortilla Factory (16.7%)—known for ready-to-eat frozen foods, seasonings, and condiments—delivered the highest discounts. Other notable discounts included Jose Ole (12.5%), a frozen food brand, and Yucatan (8.3%), known for its guacamole.
Safeway’s private label brand, Signature Select, offered a 5.20% discount. Additionally, Safeway provided deep discounts on brands like Pace, Herdez, and Taco Bell, indicating an aggressive discounting strategy. In contrast, brands closely associated with Mexican or Tex-Mex cuisine, such as Old El Paso, Mission, Rosarita, and La Banderita, offered relatively modest discounts ranging from 0.5% to 3.3%.
The discount patterns varied between alcohol and food categories, with food brands generally offering higher discounts. This trend may be attributed to pricing being regulated in the alcohol industry. These differing discount levels highlight how brands navigated the balance between driving sales and maintaining profit margins during Cinco de Mayo, particularly in the context of inflation affecting costs.
Impact of Inflation on Cinco de Mayo Prices (2024 vs 2022)
To gauge the impact of inflation on popular Cinco de Mayo products, we analyzed the average prices at Walmart and Target between 2022 and 2024. These two retailers were chosen due to their prominence in the retail sector and the robustness of our sample data.
At Walmart, the Tex Mex category saw the highest average price increase, rising by 22.51%. Other notable subcategories with significant price hikes include Condiments (23.21%), Vegetables/Packaged Vegetables (21.22%), and Lasagne (14.10%). Categories like Dips & Spreads (13.77%), Pantry Staples (14.92%), and Salsa & Dips (8.23%) experienced relatively lower increases.
At Target, the Snacks subcategory had the steepest average price rise at 27.94%, followed by Meal Essentials (16.07%) and Deli Pre-Pack (8.82%). Categories such as Dairy (0.51%), Frozen Meals/Sides (7.11%), and Adult Beverages (7.41%) saw smaller price increases.
Brands associated with traditional Mexican or Tex-Mex cuisine faced higher price hikes. Examples include Old El Paso (24.59% at Walmart, 8.70% at Target), Tostitos (35.44% at Walmart, 11.41% at Target), Ortega (30.59% at Walmart, 19.69% at Target), and Rosarita (14.39% at Walmart).
In contrast, private label or store brands generally experienced lower price increases compared to national brands. For instance, Good & Gather (Target’s private label) saw a 9.55% increase, while Market Pantry (Walmart’s private label) had a 17.27% rise. This trend is understandable as retailers have more control over their costs with private label brands.
The data clearly indicates that both Walmart and Target have significantly raised prices across various categories and brands, reflecting the broader inflationary environment where the cost of goods and services has been steadily climbing.
Interestingly, we observed higher price increases at Walmart compared to Target. Although Walmart is renowned for its consumer-friendly pricing strategies, it too had to elevate grocery prices post-2022 to combat inflationary pressures. As consumers become more cost-conscious and reduce spending on discretionary items, Walmart and other retailers are now cutting prices across categories to align with shifting consumer behaviors.
Mastering Pricing Strategies During Sale Events
Our pricing analysis for Cinco de Mayo reveals compelling insights into the dynamics of retailer landscapes in the US. It highlights the enduring relevance of private label brands, even amidst fluctuating demand, showing the emergence of local, national, and small players vying for market share.
As retailers navigate inflationary pressures and evolving consumer behaviors, understanding these pricing dynamics becomes crucial for optimizing strategies and bolstering market competitiveness. This analysis offers actionable intelligence for retailers seeking to navigate the intricate terrain of sale event promotions while addressing shifting consumer preferences and economic challenges.
Access to reliable and timely pricing data equips retailers and brands with the tools needed to make informed decisions and drive profitable growth in an increasingly competitive environment. To learn more and gain guidance, reach out to us to speak to a DataWeave expert today!
On Black Friday this year, Health & Beauty brands saw a significant increase with a 13% jump in foot traffic, according to a report by RetailNext. Despite caution from various sources, higher prices for everyday goods, and high interest rates, consumers chose to spend big this cyber week.
So what kind of deals did top retailers and brands offer in the Health & Beauty category this BFCM? At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of Health & Beauty products across prominent retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts among leading US retailers in the Health & Beauty category during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across leading retailers during the sale.
Subcategories reported on: Shampoo, Toothpaste, Conditioner, Sunscreen, Makeup, Electric Toothbrush, Beard Care, Moisturizer
Timeline of analysis: 24 to 27 November 2023
Our Key Findings
Average Discounts Across Retailers
Amazon leads the pack with a huge margin, offering an average discount of 31.9%, covering 62% of its products analyzed. Target follows an 18.8% average discount across only 5% of its analyzed assortment. The other retailers aren’t even close.
Ulta Beauty was the next in line, providing a 9.2% average discount followed by Walmart with a 6.8% average discount. Sephora, known for its premium beauty offerings, adopted a more conservative approach with a 3.5% average discount, targeting only 9% of its top products
Across retailers, it is clear that Amazon led the charge by far this cyber week, with the other retailers choosing to markdown prices conservatively in the Health & Beauty category.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
Amazon offered high discounts on lower priced subcategories like Toothpaste (49.4%), Sunscreen (46.3%), Moisturizers (38.5%), and Conditioners (37.5%), highlighting its focus on products with high demand that consumers would look to stock up on. Ulta Beauty also focused its discounts on Toothpaste (15.6%), Moisturizers (14.9%), and Conditioners (12.6%), targeting skincare and grooming.
Sephora, meanwhile, offered the most attractive deals on the Makeup subcategory at 5.3% across 12.67% of its analyzed assortment, banking on the demand generated due to the brand’s popularity in this subcategory.
Target prioritized discounts on Toothpaste (22.5%), Shampoo (21.6%), and Moisturizers (18.9%). Walmart too offered significant discounts on Shampoo (21.6%) and Toothpaste (22.5%).
Retailers prioritized staple subcategories like Toothpaste and Moisturizer with substantial discounts during this Black Friday Cyber Monday, ensuring a broad consumer appeal. In contrast, discretionary items like Makeup may be less motivated by discounts alone, and hence saw lower discounts during the sale.
Average Discounts: Brands
Brands offered the most attractive deals on Amazon, with OGX leading the pack at 58.4% average discount. Neutrogena and Colgate followed with an average discount of 50.4% and 44%. This mirror’s Amazon’s subcategory focus on shampoos, conditioners, and toothpastes.
Other instances of brands offering attractive deals across retailers include Belif (27.9%) and Anastasia Beverly Hills (17.6%) on Sephora, Johnson’s (20%) and Philips Sonicare (18.8%) on Target, and Olay (12.2%) and Colgate (10.6%) on Walmart.
Ulta Beauty hosted several attractive deals by specific brands, including Moon (30.7%), Joico (24%), and Clinique (22.3%).
Share of Search For Health & Beauty Brands Across Subcategories
Our Share of Search analysis illuminates the strategic moves made by brands to enhance their visibility, playing a crucial role in influencing consumer choices during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Among some of the leading brands, Head & Shoulders and Oral-B increased their Share of Search by 2.3% and 1% respectively, reflecting a successful strategy to boost brand visibility during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events. On the other hand, L’Oreal Paris, Colgate, and Neutrogena faced marginal decreases in Share of Search.
Overall, since the difference in Share of Search values did not change dramatically, the visibility levels of leading brands across key subcategories remained consistent during the Thanksgiving weekend.
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For deeper insights on pricing and discounting trends across a diverse range of shopping categories during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, check out our blog!
To learn more about our AI-powered Pricing Intelligence and Digital Shelf Analytics platform, contact us today!
Insider Intelligence‘s forecast of a 4.5% growth in US Holiday Sales this year has been validated by the sustained robust spending observed during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Despite multiple challenges impacting consumer spending, such as escalating prices of everyday products and elevated interest rates, shoppers continued to spend significantly, aligning with these earlier predictions.
However, in response to these projections, retailers strategically adjusted their approach. Our analysis indicates substantial discounts prevalent in the Consumer Electronics and Home & Furniture segments during Cyber Week. Prominent retailers specializing in Home & Furniture, such as Wayfair, Overstock, and Home Depot, notably led the charge in offering attractive discounts.
At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of home & furniture products across prominent retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
We’ve also recently published our analysis of the Consumer Electronics and Apparel categories this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the discounts offered by leading US retailers in the Home & Furniture category during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across leading retailers during the sale.
Sample size: 44,716 SKUs
Retailers tracked: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Overstock, Wayfair, Home Depot
Subcategories reported on: Dishwasher, Washer/Dryer, Mattresses, Beds, Dining Tables, Entertainment Units, Rugs, Luggage, Bookcases, Cabinets, Sofas, Coffee Tables
Timeline of analysis: 24 to 27 November 2023
Our Key Findings
Discounts Across Retailers
Wayfair led the pack with the highest average discount of 27.5%, covering an impressive 88% of its Home & Furniture inventory. This bold strategy positions Wayfair as a go-to destination for consumers seeking substantial savings on high-quality Home & Furniture items during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Home Depot offered an average discount of 17.5%, covering a substantial 69% of the products analyzed, choosing to cash in on the Cyber Week madness. Overstock followed next with an average discount of 16.6%.
Interestingly, Home & Furniture happens to be one of the few categories in which Amazon did not offer the highest discount among the analyzed retailers, choosing a moderate average discount of 13.8%.
Best Buy also maintained a competitive stance in the category, providing an average discount of 12.8% across 58% of their assortment. Target adopted a conservative markdown strategy, offering a relatively low average discount of 6.5%.
In summary, the Home & Furniture category exhibited a diverse range of discounting strategies among retailers, reflecting a balance between competitiveness and profit margins. Consumers could have chosen from a spectrum of discounts based on their preferences and budget considerations during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
Among subcategories, Amazon offered a moderate 8.3% average discount on 32.9% of its products in this Dishwasher category, while Best Buy took a more aggressive stance with a 14.7% average discount covering 55.9% of its products.
Home Depot emerged as a standout player in the Washer/Dryer category, providing a substantial 21.3% discount on 78.4% of its analyzed inventory. Best Buy closely followed with a 15.1% average discount targeting 67.6% of its products.
Wayfair grabbed attention with a generous 36.9% average discount on Mattresses, covering almost all (99%) of its analyzed products. In addition, Wafair led the discount war in Beds, Dining Tables, Cabinets, Sofas, Coffee Tables, and Entertainment Units. Overstock took an aggressive pricing stance on Rugs, offering a substantial 52.3% average discount, covering 100% of its Rugs inventory.
Average Discounts: Brands
Among brands, Signature Design by Ashley maintained a consistent presence with substantial discounts on both Best Buy (25.24%) and Overstock (16.19%). This could be indicative of the brand’s commitment to appealing to a diverse customer base through varied retail channels. Costway emerges as a standout brand offering exceptionally high discounts at both Target (61.6%) and Walmart (51.7%).
Home Decorators Collection, Home Depot’s in-house brand, offered a significant 30.9% discount at Home Depot. High-margin private label brands like these afford retailers the opportunity to offer markdowns while retaining significant margins.
Strategic positioning on specific platforms, as seen with Alwyn Home on Wayfair and Noble House at Home Depot, suggests brands tailor their approach to the strengths and customer demographics of each retailer. The data suggests a nuanced interplay between brand positioning, discount strategies, and the perceived value offered.
Share of Search For Home & Furniture Brands
The Share of Search data for the Home & Furniture category unveils intriguing insights into brand visibility and performance during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. In this competitive landscape, where consumer decisions are influenced not only by discounts but also by brand visibility, the dynamics of Share of Search become pivotal.
Samsung strategically increased its Share of Search during the sale, showcasing a 1.2% improvement. This suggests a deliberate effort to reinforce brand visibility and capture the attention of potential buyers actively searching for Home & Furniture products, in this case, Washer/Dryers and Dishwashers.
Bosch too experienced a notable surge in Share of Search by 1.1%. LG, meanwhile, maintained a consistent Share of Search, with a marginal decrease of 0.1%. American Tourister experienced a modest increase in Share of Search by 0.4%.
Like in the other categories analyzed, the dynamics of Share of Search in the Home & Furniture category reflect brand strategies aimed at not only offering discounts but also ensuring heightened visibility during the critical Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events. Positive shifts indicate effective marketing efforts, while stable performers demonstrate a resilient brand presence in a competitive online marketplace.
To explore how our insights can help retailers and brands boost their pricing strategies during sale events, reach out to us today!
For more in-depth analyses and trends across various shopping categories, stay tuned to our blog.
As the highly anticipated shopping season approached, industry analysts, including Deloitte, had forewarned consumer spending caution owing to persistent inflationary pressures tightening budgets. Despite these concerns, the holiday spirit was buoyed by sensational deals that delighted bargain-hunting shoppers.
According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), over 200 million consumers participated in both in-store and online shopping activities over the Thanksgiving weekend. This marked an almost 2% uptick from the previous year, surpassing the NRF’s initial estimates of 182 million and showcasing a robust start to the holiday shopping season.
So what was all the hype about this Black Friday and Cyber Monday? How did top retailers react to reports of possibly decreased consumer spending? At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of products across prominent retailers and categories to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
In this article, we focus on the pricing and discounting strategies of Amazon, Walmart, and Target in the Apparel category.
Stay tuned to our blog for insights on other shopping categories like Home & Furniture, and Health & Beauty!
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts of apparel products among leading US retailers during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across during the sale.
Amazon offered the most attractive deals, showcasing an average discount of 19.5%, applying to a substantial 61% of their apparel inventory.
Trailing closely behind was Target, offering an average discount of 14.8% across 52% of the products analyzed. Walmart, however, took a more conservative approach, providing an average discount of 8.5%, applicable to 29% of its products.
The contrast in discounting strategies highlights the diverse tactics employed by retailers to entice Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers within the Apparel category. Amazon remains the forerunner, balancing competitive discounts with a significant coverage of discounted items.
Target follows suit with a competitive stance, while Walmart opts for a more reserved markdown approach, given that the retailer tends to carry a large number of products in the affordable price ranges.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
Examining the Black Friday and Cyber Monday discount landscape within the Apparel category reveals intriguing patterns among major retailers. Amazon led the charge, boasting an impressive 24.9% average discount on Women’s Tops, covering a substantial 76.5% of its products. In the same subcategory, Target competed fiercely with a 25.1% average discount, covering 87.5% of its products. Walmart, taking a measured approach, presented a 14.6% average discount across 45.1% of its Women’s Tops inventory.
Notably, Men’s Swimwear at Target has no discounts. Meanwhile, Amazon remained aggressive across various subcategories, particularly in Women’s Shoes and Women’s Tops, aiming to capture a significant market share through both competitive pricing and a broad coverage of discounted items.
Average Discounts: Brands
Across brands, Tommy Hilfiger and Jockey took the lead on Amazon with an enticing average discount of 28.3% and 24.6% respectively, appealing to savvy shoppers. Calvin Klein followed closely with a 17.3% discount, offering a balance of style and affordability.
In Walmart, Crocs stood out with a 39.9% average discount, followed by Reebok (15.7%) and Hanes (14.9%) Xhilaration, Target’s in-house brand, stole the spotlight on the retailer platform with an impressive 50% average discount. Reebok (32.3%) and Levi’s (22.9%) maintained competitive discounts, appealing to diverse tastes.
Our analysis sheds light on the dynamic landscape of apparel discounts, showcasing how brands adopt varying pricing strategies to position themselves competitively for Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers.
Share of Search For Apparel Brands Across Subcategories
The dynamics of Black Friday and Cyber Monday extend beyond price reductions, with brands strategically vying for increased visibility through Share of Search metrics. This metric signifies a brand’s prominence among the top 20 ranked products in a given subcategory, offering valuable insights into their online marketplace visibility.
Among the standout performers in the Apparel category, Jockey experienced a significant surge in Share of Search, leaping from 1.70% before the event to an impressive 13.30% during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Speedo, in the Women’s Swimwear subcategory, demonstrated a substantial increase from 4.40% to 13.30%, solidifying its presence and gaining an 8.90% boost in Share of Search.
Tommy Hilfiger and Adidas also exhibited notable gains in Share of Search, increasing by 5.30% and 5.60%, respectively. However, some brands experienced a slight dip, with Speedo in the Men’s Swimwear subcategory seeing a 2.50% dip in their search visibility, and Reebok in Men’s Shoes witnessing a 3.3% decrease.
These fluctuations highlight the dynamic nature of brand strategies during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the Apparel category, where gaining visibility also proves to be crucial alongside offering competitive discounts.
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For a deeper dive into the world of competitive pricing intelligence and to explore how our solutions can benefit apparel retailers and brands, reach out to us today!
Stay tuned to our blog for forthcoming analyses on pricing and discounting trends across a spectrum of shopping categories, as we continue to unravel the intricacies of consumer behavior and market dynamics.
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday unfolded across the globe, there was a noticeable subdued atmosphere compared to previous years. TD Cowen brokerage adjusted its forecast for US holiday spending, revising it down from an initial 4-5% growth to a more conservative estimate of 2-3%.
Compounded by persistent inflation and elevated interest rates, many consumers find themselves financially strained, leading to the projection of the slowest growth in US holiday spending in five years.
In this context, it would be relevant to investigate whether this restrained reaction from consumers had an influence on the extent of attractive deals and discounts provided by top retailers and brands during the sale event.
At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of consumer electronics products across prominent retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
Keep an eye on our blog for insights on other shopping categories like Apparel, Home & Furniture, and Health & Beauty!
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts among leading US electronics retailers during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across leading retailers during the sale.
Sample size: 23,505 SKUs
Retailers tracked: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy
The observed Black Friday and Cyber Monday discount strategies reveal a distinct competitive landscape among major retailers. Amazon emerged as the frontrunner, offering the highest average discounts at 23.30%, spanning a significant 74% of their consumer electronics inventory. Best Buy closely followed, with an average discount of 19.40% across 76% of their products.
On the other hand, Target and Walmart adopted a more conservative stance, providing lower average discounts at 14.8% and 12%, respectively, with Target discounting 51% of its products and Walmart discounting 41%. This variation in discounting strategies highlights the diverse approaches retailers take to attract and retain Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers, balancing competitiveness with profit margins.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
In the Headphones subcategory, Amazon stands out with a substantial 31.40% average discount, targeting 84.69% of SKUs, showcasing an aggressive discounting strategy. Best Buy follows closely, demonstrating competitive pricing with a 21.80% average discount on 67.03% of products.
Meanwhile, in TVs, Best Buy offered a significant 17.9% average discount across 89% of its products, signaling a targeted effort to capture a broad market share in this subcategory.
In the Laptop subcategory, Target was highly conservative, with only a 4.1% average discount covering 14.3% of its products, while Walmart positioned itself with a moderate 9.5% average discount, targeting 39.8% of its inventory.
Among Smartphones, Amazon (14.7%) was third to Best Buy and Target, which offered average discounts of 20.5% and 18.1%, respectively. Walmart, with an average discount of only 9.9% in the subcategory opted for a relatively muted approach.
Average Discounts: Brands
The discount strategies across top electronics brands during Black Friday unveil distinct approaches. Samsung emerges as a focal point across Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target. The brand was most attractively priced on Best Buy, with an average discount of 25.3%, followed by Target (18.3%) and Amazon (17.9%).
Apple’s discounts were quite consistent across Amazon (17.6%), Best Buy (16.1%), and Target (17.8%), with the exception of Walmart (8.1%). JBL, interestingly, opted to discount very heavily on Best Buy, at an average of 38.8%, resulting in several attractive deals for shoppers on the website. Sony, too, offered impressive discounts at over 23% on Amazon and Best Buy, followed by 16% on Walmart. On Amazon, Amazon Renewed (13.9%) was among the most aggressively discounted products, highlighting an effort to further appeal to cost-conscious consumers.
Overall, our analysis throws light on the nuanced strategies employed by leading brands on Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target, reflecting a delicate interplay between brand positioning, pricing competitiveness, and customer appeal.
Share of Search For Consumer Electronics Brands Across Subcategories
The Share of Search data reflects intriguing shifts in brand strategies during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. During sale events, brands looking to entice shoppers don’t rely only on price but also on search visibility to help drive awareness and conversion. Share of Search is defined as the share of a brand’s products among the top 20 ranked products in a subcategory, thereby providing insight into a brand’s visibility on online marketplaces.
Some of the brands that improved their Share of Search the most include LG, Skullcandy, Asus, JBL, and Samsung. On the other hand, prominent brands like Sony and Apple actually lost ground on this metric by 0.4% and 2% respectively.
At DataWeave, our commitment to empowering retailers and brands with actionable competitive and digital shelf insights remains unwavering. Our AI-powered platform provides a comprehensive view of market dynamics for our customers, enabling informed decision-making. As a partner in your journey, we offer tailored solutions to enhance your competitive edge, drive sales, and elevate your brand presence. To find out more about our solution, reach out to us today!
To learn more about pricing and discounting trends during Black Friday and Cyber Monday across various other shopping categories, stay tuned to our blog!
Amazon reported a record-breaking Prime Day this July, marking it as the biggest sales event in the company’s history. So when the eCommerce giant announced the Prime Big Deal Days this fall, we were curious to find out how big a deal it really is.
The Prime Big Deal Days, similar in magnitude to the Summer Prime Day, promised to present substantial savings across a diverse range of categories, including electronics, toys, home, fashion, beauty, and Amazon products.
However, for a shopper, an important question is: Does the Prime Big Deal Days in October offer lower prices than Amazon’s mega Prime Day event in July?
To answer this question, we turned our data aggregation and analysis platform to focus on these two sale events and analyzed which event offered better deals across key categories and brands.
TL;DR: Surprisingly, the Prime Big Deal Days in October offered, on average, 2.02% higher discounts than its counterpart event in July.
Read on for details on how we went about our analysis and how discounts vary across categories, sub-categories, and brands.
Our Methodology
We tracked the prices and discounts of a large sample of products during both Prime Day events. The following are some relevant details about our sample:
Number of products analyzed: 1500+
Categories: Apparel, Consumer Electronics, Home & Furniture, Health & Beauty
Prime Day Sale Analysis: 11-12 July 2023
Prime Big Deal Days Analysis: 10-11 Oct 2023
Website: Amazon.com
Our analysis focused on the differences in the prices and discount levels of products between the two sale events.
Our Key Findings
The average discount during the Prime Big Deal Days in October was 29.44%, which was 2.02% higher than the average discount during the Prime Day sale in July (27.42%). Interestingly, the October event offered better deals across each product category analyzed, albeit at slightly varying levels.
By offering deeper discounts in October, Amazon may have aimed to encourage early holiday shopping, thereby capturing a larger share of the consumer wallet before competitors intensify their promotional activities closer to the festive season.
As other retailers and online marketplaces gear up for their own holiday promotional events, Amazon’s decision to provide heightened discounts in October could serve as a preemptive move to secure customer loyalty and drive sales momentum before the onset of the peak shopping period.
Additionally, Amazon’s strategic push to amplify the visibility of its diverse product offerings, including exclusive launches and partnerships during the October event might have contributed to the higher discounts.
Next, let’s take a closer look at each product category.
Apparel
During October’s Prime Big Deal Days, the Apparel category experienced a notable uptick, boasting a 2.29% increase in discounts compared to the earlier Prime Day event in July.
In the detailed assessment of Apparel sub-categories, Men’s and Women’s Swimwear, alongside Men’s Shoes, Innerwear, and Athleisure, emerged as the segments showcasing the most substantial average discounts during October. Fall also brought about more affordable prices for Women’s Innerwear and Men’s Shirts. However, Women’s Athleisure, Dresses, and Tops displayed diminished average discounts during this Prime Big Deal Days event.
Delving into brand-specific analyses revealed intriguing trends. Athleisure brands such as Ibkul, Esprlia, and Ryka notably escalated their discounts in October after minimal markdowns during the Summer Prime Day sale.
Steve Madden, witnessing heightened discounts in October, hinted at a growing demand for boots and footwear in the Autumn and Winter seasons. For instance, the Steve Madden Men’s Fenta Fashion Sneaker was priced at $46 during the Summer Prime Day, and only at $35 during the Prime Big Deal Days in October.
Conversely, brands like PGA Tour, Land’s End, Roxy, and Anrabess offered more substantial discounts during the Summer compared to the October event.
Consumer Electronics
The Consumer Electronics segment during October’s Prime Big Deal Days showcased an average price decrease of 1.98% compared to the Prime Day event in July.
Nearly all scrutinized subcategories experienced heightened discounts during the Fall Prime Big Deal Days in October. Tablets, Speakers, Drones, and Smartwatches notably presented higher discounts of 4.06%, 3.51%, 2.99%, and 2.69%, respectively, in October. However, more enticing deals were found on Earbuds and TVs during July’s event.
Examining consumer electronics brands, Google stood out by offering the most compelling deals in October, boasting an average discount of 23.35%, marking an 8.94% increase from the Summer Prime Days’ 14.41%. Psier, Sony, and OnePlus also featured significantly reduced prices during the Fall. For example, the OnePlus 10 Pro | 8GB+128GB was $500 during the sale in July and only $440 during the Prime Big Deal Days in October.
Conversely, prominent brands such as Bose, Sennheiser, Samsung, LG, and Asus opted to offer heavier discounts in July. Notably, the Samsung All-in-One Soundbar w/Dolby 5.1 was priced at $218 in October but only $168 in July.
Home & Furniture
During October’s Prime Big Deal Days, the Home & Furniture category experienced a notable 1.59% increase in average discounts compared to the Prime Day event held in July.
Notably, Entertainment Units, Rugs, and Coffee Tables emerged as standout sub-categories that were more attractively priced in October, exhibiting price differences of 7.73%, 5.33%, and 4.80%, respectively.
Interestingly, among the scrutinized sub-categories, only Luggage showed a lower price during the Prime Day sale in July compared to the October event. This shift likely reflects evolving consumer demand as the holiday season approaches, with items like rugs and entertainment units becoming increasingly sought-after categories for purchase.
If you’re keen to explore how these trends vary across brands within this category, reach out to us for more insights.
Health & Beauty
During October’s Prime Big Deal Days, the Health & Beauty category showcased products at an average of 1.99% lower prices compared to the Prime Day event held in July.
Our analysis of Health & Beauty reveals that a majority of the subcategories presented higher discounts during the October Big Deal Days event. Essential items such as Toothpaste, Sunscreen, and Electric Toothbrushes notably stood out as significantly more affordable during the Fall event, reflecting not only consistent demand but also a seasonal emphasis on these products. For instance, the Oral B iO Series 3 Limited Edition Electric Toothbrush, priced at $140 during the summer Prime Days, was further discounted to $120 in the fall event.
Interestingly, Beard Care emerged as an exception, displaying higher discounts during the Prime Day sale in Summer compared to Fall’s Prime Big Deal Days.
Examining brands within the category, Babyganics, Thinkbaby, and Vaseline showcased substantial increases in average additional discounts during October’s Prime Big Deal Days.
Conversely, prominent brands like Maybelline, Neutrogena, and Cetaphil offered lower discounts during the fall event.
Competitive Insights to Drive Optimized Sale Event Pricing
At DataWeave, we understand the pivotal role of competitive pricing insights in empowering retailers and brands to gain a competitive edge, especially during significant events like Prime Day. Our commitment lies in providing retailers with precise and extensive competitor price tracking on a large scale. This empowers them to devise impactful pricing strategies and consistently uphold a competitive stance in the market. To learn more about how this can be done, talk to us today!
For consumer brands, the digital marketplace presents an unparalleled landscape of opportunities for engaging with consumers and expanding their market presence. Within this dynamic environment, Digital Shelf Analytics has emerged as a crucial pillar in a brand’s eCommerce strategy. This technology provides valuable insights into a brand’s organic and paid visibility on marketplaces, content quality, pricing strategies, promotional efforts, and product availability. These insights help brands gain a comprehensive understanding of their competitive positioning and overall market performance.
Nevertheless, many brands often grapple with the question of whether this understanding translates into tangible actions that drive real business impact and return on investment (ROI). This uncertainty stems from a lack of clarity about the direct correlation between digital shelf insights and key metrics such as enhanced sales conversions.
Nonetheless, there is compelling evidence that when these insights are effectively harnessed and strategic actions are taken, brands can realize significant, measurable benefits.
So, the question arises: does Digital Shelf Analytics genuinely deliver on its promises?
At DataWeave, we’ve partnered with numerous brands to fuel their eCommerce growth through the application of digital shelf analytics. In this article, we will delve into these insights, uncovering the concrete and quantifiable results that brands can achieve through their investments in digital shelf analytics.
Digital Shelf KPIs and Their Impact
Digital Shelf Analytics is a robust system that analyzes specific key performance indicators (KPIs) about the digital shelf, furnishing brands with precise recommendations to not only bolster these KPIs but also to monitor the enhancements over time. The following is a brief explanation of digital shelf KPis and their expected impact areas:
Product Availability: Ensuring Shoppers Never Hear “Out of Stock” Again
Timely insights on the availability of products ensures brands reduce replenishment times at scale, which can significantly impact sales, creating an unbreakable link between product availability and revenue. With Digital Shelf Analytics, procurement and replenishment teams can set up notifications to promptly identify low or out-of-stock items and take swift action. This can also be done for specific ZIP codes or individual stores. In addition, availability plays a crucial role in a brand’s Share of Search and search rankings, as online marketplaces often ensure only in-stock products are shown among the top ranks.
If a product isn’t visible, does it even exist? In fact, 70% of consumers never go beyond the first page of search results on major online marketplaces. Therefore, as a brand, the visibility of your products for relevant search keywords and their appearance on the first page can heavily determine your awareness metrics. This is where the concept of Share of Search comes into play. Think of it as securing prime shelf space in a physical store. Digital shelf insights and benchmarking with category leaders for Share of Search help ensure your products command relevant attention on the digital shelf.
Content Quality: Crafting the Perfect Product Story
Creating engaging product descriptions and visuals is akin to giving your products a megaphone in a crowded marketplace. By enhancing content quality, including product names, titles, descriptions, and images, brands can climb the search result rankings, leading to increased visibility and subsequently, more sales.
Ratings and Reviews: The Power of Social Proof
Public opinion holds immense sway. Research indicates that a single positive review can trigger a 10% surge in sales, while a multitude of favorable reviews can propel your product to a 44% higher trajectory. The correlation between ratings and sales is not surprising—each step up the rating ladder can translate to substantial revenue growth.
While it’s reasonable to anticipate a connection between these KPIs and downstream impact metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions, we were driven to explore this correlation through the lens of real-world data. To do so, we meticulously monitored the digital shelf KPIs for one of our clients and analyzed the improvements in these metrics.
It’s essential to acknowledge that not all observed impact areas can be solely attributed to enhancements in digital shelf KPIs. Still, it’s evident that a robust correlation exists. The following section presents an in-depth case study, shedding light on the results of this analysis.
A Success Story: Real-World Impact of Digital Shelf Analytics
Let’s dive into the journey of one of our clients – a prominent CPG brand specializing in the sale of baked goods and desserts. Through their experience, we will illustrate the transformative impact of our DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics product suite.
Over a period of one year, from August 2022 to July 2023, the brand leveraged several key modules of Digital Shelf Analytics for Amazon, including Share of Search, Share of Category, Availability, Ratings and Reviews, and Content Audit. Each of these digital shelf KPIs played a vital role in shaping the brand’s performance across various stages of the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is typically delineated into three key stages:
Awareness: At this stage, shoppers peruse multiple product options presented on search and category listing pages, gaining an initial understanding of the available choices.
Consideration: Here, shoppers narrow down their selections and evaluate a handful of products, moving closer to a purchase decision.
Conversion: In this final stage, shoppers make their ultimate product choice and proceed to complete the purchase.
Let’s now examine the data to understand how digital shelf KPIs helped drive tangible ROI on Amazon for the brand across the stages of the buyer journey.
Stage 1: Raising Awareness
Enhancing Share of Search and Share of Category can help brands boost product visibility and raise brand awareness. The following chart demonstrates the steady, incremental improvements in our client’s Share of Search and Share of Category (in the top 20 ranks of each listing page) throughout the analyzed period. These enhancements were achieved through various measures, including product sponsorship, content enhancement, price optimization, promotional initiatives, and more.
This amplified Share of Search and Share of Category directly translates into improved product discoverability, as evident from the surge in impressions depicted in the chart below.
Stage 2: All Things Considered
In the consideration stage, shoppers make their product selections by clicking on items that meet their criteria, which may include factors like average rating, number of ratings, price, product title, and images. For brands, this underscores the importance of crafting meticulously detailed product content and accumulating a substantial number of ratings.
The subsequent chart illustrates the year-long trend in both average ratings and the number of ratings, both of which have displayed steady improvement over time.
The enhancements in the number of ratings and the average rating have a direct and positive impact on product consideration. This, in turn, has led to a noticeable year-over-year increase in page views, as indicated in the chart below.
These improvements are likely to have also been influenced by the overall enhancement of content quality, which is detailed separately in the section below.
Stage 3: Driving Decisions
As buyers progress to the next stage, they reach the pivotal point of making a purchase decision. This decision is influenced by multiple factors, including product availability, content quality, and the quality of reviews, reflecting customer sentiment.
Our client effectively harnessed our Availability insights, significantly reducing the likelihood of potential out-of-stock scenarios and enhancing replenishment rates, as highlighted in the chart below. The same chart also indicates improvements in content quality, measured by the degree to which the content on Amazon aligns with the brand’s ideal content standards.
Below, you’ll find the year-over-year growth in conversion rates for the brand on Amazon. This metric stands as the ultimate measure of business impact, directly translating into increased revenue for brands.
As the data uncovers, growth in key digital shelf KPIs cumulatively had a strong correlation with impressions, page views, and conversion rates.
It is also important to note that the effect of each KPI cannot be viewed in isolation, since they are often interdependent. For example, improvement in content and availability could boost Share of Search. Accurate content could also influence more positive customer feedback. Brands need to consider optimizing digital shelf KPIs holistically to create sustained business impact.
Impact on eCommerce Sales
After the implementation of digital shelf analytics, the results spoke for themselves. Sales consistently outperformed the previous year’s records month after month. As shown in the chart below, the diligent application of DataWeave’s recommendations paved the way for an impressive 8.5% year-over-year increase in sales, leaving an indelible mark on the brand’s eCommerce success.
From boosting product visibility to catapulting conversion rates, Digital Shelf Analytics serves as the key to unlocking unparalleled online success.
While the success story detailed above does not establish a direct causation between Digital Shelf Analytics and sales revenue, there is undoubtedly a strong correlation. It’s evident that digital shelf KPIs play a pivotal role in optimizing a brand’s eCommerce performance across all stages of the buyer journey. Hence, for brands, it is vital that they collaborate with the right partner and harness digital shelf insights to fine-tune their eCommerce strategies and tactics.
That said, the eCommerce landscape is in a constant state of flux, and there is still much to learn about how each digital shelf KPI influences brand performance in the online realm. With more data and an increasing number of brands embracing Digital Shelf Analytics, it’s only a matter of time before a direct causation is firmly established.
Reach out to us today to know more about how your brand can leverage Digital Shelf Analytics to drive higher sales and market share in eCommerce.
Amazon’s India Prime Day 2023 shattered previous records with a peak of 22,190 orders received in a minute. An important aspect of Amazon’s India Prime Day was the benefits it offers to Prime Members. Thousands of sellers, brands, and bank partners collaborated to help Prime members save a staggering sum of over Rs. 300 Crores. The 2 day (July 15-16) event even witnessed strong growth in Prime membership, with 14% more members shopping than last year’s Prime Day event. 45,000+ new products were launched by over 400+ top Indian and global brands.
However, our analysis reveals that Amazon was able to make a huge splash despite adopting a relatively modest discounting strategy for the event.
Pricing and Discounts on Prime Day 2023
While Prime Day is Amazon’s showstopper, bringing huge benefits to partner brands and sellers, it’s interesting to also see how Flipkart responded to such a massive sale by its biggest competitor. Therefore, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to analyze the prices and discounts of Amazon and Flipkart across key product categories – Apparel, Home & Furniture, Consumer Electronics, and Health & Beauty – during Prime Day.
Since products on Amazon and other eCommerce websites are often sold at discounts even on normal days not linked to a sale event, we delved into the real value that Prime Day offers to shoppers by focusing on price reductions or additional discounts during the sale compared to the week before. As a result, our approach highlights the genuine benefits of the event for shoppers who count on lower prices during the sale.
Research Methodology
For our analysis, we tracked the prices of a large number of products across Amazon and Flipkart during Prime Day as well as the week prior to the event. The details of our sample are mentioned below:
Number of SKUs: 85,000+
Retailers: Amazon, Flipkart
Categories: Apparel, Home & Furniture, Consumer Electronics, Health & Beauty
Pre-event Analysis:10-14 July 2023
Prime Day Analysis: 15-16 July 2023
Our Findings
Based on our analysis, Prime Day showcased relatively higher price reductions in the Health and Beauty category, offering an average additional discount of 5.3%. In comparison, the Apparel category had lower discounts at 4.90%, followed by the Home & Furniture category at 2.50% during the sale event.
The Consumer Electronics category, known for attractive prices during sale events, featured only 0.9% price reductions. This is due to the fact that the category was already being sold at a very high average discount of around 44.8% the week prior to Prime Day.
Below, we delve deeper into our analysis of each category to better understand how price reductions were distributed across key subcategories on Amazon. We also report on the degree to which Flipkart responded to Amazon’s pricing actions during the event.
Apparel
As Amazon grappled with heightened costs and reduced profit margins in apparel (like most other retailers), its average discount before Prime Day was already at 36.5%. Then, on Prime Day, Amazon’s apparel deals were tempered at around 4.9% average price reduction across 43.7% of its assortment.
Flipkart, on the other hand, offered only a modest additional discount of 1.8% across 17.7% of its Apparel assortment. It’s clear that while Flipkart took steps to compete against Amazon in this category, it was done to a lower extent on fewer products than Amazon.
Across all the apparel subcategories we analyzed, Men’s Shoes (11.6%), Women’s Shoes (9.5%), and Men’s Shirts (8.7%) were among the ones with the highest price reductions. On the other hand, Men’s and Women’s Swimwear (2.3%), Women’s Innerwear (2.9%), and Women’s Athleisure (3.3%) had conservative markdowns.
Pricing choices within different subcategories likely stemmed from a range of factors, such as inventory quantities, trends in demand, and the aim to harmonize competitive deals with the maintenance of viable profit margins. These decisions reflect Amazon’s attempt to cater to a consumer base that is particularly conscious of pricing.
Across all apparel subcategories, leading brands that offered the highest markdowns were Sweet Dreams (65.5%), Ketch (55.1%), Clarks (44.9%), and Kibo (38.4%). Meanwhile, Reebok and Adidas offered significant additional discounts at 26.3% and 24.9%, respectively, as well.
For brands, however, reducing prices is just one approach to entice shoppers. They must also guarantee their prominent presence and easy discoverability within Amazon’s search results. This significantly amplifies their potential to generate higher clicks and conversions. In our analysis, we monitored brands’ Share of Search across various frequently used search terms in addition to the discounts they provided. The Share of Search denotes the portion of a brand’s products within the top 20 search results for a specific search query.
Our data indicates that certain brands gained ground in their discoverability during Prime Day, while others fell behind. Van Heusen in Women’s Athleisure (30%), Campus in Men’s Shoes (50%), and Rovar’s (30%) in Women’s Swimwear among others, improved their Share of Search by significant levels during Prime Day.
On the other hand, brands like Sparkx in Men’s Shoes, Xyxx in Men’s Innerwear, WomanLikeU in Women’s Swimwear, and Adidas in Women’s Shoes lost around 40%-80% in their Share of Search during the event. This is likely to have impacted their sales volumes adversely.
Home & Furniture
The Home & Furniture industry faced challenges of reduced demand and overstocked inventory over the past year. Therefore, even before Prime Day, discounts offered in this category on Amazon averaged a staggering 45.3%. Consequently, on Amazon Prime Day, additional discounts averaged only 2.5% on Amazon, offered across 33.3% of its assortment. Flipkart opted, in effect, not to compete with Amazon in this category, offering a negligible additional discount of 0.8% across 14.70% of its assortment.
Of all the Home & Furniture subcategories we analyzed, Luggage (5.1%), Beds (3.9%), and Coffee Tables (3.1%) had high price reductions, while Rugs (0.6%), Bookcases (1.5%), and Washer/Dryers (1.2%) had lower markdowns. This highlights the difference in consumer preferences across geographies, with rugs being more discretionary in India but staple in the US.
The Home & Furniture category is not known for its brand loyalty among shoppers. Therefore, brands often rely on attractive pricing to gain shopper interest. This Prime Day, brands that offered the highest markdowns in this category include It Luggage (40%), Couch Culture (25.8%), Story@Home (23.3%), and Verage (21.2%).
In terms of Share of Search, Wudparadise in Entertainment Units gained the highest (50%). Solimo (an Amazon Brand) in Beds (40%), Sofas (30%), and Coffee Tables (10%) gained significant ground in its respective categories too. In contrast, About Space in Bookcases (-60%), Anika in Entertainment Units (-40%), and Sleepyhead in Mattresses (-40%) lost out on their discoverability in their respective categories during the event.
To gain a competitive edge during sale events like Prime Day, brands need to monitor their Share of Search closely, especially in categories like Home & Furniture with low brand loyalty.
Consumer Electronics
This Prime Day, five smartphones got sold every second with 70% of the demand coming from Tier 2 & 3 cities in India, largely comprising of foldable smartphones and newly launched smartphones (OnePlus Nord 3 5G, Samsung Galaxy M34 5G, Motorola Razr 40 Series, Realme Narzo 60 Series and iQOO Neo 7 Pro 5G). Multiple new products were launched this Prime Day, by brands such as OnePlus, iQOO, Realme Narzo, Samsung, Motorola, boAt, Sony, and more in India.
Despite the high demand and new product launches, Amazon’s price reductions in the Consumer Electronics category averaged only 0.9% across 27% of its assortment. Similar to what we observed in the Home & Furniture category, this can be attributed to the prevailing high average discount of 44.8% the week prior to Prime Day. Essentially, in Consumer Electronics, shoppers needn’t always wait till sale events like Prime Day to view the most attractive deals. Several are offered even during the days leading up to the sale.
Across subcategories, Earbuds (2.4%), Wireless Headphones (1.6%), and TVs (1.3%) received the highest price reductions due to their popularity and high sales volumes during sales events. On the other hand, Smartwatches (0.6%), Drones (0.4%), and Smartphones (0.3%) had lower markdowns.
In terms of price reductions across brands, Da Capo (52.6%), Muzen (33.3%), JLab (23.6%), and Earboss (21.5%) offered the most attractive deals in the Consumer Electronics category. Notably, Amazon Basics also offered modestly attractive deals (12.2%), highlighting Amazon’s strategy of promoting in-house brands.
The Consumer Electronics category has a loyal shopper base, but generic search keywords like earbuds, headphones, and tablets remain essential for attracting high-intent shoppers and increasing brand awareness. So when it comes to Share of Search, Noise in Smartwatches, Samsung in Smartphones and Tablets, and HP in Laptops, all made strong strides in building their discoverability on Amazon during Prime Day.
Xiaomi in Laptops, Ekko in Earbuds, OnePlus in Smartphones and Apple in Tablets, lost out to other brands during the sale.
Health & Beauty
Health & Beauty emerged as the top-performing category in terms of additional discounts during Prime Day in India. Our data shows that Amazon offered an average additional discount of 5.3% on almost half of its products (46.8%) in this category. Competing head to head with Amazon in this category, Flipkart offered 5.5% additional discounts across 35.8% of its assortment.
Within all the subcategories we analyzed, Sunscreen (7.5%), Make-Up (7.2%), Shampoo (6.6%), and Moisturiser (6.4%) saw the highest price reductions on Amazon. Conversely, staple items like Toothpaste (3.%) and Beardcare (3.6%) had lower markdowns.
During the sale event, brands like Sadhev (43.4%), Clear (41.1%), Teenilicious (40.4%), and Coal Clean Beauty (38.4%), offered the most attractive deals.
In terms of significant gains in Share of Search for brands, L’Oreal Paris in Shampoo and Conditioner led the pack along with Oracura in Electric toothbrushes and The Formularx in Moisturiser. Perfora in Toothpastes and Ustraa in Beardcare also gained more than 10% in their Share of Search during the sale event.
Other popular brands like Tresemme in Conditioners, and Swiss Beauty in Make-Up surprisingly had reduced visibility among the top search results for relevant subcategories.
Navigating the Competitive Landscape: How To Thrive During Sale Events
Amazon’s strategic pricing during Prime Day reflects a balance of profitability, inventory, and competition. Competitive pricing insights empower retailers to make informed decisions, optimize strategies, and thrive during high-stakes events. Prime Day serves as a crucial opportunity to drive sales, attract new customers, and boost loyalty. Therefore, monitoring competitor prices accurately, at scale, is essential for impactful pricing strategies.
For more insights on staying ahead during sale events, reach out to us today!
If you’d like to learn about Amazon’s pricing and discounts during Prime Day 2023 in the US, check out our analysis here.
Amazon’s Prime Day this year proved to be a record-breaking success, becoming the largest Prime Day event in the company’s history. Over the two-day extravaganza, shoppers in the US spent a staggering $12.7 billion, a 6.1% increase from the previous year. Amid inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions, Amazon adopted a bold discounting strategy, offering steeper discounts compared to Prime Day 2022.
An interesting aspect of Amazon’s approach is their loyalty based offerings. In the weeks leading to Prime Day on July 11-12, members of the loyalty program were given access to “invite-only deals” where shoppers could request invites to specific products that they were looking to purchase on deals. Overall, Amazon’s pricing and discount strategies during Prime Day were carefully designed to create a buzz among shoppers, generate increased sales, and maintain a competitive advantage in the market.
While Prime Day is Amazon’s showstopper, it’s interesting to also see how other leading retailers respond to such a massive sale by their biggest competitor. Do they also lower their prices during the event, or are they happy to take a backseat? To answer these questions, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to analyze the prices and discounts of Amazon and its leading competitors across key product categories – Apparel, Home & Furniture, Consumer Electronics, and Health & Beauty – during Prime Day.
Since products on Amazon and other eCommerce websites are often sold at discounts even on normal days not linked to a sale event, we delved into the real value that Prime Day offers to shoppers by focusing on price reductions or additional discounts during the sale compared to the week before. As a result, our approach highlights the genuine benefits of the event for shoppers who count on lower prices during the sale.
Research & Methodology
For our analysis, we tracked the prices of a large number of products across several leading retailers during Prime Day as well as the week prior to the event. The details of our sample are mentioned below:
Number of SKUs: 110,000+
Websites: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Overstock, The Home Depot, Wayfair, Ulta Beauty, Sephora
Categories: Apparel, Home & Furniture, Electronics, Health & Beauty
Pre-event Analysis: 4-10 July 2023
Prime Day Analysis: 11-12 July 2023
Our Key Findings
Our data reveals that Amazon’s price reductions were most aggressive in the Consumer Electronics category, with an average price reduction of 10.4% on Prime Day, due to the category’s popularity and high demand.
The Health & Beauty (6.7%), Apparel (5.9%), and Home & Furniture (4.8%) categories offered relatively modest deals during the sale event.
Below, we delve deeper into our analysis of each category to better understand how price reductions were distributed across key subcategories on Amazon as well as the discounting strategies of Amazon’s leading competitors.
Apparel
As Amazon grappled with surplus inventory, heightened storage costs, and reduced profit margins in apparel (like most other retailers), its average discount before Prime Day was already as high as 13.3%. Then, on Prime Day, Amazon’s apparel deals were tempered at around 5.9% across an impressive 33.1% of its assortment, while Target and Walmart chose not to compete in a meaningful way.
Unlike Prime Day 2022, when Target competed with Amazon with high discounts, the retailer offered only 0.8% additional discount across 4.4% of its assortment in this category. Walmart, too, reduced its prices by only 1.4% on 8.5% of its assortment during Prime Day.
Across all the apparel subcategories we analyzed, Women’s Athleisure (8.7%), Men’s Swimwear (8%), and Women’s Tops (7.6%) were among the ones with the highest price reductions. On the other hand, Men’s Athleisure (2.5%), Women’s Shoes (3.5%), and Men’s Innerwear (4.1%) had conservative markdowns.
Pricing decisions across the various subcategories are likely to have been influenced by several factors like inventory levels, demand patterns, and the need to balance competitive offers with maintaining reasonable profit margins, as Amazon tried to cater to a more price-sensitive consumer.
Across all apparel subcategories, leading brands that offered the highest markdowns were Tommy Hilfiger (11.5%), Amazon Essentials (9.4%), Adidas (8.6%), and Calvin Klein (8.6%).
For brands, however, lowering prices is only one lever to attract and convert shoppers. They also need to ensure they’re highly visible and discoverable on Amazon’s search listings. This exponentially improves their chances of driving more clicks and conversions. In our analysis, we tracked the Share of Search of brands across several popular search keywords. Share of Search for a brand is defined as the proportion of the brand’s products in the top 20 search results for a search query.
Our data indicates that several brands gained impressive ground in their discoverability during Prime Day, while others fell behind. Gildan in Men’s Innerwear, Adidas in Men’s and Women’s Shoes, Anrabess in Women’s Athleisure, and Lululemon in Men’s Athleisure, among others, improved their Share of Search by significant levels during Prime Day.
On the other hand, brands like Hanes in Men’s and Women’s Innerwear, Kanu Surf in Men’s Swimwear, Cupshe in Women’s Swimwear, and others lost around 10% in their Share of Search during the event. This is likely to have impacted their sales volumes adversely.
Home & Furniture
The Home & Furniture industry has been challenged with reduced demand due to inflationary pressures over the past year or so. Leading retailers in the category overestimated the demand, leading to overstocking of inventory. As a result, Home & Furniture is one of the few categories that saw Amazon’s competitors participate at a significant level on Prime Day in order to ensure they don’t fall behind on liquidating their stock.
Amazon’s additional discounts averaged 4.8% across 30.2% of its assortment. Wayfair and Overstock too reduced their prices by 4.8% and 4.3% on around 44% of their respective assortments. Wayfair’s move is likely a part of their strategy to attract new customers and expand their market share, in response to a decline in their consumer base. Last year, Wayfair experienced a loss of 5 million out of its 1.3 billion consumers due to weakening demand.
Target and Walmart did offer additional discounts, but they were not at a competitive level. The Home Depot effectively opted not to compete at all during the sale event. Overall, the pricing actions of these retailers are in stark contrast to the highly conservative pricing strategies observed on Prime Day last year.
Our recent pricing analysis of the Home & Furniture category revealed more interesting insights and pricing dynamics over the past year.
Across all the subcategories we analyzed, Bookcases (8.2%), Rugs (7.8%), Mattresses (6.5%), and Luggage (6.2%) were among the ones with high price reductions.
Meanwhile, Sofas (2.4%), Washer / Dryers (2.4%), and Entertainment Units (2.7%) had lower markdowns. These are large and substantial purchases, making retailers more cautious about deeply discounting them while still ensuring profitability.
The brands that stepped up and offered the highest markdowns in this category include Zinus (20.2%), Comfee (10.8%), Sauder (9.9%), and Best Choice Products (8.7%).
In terms of Share of Search, Rockland in Luggage gained the highest (21%), followed by Farberware in Dishwasher, Olee Sleep in Mattresses, and Homeguave in Mattresses gained significant ground in their respective categories as shown in the image below.
Brands like Best Choice Products in Coffee Tables, Molblly in Mattresses, and Black+Decker in Washer/Dryers and Dishwashers lost a good portion of their Share of Search during the event. Due to high competition for visibility during sale events, brands that fail to keep an eye on their Share of Search stand to take a hit in their sales, especially in categories like Home & Furniture that tend to have low brand loyalty.
Consumer Electronics
2023 was the year of consumer electronics on Amazon Prime Day. Amazon’s price reduction during the sale averaged 10.4% across 54.5% of its assortment in the category. Target and Walmart, on the other hand, offered significantly lower additional discounts of 1.9% and 2.7% on 10.4% and 19.1% of their assortment, respectively.
The consumer electronics category often witnesses aggressive price reductions during Prime Day and other sale events due to its popularity and high demand. In addition, since retailer margins are usually low in this category, shoppers often have to wait for sale events like Prime Day (when brands markdown their wholesale rates) to have several attractive deals to choose from.
Across all the subcategories we analyzed, Smartwatches (15.4%), Wireless Headphones (15.4%), Earbuds (14.9%), Headphones (12.5%), and Tablets (12.0%), were among the ones with the highest price reductions. All of these subcategories are quite popular that tend to sell in large volumes during sale events.
Meanwhile, Laptops (2.1%), TVs (3.1%), and Smartphones (7.6%) had lower markdowns. A lower markdown on smartphones may reflect steady demand throughout the year, reducing the urgency to offer significant discounts during the short Prime Day window.
Amazon (22%), Tozo (12.5%), Lenovo (10.8%), JBL (8.3%), and Apple (5%) offered the highest price reductions in Consumer Electronics as a whole. Clearly, Amazon didn’t hold back on offering attractive deals on its own private label products in this category.
Consumer Electronics as a category tends to have a brand loyal shopper base. However, Share of Search generic search keywords are still very important for keywords like earbuds, headphones, and tablets that result in relatively lower priced products. HP in Laptops, Samsung in Tablets and TVs, and Oneplus in Smartphones all made strong strides in building their discoverability on Amazon during Prime Day. Beyond just driving more sales, this also has the intended effect of boosting brand awareness among high-intent shoppers.
Sony in Headphones, Asus in Laptops, and Insignia in TVs lost out to other brands in terms of their discoverability during the sale. Sony and Asus, especially would be hurting as they are prominent brands in their respective categories.
Health & Beauty
The Health & Beauty category is a favorite among consumers during Prime Day, as it encompasses a wide range of products like skincare, cosmetics, and grooming items. As shoppers often tend to stock up during the sale, brands and retailers are willing to offer competitive discounts and gain an edge over their competitors.
Our data reveals that the average additional discount on Amazon was 6.7%, offered on a little over a third of its assortment. Walmart reduced its prices sizably as well, by an average of 3.1% on 13.4% of its assortment.
Interestingly, Sephora and Ulta Beauty, leading retailers in the Health & Beauty category did not compete on price at all this Prime Day. It is likely they are confident their loyal customer base will not be influenced by Amazon’s Prime Day deals and be driven away merely by lower prices. In addition, keeping their prices steady during Prime Day might have been a strategic choice to protect their brand reputation and premium positioning.
Relatively premium subcategories like Electric Toothbrushes (10%), Moisturizer (8.3%), Beardcare (7.3%), and Make Up (6.7%) saw the highest price reductions on Amazon.
In contrast, staple items like Toothpaste (3.7%), Shampoos (5.4%), and Conditioners (5.7%) had lower markdowns.
Among the leading brands in this category, Oral-B (10.3%), Philips Sonicare (8.7%), Neutrogena (8.4%), and Colgate (5.6%) offered the most attractive deals during the sale event.
In terms of significant gains in Share of Search for brands, Oral-B in Electric Toothbrushes led the pack again. Neutrogena in Sunscreens and Somall in Toothpastes also gained more than 10% in their Share of Search during the sale event, followed by Tresemme in Shampoos and Airspun in Make-Up products.
Other popular brands like Crest in Toothpastes, e.l.f in Make-Up, Philips Sonicare in Electric Toothbrushes, and Sheamoisture in Beradcare surprisingly had reduced visibility among the top search results for relevant subcategories.
Staying Ahead of the Curve During Sale Events
This Prime Day, Amazon leveraged its scale to offer aggressive discounts across key product categories, while several competing retailers chose to sit back and let the sale play out. Others chose a selective discounting strategy that focused their modest price reductions on a small set of items.
At DataWeave, we understand the pivotal role competitive pricing insights play in empowering retailers and brands to gain a competitive edge, especially during crucial events like Prime Day. For retailers, the ability to track competitor prices accurately, at scale, in a timely manner is essential to plotting and acting on impactful pricing strategies and staying ahead of the curve.
Contrary to popular speculation of lukewarm online sales owing to the weak economy, high inflation, and stretched wallets, Black Friday this year recorded a whopping $9 billion in e-commerce sales. Despite the lull in online shopping across many retailers in the months preceding Thanksgiving and weakened consumer sentiment, US online merchants saw a sizable boost in sales during and after Thanksgiving, albeit at a slower growth of 2.3%, as reported by Adobe Analytics.
This article looks closely at the Black Friday data to understand which brands, retailers, and product categories were key players. Through DataWeave’s innovative Digital Shelf Analytics product, we deep dive into the availability, discount, and share-of-search data to deduce why some product categories and retailers fared better than others.
Who: Retailers and Brands that had the Highest Presence
Black Friday sales this year were driven by consumers grabbing the biggest and best deals to make the most of their already stretched wallets. Many shoppers opted for flexible payment schemes, and Buy Now Pay Later (BPNL) payments rose by 78% compared to the week before Thanksgiving. Surprisingly, Amazon, which was the most searched retailer during Black Friday last year, came only fourth this year, as reported by the Search Intelligence company, Captify.
According to Captify, Walmart was the most searched retailer for Black Friday deals, followed by Target, Kohls, and Amazon in that order. Amazon, however, has reported its biggest Thanksgiving sale this year, with independent retailers selling through Amazon seeing a total sales of $1 billion. With the economic slowdown and thin wallets looming large, discount rates greatly influenced consumer spending. Mobile shopping accounted for 55% of digital sales, 8.5% more than the previous year.
As told by Adobe, Electronics were the significant sales driver, reporting 221% higher sales than in October this year, with smart home items and audio equipment playing an important role with 271% and 230% higher sales. Toys ( popular purchases were Fortnite, Roblox, Bluey, Funko Pop!, and Disney Encanto) and exercise equipment also registered a substantial growth of 285% and 218%, respectively.
Other top-selling items included gaming consoles (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 devices, games including FIFA 23, NBA 2k23, and Pokemon Scarlet & Violet), drones, Apple MacBooks, and Dyson products (airwrap and vacuum). Amazon’s most popular items were reported to be Apple Airpods, Nintendo Switches, Echo Dot smart speakers, and Fire TV sticks.
What: Top Selling Product Categories
Electronics, closely followed by home appliances (robotic vacuum cleaners), toys, and exercise equipment, were popular product categories in demand during Black Friday this year. Several retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kohls, BestBuy, and Home Depot, offered lucrative pre-Black Friday discounts to trigger early sales kick-off.
Amazon carried an early discount of 50% on its Echo smart speaker, Target offered 30% off on Dyson vacuum cleaners, Walmart offered 25-35% off on Apple ipads and watches, and Kohls offered 51% off on the iRobot Roomba.
Amazon’s top ten best-selling products ranged from Amazon devices like Echo Dot speakers, Fire TV sticks, and Echo Show to Apple AirPods, Nintendo Switches, New Balance sneakers, Champion Apparel, and Burt’s Bees Lotions. The popular product categories were home, fashion, toys, beauty & health, and Amazon devices. Consumers heavily supported small businesses, contributing to $1 billion in sales. Top sellers from small businesses included card and board games.
Briefly correlating the discounts offered with the best-selling product categories, one can notice that the deals have largely influenced Black Friday sales this year. Popular categories are those that have had deep discounts, reflecting the consumer’s tendency to wait and grab the best deals.
How: Role of Digital Shelf Analytics – Key Performance Indicators
DataWeave’s Analysis Methodology
We have seen a summary of the Black Friday 2022 statistics – sales recorded, top-selling products, product categories, and retailers. Using DataWeave’s e-commerce analytics product, we track and study the variations in digital shelf KPIs across retailers before Thanksgiving and during Thanksgiving to understand how these influence sales.
Availability scores, discount rates, and share of search data are analyzed for top retailers in the US for key product categories. Data is tracked and analyzed across two time periods – before Thanksgiving (Nov 10 – Nov 21) and during Thanksgiving (Nov 21 – Nov 25).
Methodology
Retailers tracked: Amazon, Best Buy, Sephora, Target, Ulta, Walmart
Product Categories tracked: Electronics, Home Improvement, Beauty, Furniture
Digital Shelf KPIs tracked: Availability, Discount rates, Share of Search
Location: USA
Amazon maintained good availability across all product categories – Beauty ranks the highest.
Salient Insights
Amazon maintained good overall availability – an improvement of 3% over Prime day.
Beauty had the highest availability of 95%, with none and Lotion & Brushes reporting 97% and 95% availability, respectively. Shampoo reported the lowest availability at 92%
Home Improvement had the least availability at 87%, with dishwashers (68%) and washers and dryers (78%) having the lowest availability.
Unlike Furniture and Home Improvement, most categories maintained similar availability scores before and during Black Friday.
Furniture improved its availability during Black Friday by 4%, while Home Improvement reported a decrease in availability during Black Friday by 4%.
Electronics, which was a major sales driver, had an availability of > 90% across all sub-categories except for Television, which had a low availability of 70%
Tables and chairs registered 99% availability under Furniture
The above data indicates that Amazon ensured the high availability of utility products that consumers would buy even during a slow economy. Other retailers showed similar availability trends, with scores being similar prior to and during the event.
Discounts Drove Sales – Best Buy offered the Highest Discounts
Highlights
Best Buy offered the highest early Black Friday discount of 30%, followed by an additional 9% discount around Black Friday. Walmart followed next with 21% early discounts and an extra 4.5% discount during the event. Amazon came next with 17% early discounts and a 5% discount during Black Friday. Discount rates seem to strongly correlate with online searches, with Walmart beating Amazon this year as the most searched retailer for Black Friday deals.
Electronics was the most discounted category across Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, with an average discount of 21%. Walmart gave lower deals on electronics (12%). Electronics also had heavy early discounts of 12%, with most retailers giving an additional discount of 7-8% closer to Thanksgiving.
Best Buy offered early discounts of 10% and further upped their discounts by another 12% closer to Thanksgiving. Being the most discounted category, electronics was also a significant sales driver this Black Friday.
Amazon offered the highest discounts for Beauty products (18%), followed by Ulta at 10% and Walmart at 8%. Sephora and Target gave minimal discounts on beauty products (3%)
Best Buy gave the maximum discounts on Home Improvement products (16%), followed by Amazon at 14%. Walmart gave much lower discounts of 7% on Home Improvement products.
Furniture is another category with 12-13% discounts at both Amazon and Walmart.
Best Buy’s strategy this year has been to offer heavily discounted early deals to boost their sales.
Airpods and headphones were the most discounted item under Electronics, with Amazon and Target offering a whopping 27-29% discount. This clearly resulted in heavy sales of AirPods this Thanksgiving.
Best Buy and Target had good discounts on all electronic items, while Amazon gave heavier discounts on AirPods, headphones, and smartwatches.
Walmart did not offer hefty discounts on laptops and headphones, instead focused on Smartwatches, smartphones, and television.
In Home improvement, Best Buy offered the biggest discounts for refrigerators, washers and dryers, and dishwashers, while Amazon focussed more on Tools.
Walmart did not offer many discounts in this category.
Amazon topped the discount charts for maximum combined discounts for makeup and hair brushes on the day of the event.
All retailers offered better discounts for utility products like tables, chairs, and cots (~15-17%), while dressers and couches carried lower discounts (~6-10%).
Highlights
Different companies had different discount strategies based on price buckets.
Amazon gave heavier discounts in the lower price buckets (< 200$) and lower discounts for products priced higher than 200$.
Best Buy offered the heaviest early discounts of >25% on products priced under 20$ but provided a few additional discounts during the event. For products priced higher than 20$, Best Buy uniformly offered substantial early discounts as well as further discounts during the event.
On the other hand, Target focussed on mid and high-priced items, offering heavy early discounts of 16-18% on products priced higher than 100$ and early discounts of ~7% for middle and lower-priced items. For middle-priced products (40-100$), it offered heavier discounts of 10-12% during the event.
Walmart focussed on mid-priced products, offering the highest discounts (both early (~12%) and additional discounts (5%)). It offered the least discounts (~8-9%) on products priced higher than 200$.
Share of Search – Amazon is the only retailer with sponsored searches; Apple AirPods rule the roost.
Salient Insights
Amazon is the only retailer with sponsored searches, with HP, Lenovo laptops, and Apple AirPods occupying the highest share. This correlates with AirPods being one of the most sold products.
HP laptops had the highest share on Amazon pre-Event but gave the spot to Lenovo during Thanksgiving.
Tracphone and Motorola smartphones, Insignia Televisions, and JBL headphones had a good SoS on Amazon.
On Best Buy, HP and Dell laptops featured most in searches, with HP ruling the roost during the event. Lenovo had a small presence.
Samsung smartwatches, televisions, and Apple AirPods have a big chunk of the search at Best Buy.
On Target, pop sockets, smartphones, Apple smartwatches, headphones, and AirPods have the most prominent presence. Apple was the most featured brand in this segment.
Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (makeup, lotion, shampoo, hair dryers and hair brushes) of Beauty.
Salient Insights
Amazon, Target, Sephora, and Ulta sold beauty products, with Amazon being the only retailer with sponsored products.
Ogx, bs-mall, conair, hywestger were popular brands on Amazon, with interest-based ads occupying a substantial part of the search results, especially in Lotions (~40-50%)
Tresemme, Scotch Brite, Revlon and Cerave were popular brands in Target
Dyson products (brushes and hair dryers) are featured at Ulta’s top of the search, followed by Pureology shampoos.
Sephora’s own collection of brushes featured prominently on their website both before and during the event, followed by Dyson and T3 brushes and hair dryers.
Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (refrigerator, washers/dryers, dishwashers, tools and coolers) of Home Improvements.
Salient Insights
In Amazon, Frigidaire and RCA had the highest SoS amongst Refrigerators, and LG occupied the highest share among washers and dryers, Coleman in Coolers, Dewalt in Tools, and Comfee in Dishwashers, both before and during Black Friday.
In contrast, on Best Buy, Samsung had the highest share of SoS amongst Refrigerators, package deals were most prominent in washers and dryers, LG among dishwashers, ifixit in Tools, and Corsair in Coolers.
Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (bed, chair, couch, dresser, and table) of Furniture.
Salient Insights
Interest-based ads occupied the highest SoS on Amazon for Beds.
Urban shop and Amazon basics were popular in Chairs, Lifestyle in Couches, WLive in Dressers both before and during the event.
Vasagle was more popular during the event than Furrion in Tables, though the reverse was true prior to the event.
Summary & Key Takeaways
Black Friday this year was a pleasant surprise to Brands and Retailers, reporting much larger sales than predicted. After experiencing a slump in sales in the months leading up to Thanksgiving, e-commerce vendors have a reason to be optimistic about their holiday season sales forecasts.
A record-breaking $9.2 Billion in online sales was reported by Adobe Analytics, a growth of 2.3 % compared to the previous year.
Mobile shopping accounted for 55% of digital sales, a rise of 8.5% compared to last year.
Retailers wooed customers through deep discounts (~30%) prior to Thanksgiving and around Black Friday. Heavily discounted items like Apple AirPods were the most popular.
Thanks to inflation and stretched wallets, consumers were willing to spend but waited to grab the best and biggest deals. Utility products had better sales.
With tough competition between retailers on who offers the best discounts, Amazon slid down to the fourth position, and Walmart was the most searched retailer.
DataWeave, through its Digital Shelf Analytics and Commerce Intelligence solutions, gleans useful insights from e-commerce data and breaks down trends during global shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. If you are a brand or a retailer who would like to know more about our products and solutions, contact us at contact@dataweave.com.
Analyzing Search, Promotions and Availability for Chocolates, Biscuits, and Malt Drinks across BigBasket, Blinkit, Dmart, Swiggy etc.
Imagine you log into an e-commerce portal with a list of food items you need for the month. You know what you want, and scroll through the platform to see if there are any discounts. You check competitor products to see if you can get better deals. And within no time, fill your cart with products that you need and proceed to check out.
It all happens quickly. It’s an online shopping experience that we are familiar with. But what exactly is happening in the background?
Brands are tracking and ensuring the highest keyword ranking, optimal availability and competitive discounts to grab your order. And to enable this, Brands rely on Digital Shelf Analytics.
Here, we take a closer look at some of the key factors that Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Brands on e-commerce platforms need to pay attention to – to ensure their products appear on the top of search items, to better understand competitor discounts and to monitor the availability of their products across regions.
FMCG has experienced rapid growth in the last two years, largely attributed to digitalization, changing consumer habits, and increased spending post-pandemic. Macro factors, including government impetus, inflationary pressures, and consumption recovery, indicate a double digital growth for FMCG brands in the country. According to NielsenIQ’s FMCG Snapshot for Q2 2022, the FMCG industry has grown by 10.9% in the quarter ending June 2022, compared to 6% in the previous quarter. In the second half of 2022, consumers are expected to spend even more during the festive season. With these shifts underway, the growth opportunities in this sector can only be exploited by companies that can sense trends early – and take appropriate action.
In addition to providing manufacturers and retailers with actionable insights into e-commerce trends, DataWeave’s tools also allow them to make informed business decisions and ultimately improve their bottom line. Data-driven insights on e-commerce products can help brands optimize their supply chain to maximize sales. A company can determine the key areas that need attention based on an analysis of the availability of products on specific e-commerce channels, associated discounts, as well as zip-code level demand and supply statistics.
Here are a few sample insights and trend analyses for some popular FMCG brands in the Biscuits, Chocolate and Malt drinks categories spotted by DataWeave.
Analytics Methodology: An overview of the data set analyzed
What is the availability of Biscuits, Chocolate and Malt Drinks on e-commerce portals?
The availability of a product on an e-commerce marketplace is a key indicator of whether the product meets consumer demands. DataWeave’s availability analytics can be leveraged by FMCG brands to strategize their inventory and stock planning. Brands can also make data-driven decisions on product visibility, i.e. identify which products to prioritize on which platforms.
Biscuits had a better availability at 63% when compared to chocolates at 56% across all retailers
Dmart and Swiggy had more than 85% availability across all three categories, with Bigbasket coming next at 67% availability
Flipkart Grocery and Blinkit had the lowest availability at 46% and 50%, respectively.
Figure 1: Availability Scores for Biscuits, Chocolates and Malt Drinks across Retailers
Which manufacturers have the highest availability of products on e-commerce platforms?
A study of the availability of products across different manufacturers can reveal brands that have successfully tapped the market opportunity. Here’s a look at brands that have steadily improved their availability on e-commerce platforms.
Figure 2: Availability Trends for Biscuits across Manufacturers
In the biscuits category, all five manufacturers marked approximately 50% availability in Jan 2022. Availability steadily grew to 68% in June 2022, then declined to 63% in Aug 2022.
Unibic experienced the largest drop in availability, dropping 15% between May 22 and Aug 22.
Mondelez saw the largest rise in availability, an increase of 23% between Mar-22 and Aug-22.
Figure 3: Availability Trends for Malt Drinks across Manufacturers
Except for Boost and Nestle, availability for all seven manufacturers of malt drinks was consistently above 50%. The average availability across all manufacturers rose gradually from 55% in Jan to 63% in Jul-22, followed by a small decline to 57% in August.
From 30% availability in January 22 to a mere 7% in August 22, Boost has seen the greatest drop in availability.
The availability of Amul has risen the most over the past year, rising from 51% in January 22 to 78% in August 22, hitting 80% in July 22.
Chocolate: Which manufacturers have the highest availability of products on the e-commerce platforms?
Figure 4: Availability Trends for Chocolates across Manufacturers
Chocolate availability across all manufacturers averaged 47% in Jan-22, reaching a peak of 64% in May-22 and dropping to 51% in Aug-22.
From 46% in Jan-22 to 74% in May, Mondelez saw the biggest increase in availability, followed by a decline to 68% in August.
Ferrero experienced one of the sharpest drops in availability. Although the brand’s availability steadily grew from 77% in Jan 22 to 94% in Jul 22., it registered a steep drop to 49% in August.
The drop in availability hurts the Brand’s eCommerce in two ways. Not only does the Brand lose sales directly. But poor availability also impacts the keyword search ranking, which further hurts the sales.
Check out DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Product for insights on how Availability tracking can help reduce stock-outs and boost sales. Click here to know more.
Discount Analysis
Location-based, retailer-based, and manufacturer-based discount trends can be analyzed. These studies can help companies plan attractive and appropriate promotional and discount strategies to enhance their revenue opportunities.
Which manufacturer has been offering the most discounts?
A study of discounts offered across manufacturers for chocolates, malt drinks and biscuits indicates that some brands have increased their discounts while others have reduced their discount rates. These decisions could be triggered by demand, availability, and production cycle. Parle, for example, has steadily reduced its discount rates.
Figure 5: Discount Rate Trends across Manufacturers
Average discount rates across manufacturers were around 9% in Jan 2022 and rose steadily to reach 14% in Jul 2022. A small decline is observed post-July, with a 12% discount rate registered in Aug 2022.
In the biscuit category, Unibic offered the biggest discount of 28%, followed by ITC at 20%.
In the Chocolate category, Hershey’s offered the largest discount of 14%, followed by ITC at 12%.
In the Malt Drink Category, Amul offered the largest discount of 16%, followed by Boost at about 10%.
Check out DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Product for insights to respond to Competitor’s pricing and promotions. Click here to know more.
Share of Search Analysis
Which brands feature within the top 5 on the first page of the search?
A product that appears within the top 5 items on the first page of a search, has a higher probability of being purchased. Below is a study of the share of the search for biscuits across manufacturers and retailers.
Figure 6: Share of Search for Biscuits across Manufacturers and Retailers
Britannia dominates the top ten share of search across different online retail platforms.
Mondelez has the highest share of search at 62% in Amazon Fresh, whereas Parle-G has the lowest share of search at 7%.
In Bigbasket, Britannia has the highest search share of 62%, whereas Parle-G has the lowest search share of 7%.
Check out DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics to track the Share of Keyword and Navigation Search. Click here to know more.
Conclusion
FMCG is a rapidly evolving industry sector with a high potential for growth in the coming years. FMCG brands must compete with one another to fully tap this market opportunity on several factors to ensure that their products are visible, available, and attractive to consumers. Digital crawling and big data technologies have enabled manufacturers and retailers to collect publicly available e-commerce data for useful, actionable insights and trend analysis. To stay competitive, it is crucial for manufacturers and retailers to engage with analytics and data experts to seamlessly integrate e-commerce analytics into their short- and long-term business strategies. Whether it’s building keywords to increase the share of search, knowing the right discounts to attract customers in a particular city or increasing the availability of products on specific e-commerce platforms, companies need to invest in the right data intelligence!
DataWeave for FMCG Brands
DataWeave has been working with global CPG/FMCG brands, helping them drive their growth on eCommerce platforms by enabling them to monitor their key metrics, diagnose improvement areas, recommend action, and measure interventions’ impact. DataWeave’s KPIs enable Brands to fill in the blind spots in their funnel data and allows them to respond to competitors on a near-real-time basis.
If you want to know to learn how your brand can leverage DataWeave’s data insights and improve sales, then click here to sign up for a demo
Consumers are discovering and trialing new eCommerce marketplaces, brands and products at a faster rate than ever before, given the vast amount of choices encountered browsing for products online. A recent analysis shows how events like Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are especially fruitful for new-to-brand customer advertising, encouraging B2C marketers to increase their digital advertising spend to fuel product discovery, sales and market share for their brands.
The majority of eCommerce consumers are discovering products via relevant keywords attributable to their needs, with most clicks happening on page one results for the first few products listed. Simplifying the digital shopping experience is critical for brands to be in the consideration set for the majority of consumers who won’t venture past page one results.
An internal analysis conducted shows getting a product to page one on retailer websites can improve sales by as much as 50 percent, but figuring out the right levers to pull to get there organically—without paid advertising—is a real challenge, especially given fast-changing algorithms. While more than half of all retail related online browsing sessions are “organic”, sometimes brands need to boost their product visibility by investing in sponsored (paid) opportunities to improve a product’s rank.
Data analytics can equip brands with intelligence to help them decide when, where, and how to make digital advertising investments profitably, while simultaneously acting on insights that help drive organic growth. Considering a majority of U.S. consumers begin their product discovery on marketplaces like Amazon, it makes sense for brands to prioritize digital advertising opportunities with Amazon.
Maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads
Brands use Amazon Ads to drive brand awareness, acquire new customers, drive sales and gain market share, with the goal of furthering their marketing return on investment. Top performing advertisers average 40 percent greater year-on-year (YoY) sales growth, 50 percent greater YoY growth in customer product page viewership on Amazon, and 30 percent higher returns on ad spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads, according to a recent analysis. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display are among the types of Amazon Ads options cited that produce maximum return.
Ensuring your product listings appear at the top of page one results on Amazon for the most relevant discovery keywords is therefore the most important determinant for maximizing ROAS. DataWeave has become a vetted partner and measurement provider in the Amazon Advertising Partner Network, with the goal of supporting brands to optimize digital advertising campaigns by providing visibility to Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) key performance indicators (KPIs), like Share of Search, Pricing and Product Availability, Content Audits, Ratings and Reviews, and Sales Performance and Market Share.
Below is a summary of how our Digital Shelf solutions, in partnership with Amazon Ads, can improve the performance of your Amazon Ads campaigns
1. Keyword Recommendations Improve Share of Search
With the DataWeave Share of Search solution, brands can monitor their placement of both organic and paid discovery keywords relative to their competition. Once your keywords are determined, you are also provided a weighted Share of Search score that helps measure how well each keyword performs relative to product discoverability. Below is an example of insights you’d gain.
Share of Keyword Search
Brands can provide their own list of keywords to monitor, or through our Amazon Ads collaborative solution, learn which keywords are the “best” for them to measure in the realm of Amazon. Performance results are based on data that shows which keywords consumers are actually using when browsing online alongside other keywords brands request to measure. Users are able to see exactly which keywords are most popular, competitive (and even unexpected), and relevant at an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) level of granularity.
We can also estimate the degree of relevance and estimated traffic for the recommended keywords. Brands can then use these insights to adjust campaign strategies based on these parameters, which can boost product discoverability and rank visibility. A brand could assume people find its products by brand name, yet traffic insights may reveal a majority of people look for a generic product type before they end up buying that particular brand.
Strong product content is critical to succeeding on Amazon. Thorough, accurate, and descriptive content leads to better click through rates (CTR), conversion rates, more positive reviews, and fewer returns, which results in increased discoverability. DataWeave’s Content Audit solution reviews existing copy and images on a per-attribute basis to highlight any gaps essential to improving visibility, as seen in the example below.
Content Analysis
To further growth, it is equally as important that your product content aligns with your advertising strategy. With Amazon Ads partner add-on, our solution can also audit your content to measure how effectively you are incorporating Amazon Ads keywords into your product content to enhance discovery relevancy.
3. Discover More Opportunities with Pricing and Product Availability Insights
Quality content and keyword updates will only get you so far if your products are not consistently available and priced competitively. With DataWeave’s Pricing and Promotions and Product Availability modules, advertisers can monitor their selling prices and availability trends alongside their competitors to uncover more opportunities to incorporate into advertising campaigns, as seen in the Pricing and Promotions dashboard example below.
Promotion Analysis
Additionally, product targeting recommendations can be utilized to target a competitor’s ASIN that may be overpriced or that is having issues staying in stock. Alternatively, broaden your strategy to target specific brands, complementary products, or category listing pages.
You can also create alerts on your own products to monitor when items are low on inventory or out of stock to ensure key products are consistently available when customers are shopping.
4. Leverage Ratings and Reviews to Increase Conversion
Product ratings and reviews are also a critical component to running a successful Amazon Ads campaign. A large number of reviews and a positive star rating will provide customers with the confidence to purchase, resulting in higher conversion rates. Conversely, negative feedback can have a detrimental impact, resulting in lost sales and wasted ad spend. DataWeave’s Ratings and Reviews module can help you monitor your reviews and extract attribute-level insights on your products. This information can then be utilized to further optimize your advertising strategy.
If you see consistent feedback in your reviews on aspects of a product not meeting customer expectations, address them in your product content to prevent potential misplaced expectations. Alternatively, if customer reviews are raving about certain product features, ensure these are promoted and relevant keywords are populated throughout your descriptions and feature bullets. Below is an example of insights seen within the DSA Ratings & Reviews dashboard.
Ratings and Reviews
5. Correlate Digital Shelf KPIs to Sales Performance and Market Share
The newest DSA module, Sales Performance and Market Share, provides SKU, sub-category, and brand-level sales and market share estimates on Amazon for brands and their competitors, via customer defined taxonomies, to easily benchmark performance results.
This data can also be correlated with other Digital Shelf KPIs, like Content Audit and Product Availability, giving brands an easy way to check the effect of attribute changes and how they impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how search rank, both organic and sponsored, affects sales and market share estimates.
Understanding the correlation between your advertising campaigns and your Digital Shelf brand visibility will help you identify which areas to prioritize to drive sales and win more market share.
Digital Shelf Insights Help Brands Win with Amazon Ads
The need for access to flexible, actionable eCommerce insights is growing exponentially as a way to help brands drive growth, increase their Share of Voice, and to gain a competitive edge. As a result, more global brands are seeking Digital Shelf Analytics for access to near real-time marketplace changes and to develop data-driven growth strategies that leverage pricing, merchandising, and competitive insights at scale.
By monitoring, measuring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) like Sales Performance and Market Share, Share of Search, Content Audits, Product Availability, Pricing and Promotions and Ratings and Reviews alongside competitors, brands will know what actions to take to boost brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and online sales.
DataWeave’s acceptance into the Amazon Advertising Partner Network enables Amazon advertisers to effectively build their Amazon growth strategies and determine systems that enable faster and smarter advertising and marketing decision-making to optimize product discoverability and overall results.
Connect with us now to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs, or for access to more details regarding our Amazon Ads Partnership or Digital Shelf solutions.
Amazon India’s much-awaited annual two-day shopping event, Prime Day, kicked off with a bang on July 23rd & 24th this year & was one of the most successful Prime Day events yet! Amazon reported that more than 32,000 sellers saw their highest ever sales day during the event. Interestingly 70% of these sellers who received orders during Prime Day were based in Tier 2 cities in India, further validating how the post-pandemic eCommerce boom has spread across the country. Also, Indian exporters saw 50% business growth on Amazon on Prime Day as customers across markets like North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan continued to purchase Made In India products. It was a great 2 days for Indian sellers, but what about customers who were waiting in anticipation for the great deals typically offered on Prime Day? We dug into our data to take a look at the deals, discounts, and brands that shone bright on Prime Day in India.
Methodology
In addition to Amazon IN, we also tracked Flipkart on 23 & 24th July 2022, on Prime Day.
We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime Day price.
We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.
Amazon v/s Flipkart – who offered better discounts?
Prime Day discounts are legendary. And across the globe, during Prime Day retailers try and compete to see if they can offer better deals than Amazon. Forbes even published an article on the 36 Prime Day competitor sales that were way more enticing than what Amazon had to offer. In India, we wanted to see if Amazon’s homegrown rival Flipkart might give it a tough fight, so we tracked the volume of discounts across categories on both retailers.
Discounts on Amazon & Flipkart across categories
Out of the 4 categories we tracked, in spite of Prime Day, Amazon offered discounts higher than Flipkart in only 2 categories – Electronics & Beauty.
… while Flipkart offered higher discounts than Amazon in the Grocery & Fashion category. For groceries, Flipkart offered a 3.2% additional discount v/s 2.2% on Amazon. However, in the Fashion category, the difference was marginal – 8.1% on Amazon v/s 8.6% on Flipkart
Post-event, both Amazon & Flipkart went back to the original pre-event prices. This made it clear that Flipkart was tracking and making price changes based on their closest competitor. It’s what smart eCommerce businesses do to stay ahead in the race.
Interestingly, post-event, in the fashion category, not only did Amazon revert to the original pre-event price, they even increased prices by close to 2%.
Let’s take a look at discounts across 4 categories & the Brands that WON in each category.
From Electronics to Fashion, Beauty & Groceries, let’s deep dive into the data to see which products were highly discounted within each category and brands that sprinted ahead to win the race on Amazon on Prime Day 2022.
Amazon India released highlights from Prime Day and reported that Smartphones & Electronics were among the categories that saw the most success in terms of units sold.
From the 6 product categories we tracked within electronics, we saw the highest additional discounts on Smartwatches (13.4%), followed by Bluetooth headphones (10.5%)
TV, Smartphones, cameras, and laptops had an additional discount of between 3 – 5.5%
On Prime Day 2022, Amazon India reported that the top-selling consumer electronics brands were HP, Lenovo, Asus, and Boat to name a few. Our assumption is, these brands must’ve had a high Share of Search (SoS), which played a massive role in increasing sales, so we looked into our data to see which brands had the highest SoS against specific keywords related to electronics.
Brand Visibility against the Keywords
Our data aligned with what Amazon reported. HP had high sales, perhaps because they occupied the premium #1 spot in the laptop category with a 44% SoS! Simply put, this means of the 100 laptops that appeared on a page, against a search for the keyword laptop, 44 products were listed by HP! Consumers always gravitate towards buying products they can find with ease.
Lenovo had a 32% SoS for Laptops. Asus at 14%
The top selling smartphone brands reported by Amazon included OnePlus, Redmi, Samsung, Realme & iQOO – our data showed that 3 out of these 5 brands were in the top 5 listings on Prime Day! Redmi had a whopping 30% SoS against the keyword smartphone, Samsung at 15%, and iQOO at 5% – clear validation that a high SoS can positively impact sales.
BEAUTY & GROOMING
Now let’s look at discounts in the beauty & grooming category.
Discounts on Beauty Products on Prime Day
The highest additional discounts were given on shampoos (9.3%), followed by Lipsticks (6.6%)
Shaving kits for men were at an additional discount of 3.4%. Hair gel at 4.9% & Face Masks at 4.3%
In the beauty category, Amazon India reported that top-selling brands included Head & Shoulders, Dove, Biotique, L’Oreal, Sugar Cosmetics, and Mamaearth to name a few. Once again, we looked into our data to see the sort of brand visibility & SoS each of these brands had.
All the top-selling brand’s Amazon reported on we noticed appeared in the top 5 search results.
Head & Shoulders & Dove were the top 2 listings against the keyword Shampoo at 26% & 16% SoS respectively. Biotique came in at #5 with a 7% SoS
Bombay Shaving Company, Gillette, and Axe were the top grooming brands for men in the Shaving Kit category.
Lakme made a clean sweep with a 19% SoS against the keyword lipstick, which speaks volumes, considering the aggressive competition from D2C beauty brands in India today.
GROCERY
According to the New eCommerce in India report by consulting firm Redseer, grocery has been a major contributor to the growth of ecommerce in India & Amazon Fresh used Prime Day to grab a larger piece of that pie! As part of the Prime Day sale, Amazon Fresh also pushed discounts on groceries, as well as fruits and vegetables. We tracked products that fell into the “snack” category, and here’s what we saw.
Discounts on Snacks on Prime Day
Given changing lifestyles & healthy food fads, it was no surprise that we saw the highest additional discounts were given on Healthy Snacks (3.2%) & Diet Food (2.7%)
Chocolates and chips saw much lower additional discounts at 1.2% each.
Drinks were additionally discounted by 2.5% during Prime Day.
Cadbury had a 69% share of search against the keyword Chocolate, leaving some of its key competitors way behind. Amul had a 20% SoS, while Hershey’s was at just 4%.
According to an article in the Economic times, YogaBar tripled sales in FY22, which is why we were not surprised to see the brand at #1 when users were searching for “Healthy Snacks” during Prime Day. YogaBar products typically enjoy high visibility year-round, which clearly helped with brand awareness on Amazon & sales.
FASHION
Amazon reported that Men’s t-shirts and polos, denims, Kurtis, tops, and dresses for women, designer wear, and clothing for kids were some of the most-loved fashion categories on Prime Day. We looked into our data to see the trends that emerged.
Discounts on Fashion on Prime Day
From the categories we tracked, women’s handbags had the highest additional discount (11.8%), followed by watches (9.1%)
Sneakers & jeans had additional discounts in the ballpark of 7% and sunglasses at 4.4%
Some of the usual suspects made it to the top 5, but what really stood out for us were brands that popped up against the keyword Jeans. While Levi’s came in at #2 with an 11% SoS, 2 Private Label Amazon brands featured in the top 5! Symbol at 27% SoS and Inkast Denim at 9%
Against the keyword Handbag, Lavie had a massive lead at 38% v/s the #2 brand – Caprese, at 13%
Boat found a #2 spot against the keyword watches, racing way ahead of the age-old popular brand Fastrack at #5 with a 4% SoS.
Conclusion
Amazon Prime Day 2022 in India came to a successful close as shoppers across India discovered the joy of the 2 day celebration with the best deals, savings, new launches, and more. Prime members from 95% of pin codes in India made purchases, there were 1000’s of deals and 500+ new product launches from brand partners & sellers. Nearly 18% more sellers grossed sales over INR 1 crore, and close to 38% more sellers grossed sales of over 1 lakh vs Prime Day 2021. Local neighborhood shops that sell on Amazon witnessed 4x sales growth. And start-ups and brands under the Amazon Launchpad program witnessed a growth of 3x. All in all, a successful event for everyone involved!
In 2022, Amazon sold 300 million products during Prime Day – selling roughly 100,000 items per minute. Since Amazon started Prime Day in 2015 to celebrate its 20th birthday, the shopping festival has grown into a holiday and rivals Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. and Singles’ Day in China.
According to RetailDetail, the leading B2B retail community in Benelux, Amazon is planning a 2nd Prime Day shopping festival in the autumn, just a few months after its annual Prime Day event. The retailer has asked its sales partners to prepare for a promotional event in the autumn where they have until the beginning of September to propose attractive discounts, with at least 20% discounts. This year’s second Prime Day may occur in October, with or without the same name.
But before that, let’s examine what happened in Germany this year on Prime Day 2022.
Methodology
We tracked Amazon.deboth before &on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day.
We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price.
We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.
What kind of Discounts did Amazon.de offer?
Amazon Prime Day will be significant, especially for customers hoping to get discounts amid soaring inflation. Both Amazon as well as other sources reported that electrical and electronic items were the most popular purchases, followed by general retail products. Electrical and electronics saw the value of transactions soar 90% on the first day. Mobile phones and accessories were the most popular, with transaction values almost doubling to 96% on day one.
Discounts across Categories on Amazon.de
Based on trends from past events, Amazon likely knew electronic items were going to be best sellers. Keeping this in mind, they made sure to offer high discounts in the electronics category. They offered a 6.5% additional discount on electronics on Prime Day. And once the sale ended, they continued to discount electronics by 1.3%.
The Fashion category also had a fair bit of discounts and came in at a close second at 5.9%
Looks like Amazon discounted everyday use items minimally. Groceries had an additional discount of just 1.8% on Prime Day, and wine and spirits had 2% extra discount.
Discounts on Electronics Category on Amazon.de
Within Electronics, in the four categories we tracked, we saw the highest additional discounts were offered on Bluetooth earphones (10.6%) and Smartwatches (9%)
Discounts on Fashion Category on Amazon.de
Jeans and Sunglasses had the highest discounts at 8.6% & 7.6% respectively.
Sneakers & Watches too had additional discounts of 6.6% on Prime Day.
Post the Prime Day event, Amazon retained an average of 1.5% discount across all products in the fashion category instead of pricing them at the original price.
However, in the case of women’s T-Shirts, they increased the price by 1.7% from the pre-event price.
Discounts across Price Tiers
Retailers must consider several factors when making strategic discounting decisions, including customer buying behavior, the type of discount offered & the volume of discount offered. The best discounting approach will vary depending on the product and other factors like the original selling price of the product.
Now let’s compare the discounting strategy Amazon used in the Electronics v/s Fashion category on Prime Day.
Discounts across Price Ranges
Interestingly, in both the Electronics and Fashion categories, Amazon increased prices for the lowest-end products between the €0-10 range by 3.6% and 13.2%, respectively, during the sale instead of discounting them! Maybe this was a strategy to drive consumers to higher-value products with greater discounts?
Another similarity in strategy was that most of the mid-priced items had maximum discounts. In electronics & fashion both, the maximum discounts were given to products between the € 30-100 range.
Here’s a difference that stood out – for Electronics in the higher price range between €100 – 500, the volume of discounts dropped a bit which meant Amazon gave moderate discounts on high-end electronics. But the trend flipped for Fashion as luxury fashion items were made to look more attractive with higher discounts.
Monitoring stock availability during key sales days is critical
Brands need to have the right stock availability, especially during sale events, because more customers shop online during sales. What’s worse, non-availability of products may drive customers to competitors that are stocking the same product. Out-of-stock situations lead to missed opportunities & lost sales! Let’s take a look at our data and see how Amazon planned product availability across categories on Prime Day.
Availability Analysis across Categories on Prime Day
Amazon was betting big on 2 categories – Electronics & Home. This meant they needed to keep a keen eye on availability in these categories, especially since they forecasted the highest sales to be generated here. … it was no surprise that the Furniture category had almost 100% availability during Prime Day! Electronics too had a high availability at 94% during the event.
Generally, our data showed that availability across multiple categories we tracked seemed robust and above 80% in more cases. Only Beauty & Grocery had 79% availability.
Conclusion
Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!
Prime Day launched in 2015 as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Amazon’s founding & has quickly become the biggest shopping event of the year for Amazon. Prime Day is a great opportunity for customers to snag fantastic deals on products they might not otherwise consider buying. Last year, Amazon Prime Day was a tremendous success, with Prime members spending billions of dollars on discounted items. In 2022 alone, global sales during the event reached a new record high of $12 Bn.
18 countries participated in Prime Day this year, including the US. We did a deep dive into what happened in the UK – the discounts Amazon offered and categories with the highest discounts as well as checked to see if other retailers tweaked their pricing strategy to compete with Amazon on Prime Day.
Methodology
In addition to Amazon UK, we tracked some key retailers on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day. Retailers tracked – eBay UK, OnBuy, Selfridges, ASOS.com, Net-A-Porter
We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price.
We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.
Did other retailers compete with Amazon on Prime Day?
Traditionally, as Amazon’s Prime Day sale approaches, other retailers adjust their prices by offering summer deals or getting creative with offers. However, we did not see aggressive strategies from other retailers this year. In the US, Walmart always has a sale during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart announced there wouldn’t be an annual promotional event on Prime Day 2022 this year.
Another report published by Forrester stated that major retailers scaled back their promotions, and overall offers from other retailers were less than impressive. We took a look at the data we gathered in the UK to see if this trend aligned.
Discounts offered on Prime Day on Amazon v/s other retailers
Our data showed that most retailers we tracked offered negligible discounts (in the range of 0.1 – 1.5%) and did not really try and compete or match the discounts Amazon was offering.
However, ASOS was the one retailer that competed heavily with Amazon in the Fashion & Beauty category. While Amazon offered an average additional discount of 7.7% in the Fashion category, ASOS offered 13.2%. And in the beauty category, Amazon offered 6.7%, while ASOS offered 15.2%.
Which were the popular categories that offered the most discounts?
During Prime Day, shoppers saw tons of deals on essential gadgets. Tech deals were a massive hit and saw big discounts on everything from TVs, laptops, smartwatches, phones, and tablets. We look at the data we collected to see if we saw a similar trend.
Discounts on Amazon UK across categories
Amazon offered discounts across categories and reported that some of the best-selling categories were Consumer Electronics & Home.
Our data too showed that the highest additional discounts were offered in electronics – Bluetooth Earphones at 18.4%, followed by Smartwatches at 14.9% and Laptops as well as Cameras, both at 12%.
Low discounts were offered on Alcohol, with Beer at 0.9% and Wine at 1.3%, respectively.
Relatively attractive discounts were seen in the Fashion & Beauty category – Sunglasses (9.1%), Shampoo (9.7%), & Watches (9.4%)
Discounts on Amazon UK in the Electronics category
Electronics being the hot favorite – we wanted to deep dive into the data and get more insights on Amazon’s pricing & discounting strategy here. Discounts can entice customers to buy more, encourage customer loyalty, or clear out old inventory. However, businesses must be careful since too much discounting can eat into profits. They also have to be mindful of which products should be discounted and by how much.
Our data showed that the highest discounts (between 13 – 18%) were given on electronics priced between the £ 20-100 price range.
Electronics priced higher, between the £ 100 – 500 pound price range, were discounted less than 10%
However, high-value premium electronics over £ 500 were discounted slightly above 10%
How did Amazon manage stock availability during Prime Day?
Keeping track of inventory is especially important during big sales like Prime Day when thousands of customers are actively looking for deals. There’s nothing worse than them finding the item they wanted is out of stock (OOS). OOS leads to lost sales, a situation that must be avoided at all costs. Read about how a small short term stock out on Amazon led to long term negative impacts for one of our customers. And let’s also look at the data and see what product availability looked like on Prime Day.
Overall, Amazon maintained robust availability across categories, and re-stocking was constant both before, during & after the event.
Furniture, Fashion & Electronics had the highest availability. No surprise there since Amazon estimated that Home/ Furniture would be one of the best-selling categories.
Grocery saw average availability – perhaps cause some of these products are perishables, so it’s best to be mindful about overstocking.
Which Brands Won on Prime Day?
If there is one thing to remember about improving your product visibility on Amazon, it’s that it all boils down to the usage of the right keywords. Using relevant keywords makes your product appear higher up in search when customers are running searches on Amazon for those products. And the higher up a product appears in search, the higher the chances of a sale!
Let’s take a look at some popular categories and which brands had the highest Share of Search (SoS) during Prime Day.
Corona, San Miguel, and Becks were the top 3 brands optimized for the keyword Beer. However, what’s really important to note is both Corona & Becks had 20% SoS that was completely organic. San Miguel had a 20% SoS too, but it was sponsored ads that gave them this artificial boost.
While a whole bunch of other brands had a 10% SoS most of them achieved this via Sponsored Ads. Youngever was the only brand that achieved this completely organically. They must have made sure they optimized key KPIs like content, ratings & reviews & product availability to achieve this result.
Asus sponsored 28% of products before Prime Day, hoping to capitalize on the pre-sale frenzy. During the event, they sponsored only 13% of products, bringing down their total SoS from 31% before the event to 13% during the event.
Lenovo followed the opposite strategy; they sponsored just 6% of products before the event and during the event sponsored a whopping 25% which made them “almost” dominate the Laptop category during Prime Day.
Then there was Microsoft, with the highest SoS at 38%, of which all of it was organic!
The Smartphone SoS battle was clearly between Samsung & Xiaomi. Samsung was a consistent #1 at all 3 time periods (Before, During & After Prime Day) with the highest total SoS. Xiaomi came in at a close second.
Samsung had an exciting strategy – they went heavy on sponsorships before and after the event. Their sponsored SoS was 31% & 39% respectively. And SoS of 13% during the event.
Xiaomi’s strategy was just the opposite. Their sponsored SoS was 16% before the event. And 17% after the event, which was moderate compared to their Sponsored SoS during the event at 25%, which was much higher than Samsung’s 13%
Critical to note, Xiaomi’s organic search visibility before, during, and after the event was 0%. It definitely should be a concern area for any brand.
Share of search
Both before & after the event, Cadbury had the highest visibility for the keyword Chocolate. During the event, they were not in the top 5 brands.
During Prime Day, Nestle won the top spot and had a 29% SoS. However, before the event, they were at #3 and after at #2. Artificially boosting visibility might’ve had something to do with this.
Conclusion
Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!
Today, environmental damage is rapidly occurring on a global scale. And there are many reasons and causes for this. Global warming is one, deforestation, over population are some others. The list is long. In a small way, the retail & clothing industry contributes to environmental damage too. The good news is that sustainable fashion addresses this issue. Sustainable clothing is designed using sustainable fabrics like organic cotton, hemp, and Pima cotton that have less of a negative impact on the planet.
Sustainable clothing and its benefits
In this blog, we will discuss the rise of sustainable clothing and its benefits. We will also discuss marketplaces for sustainable fashion.
Benefits of Sustainable Fashion
a. Reduces carbon footprint
The fashion industry emits numerous greenhouse gases annually. Most clothes are made from fossil fuels and require significantly more energy in production. Sustainable brands often use natural or recycled fabrics that require less chemical treatment, water, and energy. Organic fabrics such as linen, hemp, and organic cotton are biodegradable and environmentally sound.
b. Saves animal lives
Leather isn’t a by-product of the meat industry, and it’s estimated that it alone is slaughtering and killing over 430 million animals annually. Sustainable fashion brands are increasingly embracing the use of cruelty-free alternatives. Various alternatives include polyester made with ocean trash, plant-based compostable sneakers, bags from recycled seatbelts, silk created from yeast, and bio-fabricated vegan wool. Another interesting leather alternative comes from pineapples, where the fabric is produced using the leaves of pineapples.
c. Requires less water
Water is used in the dyeing and finishing process for nearly all items in the fashion industry. It takes 2,700 liters of water to produce a single T-shirt. Cotton is highly dependent on water but is usually grown in hot and dry areas. Linen, hemp, Refibra, and recycled fibers are some other sustainable fabrics that require little to no water during production.
d. Supports safer working conditions
Endless working hours, unacceptable health & safety conditions, and minimum wages, are the reality for most garment workers in the fast fashion sector. A few informative documentaries like “The True Cost” or “Fashion Factories Undercover” document the social injustices of the fast fashion industry. Eco-ethical brands advocate for sustainable fashion, health care, humane working conditions, and fair wages for their workers.
e. Healthy for people and the environment
Fast fashion products often undergo an intense chemical process where 8,000 types of chemicals are used to bleach, dye, and wet process garments. Those chemicals often lead to diseases or fatal accidents for workers and inflict serious congenital disabilities on their children. These chemicals harm our health, as our skin absorbs anything we put on it.
5 Sustainable & Ethical Online Marketplaces
Here is a list of five earth-minded and socially responsible marketplaces that have sustainable and fair trade brands for the discerning and mindful shopper:
1. thegreenlabels
Netherlands-based webshop thegreenlabels is a sustainable fashion retailer that sells sneakers, womenswear, and accessories from various “green labels” brands. Founded in 2018, this is a marketplace where people can buy products from brands that care about a positive impact on the environment. All brands featured here guarantee fair working conditions and represent at least one of these 4 values – “CLEAN PROCESS” environmentally friendly production, clothes that support “LOCAL” communities, “VEGAN” brands to assure no animals were harmed and “WASTE REDUCTION”
2. LVRSustainable
LVRSustainable
Luisa Via Roma started as a family-owned boutique in the early 1900s. They have grown into a luxury e-retailer and created an LVRSustainable section for people trying to insert sustainability into their wardrobes. They have brands rated ‘Good’ or ‘Great.’ The site offers a wide range of products like bags, accessories, sports, shoes, lingerie, and much more for men, women, and kids. You can find organic, vegan, eco-friendly, ethical, and recycled & upcycled items here.
3. Brothers We Stand
Brothers We Stand
Brothers We Stand is a retailer set up in solidarity with the people who make our clothes. This retailer conducts rigorous research to ensure that every product in their collection meets the following three standards: designed to please, ethical production, and created to last. It’s a great platform to shop for ethical and sustainable menswear. They also have their private clothing line along with other brands.
4. Labell-D
Labell-D was launched with a clear mission to reduce the negative impact of fast fashion on the planet. This retailer wants to make Responsible Fashion the new norm. They intend to make sustainable clothing and fashion easy for both brands and consumers. Labell-D has a transparent accreditation process where they evaluate the brand’s carbon footprint and environmental impact. Their verification assessment includes animal welfare, emissions, materials, production processes, chemical usage, waste management, and traceability.
5. Cerqular
Cerqular wants to make sustainable shopping affordable and accessible for all. The retailer promises that every product and seller is verified as organic, recycled, sustainable, carbon-neutral, eco-friendly, vegan, or circular. They have a wide range of sellers and do not limit products only from luxury brands, so sustainable shopping is no longer expensive or inconvenient.
Conclusion
The fashion industry is a contributor to worldwide carbon emissions. Sustainable fashion is the new big thing giving rise to more and more sustainable brands and marketplaces.
To stand out and shine in the crowded eCommerce space is not easy. Having a robust Digital Shelf becomes critical for brands. A brand’s Digital Shelf is all of the ways their customers digitally interact with the brand, not only on marketplaces but on the brand’s DTC website & shoppable social media. This is why brands need to closely track & optimize their Digital Shelf KPIs like assortment, availability, pricing, ratings & reviews, product discoverability & product content to increase their online sales.
Want to learn how DataWeave can help you win the Digital Shelf? Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.
As inflation hits another 40-year high at 9.1 percent, U.S. consumers geared up for their first sign of hope and relief in the form of anticipated discount buys – 2022 Amazon Prime Days, or so we thought. While Prime Days have grown to become a promotional period almost as important as Black Friday to digital shoppers, the combination of economic uncertainty, inflationary pressures, and supply chain challenges seemed to alter the discount strategy expected given activity seen during 2021 Prime Days.
Our analyst team has been hard at work aiming to provide a ‘first look’ at 2022 Prime Day Promotional Insights, tracking discounts offered across 46,000+ SKUs within key categories like Electronics, Clothing, Health & Beauty and Home, on seven major retailer websites – Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Sephora, Ulta, Lowe’s and Home Depot. Our analysis compares prices seen during Amazon Prime Day 2022 on July 12th, to pre-Prime Day maximum value prices seen in the ten days leading up to Prime Days, to determine the average change in discounts offered during the promotional period. Below is a summary of our findings.
Competitive Promotions Give Amazon a Run for their Money
Amazon offered the greatest average discount enhancements for Electronics at 5.6 percent followed by Health & Beauty items at 5.1 percent, and Home products at 4.2 percent versus pre-Prime Day discounts seen across the categories considered within our analysis. The only category reviewed where average discounts were greater on a competitor’s website was on Target.com within the Clothing category. As seen below, Clothing on Target.com average discounts were 6.8 percent greater than pre-Prime Day offers, which was 2.6 percent higher than the average discounts offered for Clothing on Amazon.
Target Capitalizes on Growth Opportunity in Clothing Category
Diving deeper into the details of where Target won within the Clothing category, you can see a majority of their promotional activity took place within Women’s Accessories where discounts offered were 18.5 percent greater than those seen pre-Prime Day 2022, which was almost 15 percent greater than the discount enhancements seen on Amazon for Women’s Accessories. In fact, Women’s Shoes and Sneakers were the only two categories where the average discounts offered were greater on Amazon than on Target.com.
Overall, the discounts offered on Target.com within the Clothing category were primarily concentrated within items priced $40 and lower, but what was most interesting is that within the $10 and under price bucket, Target offered average discounts of over 11 percent whereas Amazon increased prices for these items on average by over 9 percent.
While most of the Clothing available on both Amazon and Target.com during Prime Days 2022 were offered without a price change, the greatest discount percentages tracked were within the range of 10-25 percent off on Amazon whereas Target chose to offer the bulk of their promotions at 25 percent off an up.
Strategic Promotional Strategies Defined at the Electronics Subcategory Level
When it comes to the Electronics category on Prime Day, the big question is always who will win the battle of the brands. Below shows the difference in average pricing and promotions discounts offered between products manufactured by Samsung versus Apple across each retailer platform, noting discounts were almost 3 percent greater on average for Apple versus Samsung products on Amazon, and Apple discounts were almost 5 percent greater on Amazon versus than those seen on Target.com.
Amazon wasn’t going all in on Apple however, as we saw ‘Alexa’ devices (Amazon products) available on Best Buy and Target websites also, but the discounts were almost 4 percent greater on Amazon versus Target and over 7 percent greater than the discounts seen on BestBuy.com.
While the average discounts offered within the Electronics category were greatest on Amazon (5.6 percent) versus Best Buy (3.9 percent) and Target (3.4 percent) as noted within the first chart of this blog and across brands and technologies considered above, the discounts offered on Amazon were strategically focused between 10-25 percent as seen below.
Amazon’s Electronics promotions were also targeted at smaller price points, items priced between $20-500, whereas Best Buy and Target offered greater promotions for electronics priced $500 and up than Amazon.
Below is a snapshot of price buckets tracked for Electronics available on BestBuy.com, highlighting where most of the promotional activity was targeted at products priced $50 and up during Prime Days 2022, with discounts ranging from 10 percent up to greater than 25 percent greater than pre-Prime day prices.
The standout categories were TVs on Target.com with discounts averaging nearly 12 percent greater than those seen pre-Prime day, and smartphones on BestBuy.com with discounts averaging just over 11 percent greater than those seen pre-Prime Day. The category with the greatest average discount enhancements seen on Amazon during Prime Days 2022 was for Wireless Headphones with an average discount of 8.7 percent.
Home is Where Amazon’s Heart Was on Prime Day
Amazon dominated offers within the Home categories, especially for products within mid ($40-100) and higher price ranges (items priced $200-500), with the bulk of the discounts offered between 10-25 percent. There was little to no promotional activity seen across all price points on Lowe’s or Home Depot’s websites within the categories we tracked, and most other competitive offers on Home products were seen on BestBuy.com for products priced from $50-500. Even a subcategory like Tools offered deeper average discounts on Amazon (4.7 percent) than discounts seen on HomeDepot.com (1.1 percent) or Lowes.com (0 percent).
For Large Appliances, Amazon was the only retailer to off any significant discount across each major subcategory with the greatest average discount being on Ovens at 6 percent, followed by Refrigerators at 4 percent. One caveat with this category, when we reviewed Large Appliance prices two weeks prior to Prime Days, we saw average price increases around 16.7 percent occurring on Amazon.
During Prime Days 2022 however, Amazon also offered top average discounts for small appliances, except for on Instant Pots which appeared to have greater average discounts on Target.com (5.9 percent versus 4.2 percent on Amazon), and Vacuum Cleaners which appeared to have the best promotion of appliances small and large at 13.8 percent average discount on BestBuy.com. Another subcategory deeply discounted on BestBuy.com was weighted blankets, which averaged discounts around 18.5 percent versus Amazon’s average discount at only 6.2 percent.
Health & Beauty Retailer Pricing Strategies Revealed
Given the importance Health & Beauty Brands placed on Prime Day sales last year, we had anticipated to see more offers, especially within pure-play beauty retail channels, than we did for this booming category.
Amazon drove most of the Health & Beauty offers seen averaging 5.1% discounts versus other retailers only offering less than 1% on average, but discounts were aimed at a targeted group of SKUs on Amazon, bringing the average discount lower overall. Most of the promotions offered on Amazon fell within mid-range price points ($20-50) and were discounted between 10-25 percent versus pre-Prime Day prices.
Target.com offered the most comparable discounts to Amazon for Health & Beauty products on average, but their strategy primarily focused on items within the $20 and lower price range with discounts ranging primarily between 10-25 percent.
More 2022 Prime Day Insights Coming Soon
We know the significance visibility to critical pricing and promotional insights play in enabling retailers and brands to offer the right discounts to stay competitive, especially during promotional periods like Prime Days. While this blog is intended to provide a ‘sneak peek’ into 2022 Prime Day insights for the U.S. market, we will be providing more extensive, global coverage and will proactively share new insights with the marketplace as they become available throughout the month of July.
Be sure to also check out our Press page for access to the latest media coverage on Prime Day insights and more. Don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if there is any particular category you are interested in seeing in more detail, or for access to more information on our Commerce Intelligence and Digital Shelf solutions.
Let’s start with the basics – what is a ‘House of Brands.’
House of Brands is a portfolio management strategy that defines how a family of brands owned by one parent company, each independent of one another and each with its own audience, marketing, look & feel operate in harmony with each other.
Advantages of a House of Brands Strategy
The Profit Playbook: The playbook generated by the success of one brand can be leveraged to scale other brands.
Economies of Scale: Cost across Marketing, Supply chain, Advertising, and Operations gets shared across multiple brands helping optimize costs.
Market Coverage: Multiple products enable brands to cover multiple market niches and audiences while maintaining unique messaging for each niche.
Future-Proofing: By hedging bets across multiple brands, it cushions the parent company against changes in customer preferences and trends.
… for these reasons and more, it’s no surprise that every digital-first consumer brand today aspires to leverage a portfolio strategy to become a House of Brands.
More and more companies are slowly adopting this strategy
In the US the brands like P&G, Newell, and Unilever which found early success in the online space are quickly acquiring more brands and betting on the “House of Brands” strategy to scale.
In India, Unicorn D2C start-ups like MamaEarth, Good Glamm Group, Sugar Cosmetics, Rebel, Boat, and Lenskart to name a few, are already knee-deep into this strategy as their brand portfolio keeps growing.
And then there are brand roll-ups like Thrasio, Perch, HeyDay in the USA, Branded, Hero in the UK and Mensa, and GlobalBees in India which started as a House of Brands from the get-go.
More Brands. More Data. More need for Monitoring!
You cannot improve what you cannot measure! In order to scale these brands, the first thing needed is DATA. Data across all digital platforms – data on social media performance, customer engagement, eCommerce sales, product stock availability, pricing, reviews, and customer sentiment to name a few. This data will unlock huge value for brands and it gives them a sense of what’s working and what needs to be improved in order to increase sales & scale.
All brands need to track this information – but here’s a challenge unique to a House of Brands – it is the sheer volume & scale of data needed across multiple brands across multiple digital platforms! For example, a House of Brands with let’s say 10+ brands, each brand with 50 SKUs, selling on 10 eCommerce platforms is the equivalent of managing 10 retail shops with 500 SKUs!
Let’s look at some of the questions the analytics, marketing, and brand management teams at House Of Brands would ask. And the data they would need almost on a daily basis for every single brand.
What is the search ranking for all of our SKUs across each and every single eCommerce store it is available on? How does this benchmark to the closest competitor? And are competitors using aggressive advertising strategies to outperform & overshadow our SKUs?
Are competitors offering discounts? Are those discounts higher than what we’re offering leading customers to purchase their products instead of ours?
Are my products & SKUs available and not out of stock across every single marketplace and online store?
Are positive ratings & reviews driving my customers to purchase my product? Or do our competitors have a better customer perception than my brand does?
Are Amazon and other marketplaces displaying my product content correctly so customers have enough information to make an informed purchase decision?
… if the sheer scale across multiple brands was not a big enough challenge when this data needs to be tracked hyper-locally for each brand, it becomes anyone’s worst data nightmare!
Need Data? Lots of it? No problem!
To get ample data, across key KPIs brands need to invest in a Digital Shelf Solution. However, traditional Digital Shelf Solutions were built for brands that got a majority of their revenue from in-store sales and only a part of their revenue was being generated online.
That’s where DataWeave is different. DataWeave’s AI-Powered Digital Shelf Solutions was built with Digital Native brands in mind.
What KPIs do we help House of Brands track?
Keyword Search Ranking: Track & improve your search rankings for priority keywords. Boost product visibility and sales
Keyword Analysis
Content: Optimize your brand’s product content to drive up conversions
Stock Availability: Make sure that your products are never out of stock again
Availability Analysis
Ratings & Reviews: Adapt to customer sentiments & strengthen your product reviews
The following metrics are available to view in one single dashboard, across multiple online stores and multiple geographies making it so easy to get a consolidated view of the health of the entire portfolio of products! What’s more, we’ve created a dashboard with multiple views – brand-wise, function-wise & even hierarchy-wise. This means a brand manager can see all KPIs specific for only the brand they manage, while the marketing team can look at keyword search rankings across all brands and the leadership team can see a brand-level daily scorecard for a quick health check. And that’s not all! Our dashboard highlights insights that can be “actioned asap” to make it easier to understand what critical tweaks and changes can help improve sales. Lastly, as a House of Brands adds more Brands & SKUs to its portfolio, our solution has the full flexibility to add and delete SKUs on the go!
If you are a House of Brand and wish to explore how some of the problems you face daily can be solved – please email: contact@dataweave.com.
Brand Roll-Ups and House of Brands are always scouting for new brands to acquire. DataWeave has a unique product to help you track a category daily, highlighting brands that show exceptional KPIs across – Ranking, Reviews, Ratings, Bestseller ranks, Sales Estimates, etc. Read more about how VC’s & Brand Rolls up are using Data for faster Acquisitions.
It’s common knowledge that upward of 70% of Amazon customers never scroll past the first page of search results. And that the first 3 products garner 64% of business generated. This is why it is critical for brands and businesses to make sure they rank well on Amazon. A good search ranking helps customers find your product with ease. And findability is fundamental! Having a better ranking is also a driver of the “flywheel effect” at online retailers. According to this effect, products that sell more tend to rank better in search results, and products that rank well in search results tend to sell more.
Negative impact on Sales Ranking due to Stockouts
If you want to stay on top of search rankings on Amazon, one of the things you need to keep an eye out for is your product stock availability. It’s not the ideal customer experience to have to click on a product listing only to find out it’s currently out of stock. This is why Amazon will not rank products at the top if they’re not available & customers cannot buy them immediately. Not only does this lead to a lost sale for a brand, to make things worse, but customers also end up buying a competitor’s product instead.
We were tracking product availability on Amazon for one of our customers in the CPG space. We tracked availability for products across varying ranks & looked at how going out of stock impacted their search rankings.
Product Availability
Impact on products with a Search Rank between 1 to 10:
Our data showed that when products that ranked between 1-10 went out of stock for just 1 day, their rank fell by over 28%. After 3+ days of being out of stock, their rank fell by 83% and after being out of stock for over 10 days their rank fell by close to 150%!
This clearly illustrates that when the longer top-ranking products are out of stock, the greater the impact on search rank and product discoverability.
Impact on products with a Search Rank between 10 to 20:
The impact of being out of stock on products that ranked lower, i.e. between 10 to 20 was much lower. After being stocked out for 1 day, the ranking fell 17% compared to the 28% dip for products in the top 10 ranks.
Incremental change was minimal, too. After 3+ days of being OOS, search rank dropped by 22% and by 53% after 10+ days v/s close to 150% for higher-ranked products.
Impact on products with a Search Rank between 20 to 30:
These products had the least impact but there was an impact nonetheless.
After being OOS for 5+ days, search ranking fell by close to 8% and to close to 30% after 10 days of product unavailability.
Avoiding Stockouts with better Inventory Management
Customers can buy your product only when it is available. Failing to provide products at the right time will lead to losing sales to your competitors. If your products become unavailable, you’ll notice a drop in customers’ overall satisfaction and shopping experience too in addition to a lost sales rank on Amazon. In fact, your reputation and sales will take a beating long term in case of consistent product unavailability. Moreover, once the product is back in stock, the climb back to the top ranking is a slow and not-so-easy process. This is why brands need to maximize conversions by tracking product availability on a constant basis.
Conclusion
Stockout is a critical issue that has a significant impact on sales, brand image, and customer loyalty. Items ranking higher on eCommerce platforms take the biggest hit when they get out of stock. Brands can recapture their search share after restocking their inventory.
Want to maximize sales by reducing latency periods between stock replenishment? Reach out to our Digital Shelf Experts to know how!
What an exciting month we’ve had at DataWeave! Our team flew down to gorgeous Cape Town, South Africa to attend the 8th edition of #EcomAfrica! After months of Zoom calls and virtual events, it was a refreshing change to see our customers in person and meet some of the movers and shakers in eCommerce and some of the top South African brands.
Top eCommerce Companies in South Africa
My last visit to South Africa was before the pandemic. Things have changed since then, & the difference was stark! The eCommerce landscape had a paradigm shift during Covid-19 and grew exponentially. My customers spoke to me about the new opportunities, growth potential as well as challenges that came in because of this boom. For one, eCommerce in South Africa has become more competitive than ever – from online retail to grocery and food delivery to even alcohol delivery! All retail businesses seem to have jumped onto the eCommerce bandwagon.
A recent Deloitte report found that over 70% of South Africans shop online at least once a month & 2 out of 3 respondents said they plan to increase their frequency of online shopping. 65% said they know what they want, search online & check all stores that stock the product to compare prices. Price is one of the key factors that influence consumer purchase decisions. Other critical factors include delivery fee, delivery time, promotions & discounts & product assortmentto name a few. In order to stay ahead in this highly competitive arena, both retailers and brands need to make data-driven decisions about critical KPIs like pricing to stay ahead of the competition.
Increased Online Shopping & Online Shopping Frequency
We’ve been working with customers in South Africa for over 4 years now, even before the pandemic. So on Day 2 of the event – S.Krishnan Thyagarajan “Krish”, President & COO, Dataweave had a chance to share our learnings and experience from all these years and how user data is critical to getting ahead & winning the eCommerce race in South Africa.
For the purpose of Krish’s keynote address, we tracked pricing insights for a finite set of categories across key South African retailers like Checkers, Pick n Pay, EveryShop, Incredible, Makro, Waltons, Shoprite & Dis-Chem to name a few over a period of 16 months from Dec 2020 to April 2022. We highlighted price increase and decrease opportunities and how each retailer reacted in order to stay competitive, increase sales and protect margins.
BATTLE of the eCommerce GIANTS!
Key Highlights from the Keynote
Increasing prices where an opportunity exists helps retailers increase their margins exponentially. Pick n Pay had the highest action rate (73%) when it came to capitalizing on price increase opportunities v/s Dis-Chem at 11%.
When it came to price decrease opportunities (in order to stay competitive with rival brands) Takealot was the most responsive retailer – they capitalized on 30% of the opportunities, followed by Pick n Pay at a close second (28%) and Shoprite & Dis-Chem at just 4%.
Most retailers took between 1 – 5 days maximum to make price changes which means responsiveness to the market among all retailers is high making it more important for online retailers to always be on their toes.
The 2 categories where most retailers capitalized on Price Increase Opportunities were Sauces & Condiments and Crackers & Biscuits.
Watch the Impact of price increase & decrease opportunities on Private Label brands!
See how product stock availability impacts price changes over a 16-month period.
Find out which brands are in the lead in the Skin Care, Pet, Baby, Laundry & Cleaning Aid categories
If you’re an online retailer in South Africa & need insights on staying competitive with the right pricing, product assortment, delivery time, delivery rates, and the other key influencers that affect customers’ choice of online retailers, sign up for a demo with our team at DataWeave to know how we can help!
Social commerce is the selling of goods and services within a social media platform. Brands use social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter to promote and sell products. These platforms have become an integral part of consumers’ everyday life because they continue to engage users with relatable content, making them scroll their feeds for hours.
The Social Commerce model capitalizes on this high user engagement & moves social media beyond its traditional role in the top-of-the-funnel marketing process by encouraging users to shop without leaving their preferred apps. According to the Social Media Investment Report, 91% of executives agree that social commerce is driving an increasing portion of their marketing revenue, and 85% report that social data will be a primary source of business intelligence.
Let’s talk a little bit about why brands should consider selling via social media platforms:
Social Commerce vs. eCommerce vs. QCommerce
While they may fall under the same umbrella of online selling, social commerce, quick commerce, and eCommerce are three very different concepts
eCommerce refers to online shopping via a (retailer or brand) website or app. Customers can access these platforms via desktop or mobile devices. However, the sales funnel generally looks the same. These brands and retailers use top-of-the-funnel tactics like social media content, digital ads, and other marketing strategies to encourage customers to visit the online store. There are three main types of eCommerce businesses: Business-to-Business (Alibaba, Amazon Business, eWorldTrade), Business-to-Consumer (websites such as Amazon, Rakuten, and Zalando), and Consumer-to-Consumer (platforms such as eBay & Etsy).
Quick Commerce (or QCommerce) refers to eCommerce businesses that deliver goods within a couple of hours or even minutes. Although it’s sometimes used interchangeably with on-demand delivery or instant commerce, the idea of quick commerce has been around in the food industry for ages now. It has been recently ushered into the mainstream by evolving consumer preferences for quicker delivery of groceries and FMCG goods.
Social commerce brings the store to the customer rather than redirecting customers to an online store. It removes unnecessary steps and simplifies the buying process by letting the customer checkout directly through social media platforms, creating a frictionless buying journey for the customer. Additionally, social media platforms are mobile-friendly, a huge benefit for brands because increasingly more and more customers are accessing the internet through mobile devices.
Social Commerce
Rise of Social Commerce
First used in 2005 by Yahoo!, ‘social commerce’ refers to collaborative shopping tools such as user ratings, shared pick lists, and user-generated content. Social media networks snowballed throughout the 2000s and 2010s, alongside a general increase in eCommerce, leading customers and merchants to quickly recognize the benefits of buying and selling through social media networks. Social media platforms have since evolved from merely a showcase tool for brands. They now serve as virtual storefronts and extensions of a company’s website or brick and mortar stores, capable of handling the buying experience.
Top Social Commerce Platforms
Social media platforms aim to keep visitors engaged on their platforms for as long as possible. Increased time in-app or on-site maximizes their opportunity to serve ads, a primary source of revenue generation. Social media platforms have millions of active users and they have a great power to help companies and individuals build their brands, interact with consumers, and support after-sales. Here are the top social commerce platforms:
Facebook
Facebook introduced Facebook Shops to capitalize on the commercial opportunity by allowing vendors to advertise and sell directly through the platform. Facebook integrates social commerce with shopping, allowing users to purchase products smoothly. Facebook shops offer a smooth user experience where users can review products and get recommendations from trusted acquaintances. Customers can directly interact with the merchant’s customer service department post-purchase.
Instagram
60% of people discover new products on Instagram. Owned by Facebook, Instagram facilitates in-app shopping and handles the entire transactions within the app itself. Users scrolling on Instagram often wants to follow trends and replicate the looks of their role models or favorite influencers. By offering purchasing options in the app, Instagram benefits from the platform’s rich visual imagery and videos, allowing businesses to sell an idea rather than the traditional process of selling a product.
TikTok
Shopify partnered with TikTok to introduce shopping and drive sales through the younger and seemingly ever-expanding TikTok audience. With TikTok for Business Ads Manager, brands and merchants can create in-feed video-based content depending on their product offering. This partnership allows Shopify merchants to expand to the TikTok audience.
Snapchat
Snapchat has recently launched Brand profiles, a feature that allows users to scroll through a merchant’s products and buy them in-app. This new experience is powered by Shopify too. Merchants can create Brand Profiles or Native Stores that allow users to purchase products from the app.
Pinterest users are there for Shopping Inspiration
Pinterest
Pinterest is also an image-based platform where users create boards of their favorite wedding accessories, home decor, fashion trends, etc. Pinterest doesn’t specifically offer social commerce for the global audience. Rather, it allows business accounts to create ‘Product Pins’ that are displayed in the brand’s Pinterest shop. Only U.S. customers can purchase within the app. Users from other countries are redirected to the eCommerce site to complete the sale. We have added Pinterest to this list because 89% of Pinterest users are there for shopping inspiration.
Pinterest is an image-based platform where users create boards
Why Should Brands Care About Social Commerce
To enhance social media presence and brand awareness
If your target demographic is in the 18-to-34 age range, they’re already on social media and waiting to shop while they scroll. According to Sprout Social, over 68% of consumers have already purchased directly from social media and nearly all (98%) consumers plan to make at least one purchase through social or influencer commerce this year. You can enhance brand awareness by selling on social media platforms. Influencer marketing is an amazing way to build brand awareness since customers are now seeking authenticity from micro-influencers rather than big-name celebrities.
To generate social proof
90% of online shoppers say that they read online reviews before making an online purchase. Whether it’s an automated follow-up email or a message through the social media platform, ask for a review after your product has been delivered to the customer. You can also offer incentives like a contest to encourage previous customers to weigh in and share their experiences. These steps will allow you to collect social proof since it’s vital to build a positive reputation online. You can also ask customers to create small product review videos that you can share on your social feeds in creative ways. You can also post user-generated content, create a carousel of positive comments, or host a live video with happy customers.
Social Proof
To simplify the buying process for consumers
Traditional eCommerce involves several steps. It starts with displaying ads on social media platforms and customers being redirected to the business website for completing the transaction. To complete the transaction, customers also have to create an account or manually fill in the credit card details and delivery address. On the other hand, social is only a three-step process — find, click and buy.
Counterfeit Products
Conclusion
While social commerce is proliferating, it also has a few setbacks like the rise of counterfeit products. Counterfeiting has expanded into social media and has become an under-reported but vital hub for counterfeiters. A counterfeit detection solution can help brands and merchants identify & remove fake and unauthorized products. Technologies like image recognition can help in counterfeit detection by capturing fake logos and discrepancies. Removing counterfeit products will help brands safeguard customer loyalty and prevent fake products from harming your bottom line.
Here’s how DataWeave helped Classic Accessories, a leading manufacturer of high-quality furnishings & accessories identify counterfeit products across multiple retail marketplace websites eliminating 22 hours of time spent per week conducting manual audits – read the case study here.
Are you a brand or a retailer worried about counterfeits? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how we can help you track, identify and eliminate fakes!
As inflation continues to hike costs for consumers and supply chains challenge them to maintain loyalty, there is still an active audience willing to pay the ultimate price for the convenience of food and alcohol delivery. That being said, we analyzed 8 popular Retail and Delivery Intermediary websites and 11 popular ‘Cinco de Mayo’ keywords to see which Brands are predicted to win the battle of Digital Shelf Share of Search this holiday.
2022 Cinco de Mayo Share of Search Insights – Top Brands for ‘Cinco de Mayo’
Opportunities for Food & Bev on Cinco de Mayo
While most of our analysis focused on popular Cinco de Mayo food and beverage products, none of these brands populated on either Target (pictured on left below) or Walmart (pictured on right below) page 1 search results for the term ‘Cinco de Mayo’. Keyword search results for this term are dominated primarily by décor brands as indicated below.
Brands Achieving Top Share of Search for Food and Beverage Categories on Cinco de Mayo 2022
Share of Keyword Search Results – Alcohol Category
Three of the most popular alcohol types sought out during Cinco de Mayo are ‘Mexican Beer’, ‘Mezcal’, and ‘Tequila’. Below are the brands dominating Share of Keyword Search results on each of the major retail websites we researched.
AmazonFresh, Meijer, Kroger, and Sam’s Club Share of Search – Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
We also reviewed the same keyword performance across popular delivery intermediaries to see how Share of Keyword Search altered for ‘Mexican Beer’, ‘Mezcal’, and ‘Tequila’. The results are below for TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly and GoPuff:
TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly, and GoPuff of Search – Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
The keyword ‘Agave’ is also a popular search term within the alcohol category during the time leading up to Cinco de Mayo. We reviewed keyword search performance at various zip codes to see how price points that populated on page 1 search results varied given the change in median income. Below are the results:
Share of Search for Alcohol by Price Point and Zip Code on AmazonFresh
Share of Keyword Search Results – Grocery Categories
We also reviewed some of the most popular grocery items purchased during Cinco de Mayo by Keyword Share of Search results to see which brands are primed to win the Digital Shelf this year. Below are the results for Target.com and Walmart.com.
Walmart and Target Share of Search – Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
Below are the results for the same popular grocery items and alcohol keywords related to Cinco de Mayo and the page 1 results seen for Brand Share of Search on Safeway.com.
Safeway Share of Search – Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis, and let us know what other holiday insights you’d be interested in seeing this year. Happy Cinco de Mayo!
Finding the right price often requires a trade-off between margin and price perception. Brands may want to defeat competitors’ prices on all their products, but that can often lead to losses because sales directly link to price perception. Instead of trying to stay competitive across the board on all products, brands must identify key value categories (KVCs) and key-value items (KPIs) whose prices buyers tend to remember and price those products competitively. In this scenario, they can make up for lowered prices on key products by fixing higher prices on other products.
Consumers’ perception of price fairness largely determines their experience with a brand. Brands selling online can often have a disconnect between their prices and what customers expect their prices to be. However, that does not mean spiraling downwards by getting trapped in discounting cycles and heavy promotions that can harm your bottom line. Instead, brands require real-time monitoring across thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) to identify key categories and items they need to price with care. In this blog, you’ll learn about price perception and the factors that influence it.
What is Price Perception?
Price perception is the perceived worth of a product or service in the consumer’s mind. It is one of the leading variables in the consumer’s buying process. Buyers are unaware of the true cost of production for the products they buy. Instead, they make buying decisions based on an internal feeling about how much certain products are worth and which brand offers them the best value. To offer competitive prices and yet obtain a higher price for products, brands often pursue marketing strategies to improve the price perception of their brand and products.
Price Perception
However, brands should not fall into the trap of assuming that price perception is a competitor’s price index. It’s not about offering the lowest price on certain SKUs. Not every brand strives to offer the lowest prices. Some brands take a slightly different approach to ensure the right value for their products. For example, take a look at Trader Joe’s, a grocery chain that has never claimed low costs. They’ve always taken a holistic approach to their pricing and customers to build a loyal following. And it worked well for them. Trader Joe’s can boast one of a high-value perception score, despite not having rock-bottom prices.
Marketplaces such as Walmart and Amazon may not have the best prices on every item. Still, customer perception is that they will have the lowest prices and will often shift the share of sales towards such platforms over businesses that offer the same or even lower prices.
Some things to consider:
What do your customers think of your brand?
What are the key factors that are driving your customers’ price perceptions?
Is your product mix properly aligned with your brand perception?
Are you communicating the most important and relevant information to your customers?
Is your message being received and understood?
Who do your customers see as your competitors, and why?
Price positioning is pricing products or services within a certain price range. It indicates where certain services or products lie in relation to competitors’ pricing and in the mind of different customers. A brand’s price positioning has a huge impact on whether the products are seen as priced low or not. The following is a great way to understand the price-value matrix:
Price Positioning
Your brand’s position in this matrix will depend on your pricing objectives, competition, and customer loyalty. Price positioning helps the marketing and operating teams understand customers’ perceptions of your brand and convince customers to buy your products. Brands need a holistic approach toward setting prices for their products in order to drive conversions through intelligent pricing and competitive insights.
Factors that influence Price Perception
Price-Quality Relationship
Price is often an indicator of product quality. The general rule is that the higher-priced products are perceived to have better quality, implying that brands should consider a rational quality-price relationship in their pricing or promo strategy. For example, it might not be best practice to have similar prices for both good and low-quality products because customers will perceive low-quality products as overpriced and might not purchase from you.
Price-Consciousness
Customers aren’t price conscious about every product. Instead, they are only price conscious about certain products under the best price guarantee or BGP. For instance, if buyers find your BGP products more expensive than your competitors, the cheaper products in your assortment will still be perceived as expensive.
Value-Consciousness
During markdown periods, ensure that you are not undermining the efforts to shape and maintain price perception by offering extreme or complex discounts. In an attempt to clear stocks, promotions simply confuse the shopping experience for customers and further deteriorate trust in your brand. Your promotional offers should keep price perception during the holiday season or clearance sales by offering a simplified promotional program. Start by understanding which price mechanics and SKUs work best for your target customer segment. You should also reduce over-communication on hero deals else buyers will assume that you incorrectly price products during new seasonal launches.
Prestige Sensitivity
Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard professor, argues that 95% of all purchasing decisions are subconscious. Luxury brands are a great example of how psychology directly links to price perception. Customers buy premium or luxury products to demonstrate their social status. In this scenario, buyers don’t hesitate to buy expensive products from certain brands even if they are explicitly overpriced. Thus, brands selling premium products will have to ensure pricing is coherent with buyers’ expectations.
Every customer wants to know they’re getting the best value. They use the highest and lowest prices in a range to understand how expensive a product or brand is. So, by removing high price point lines with low volume, customers will see more minor price points around the store. Brands must merchandise entry price points to help customers identify the lowest prices and improve the perception of their product ranges.
Product Range
How to adjust Price Perception
Here are three ways for brands to improve price parity:
Marketing to influence Price Perception
An efficient pricing management strategy will focus on competitiveness and establishing the right price perception among your customers. You can influence customers’ price perception by improving the look and feel of your online stores since simpler designs are often reflections of lower prices. Another great way to influence price perception is to offer loyalty and reward programs that also improve brand loyalty and reinforces the vision of an economy store irrespective of the prices of your products.
Competitive Analysis
Brands can understand price differences after a competitive analysis. Customers often search for similar products across brands to find the best deals, and you will be able to understand customer opinion through competitor analysis.
Price Management Automation
A price monitoring platform can help brands to stay on top of promotions and discounts offered by their competitors. A price intelligence software will help brands associate products by similarity criteria and compare the pricing of their products with those of competitors. It offers a detailed view of the market and ensures that brands take care of their bottom line.
Conclusion
When a consumer comes across a similar low-priced product or service from a different brand, they may see it as a good deal or might perceive it not worthy of their time or money. What consumers think about your brand’s price is just as important as the actual price of that product. A buyer may sense a company as “upscale” and assume that they have high prices, or they may see a brand as a discount retailer whose prices are too high for its reputation. At times, consumers might also see cheaper alternatives as inferior. It’s not easy for a brand to understand its customers’ perception of price vs. value it offers. Brands need a long-term, dynamic pricing strategy that matches the demands and trends of a global, competitive market. And in order to drive sustainable growth, they need to make smarter pricing and promotion decisions with insights into competitive pricing.
Learn how DataWeave can help make sense of your and your competitor’s pricing & promotional strategies and help your brand build the right Price Perception. Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.
According to MarketingCharts, 63% of online shoppers start their buying journey on Amazon. This shows that customers believe they will find the products they are looking for with competitive prices and excellent customer service on Amazon. Amazon is one of the most dominant eCommerce marketplaces with 197 million users and 112 million Amazon Prime members. Brands can sell on Amazon to capitalize on this vast customer base by showcasing and promoting their products properly.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the top 7 strategies to sell effectively on Amazon:
1. Boost Product Discoverability using Ads
Amazon Advertising helps sellers, brands, and agencies to drive profitability by making sure product discoverability is high & shoppers are able to find their brand with ease. The ads on Amazon fuel product discovery and improve conversion rate. The advertising options on Amazon are designed to help brands increase exposure, generate incremental sales, boost organic rankings, and drive growth.
Amazon has three PPC programs: sponsored product ads, sponsored brands ads, and sponsored display ads. Brands can increase visibility on Amazon with these three paid campaigns. You can sponsor products or your brand for related searches on Amazon. Businesses only pay for clicks received.
Sponsored products are for individual product listings that appear on shopping results pages and product detail pages. Sponsored brands are for showcasing brand portfolios such as logo, custom headline, and a selection of products on the shopping results page. The last is sponsored display, a self-service advertising solution for displaying ads on and off Amazon.
Promotions for Brand and SKU’s
2. Improve your Amazon SEO using effective Product Descriptions
To effectively sell on Amazon, businesses first have to understand the A9 algorithm. Amazon uses A9 Algorithm to decide which products are ranked in search results, emphasizing sales conversions. This algorithm helps Amazon promote listings that are more likely to result in sales.
Keywords in product descriptions are one of the main driving factors that the Amazon A9 algorithm looks for in determining relevance to search queries and setting rankings on its results pages. Therefore, brands must integrate high volume and significantly relevant keywords as part of their listings. Crafting product descriptions with the right keywords will provide compelling reasons for buyers to purchase the product and for the A9 algorithm to better rank the brands. Brands can analyze and optimize their content to improve discoverability across Amazon. Accurate product descriptions help users make informed decisions and allow brands to deliver a consistent customer experience.
Detailed Descriptions and Highlights
3. Improve your Product Visuals
Avoid using standard visuals when displaying your products in Amazon’s image gallery. Product images are the hook that encourages visitors to click on your products. However, Amazon has specific image requirements that you’ll need to adhere to while presenting products. When shopping on Amazon, potential buyers are looking for high-definition and clearly visible photos. Thus, you will need diversity in images if you want your product and photos to stand out.
In addition to images, brands can make their product descriptions better through video content. Videos help your brand to stand out, build a more personal relationship with customers, and lead to increased sales. One study on eCommerce sellers found that using product videos increases sales for online stores by 144%.
Product Images
4. Switch to Intelligent Pricing & Win the Buy Box
Intelligent and competitive pricing is the most essential lever for revenue growth. With advanced technology like AI and analytics, brands can get insights into competitive pricing and develop an intelligent pricing strategy to calculate real-time changes in pricing optimally.
Amazon wants to give the consumer the best value for their money and thus has a Buy Box option. The white box on the right side of the Amazon product detail page is called the Buy Box, and customers can directly add items for purchase to their cart. However, not all sellers are eligible to win the Buy Box.
Thanks to Amazon’s customer-obsessed approach and high competition, only businesses with excellent seller metrics have a chance to win a share of Buy Box. Amazon weighs low prices with high seller metrics. If your brand has near-perfect performance metrics, having higher prices can still get you a share of the Buy Box. In contrast, brands with mid-range metrics will probably need to focus on offering the most competitive price.
But, why is the Buy Box important? According to BigCommerce, 82% of sales on Amazon go through the Buy Box, and the rate is even higher for mobile purchases. Getting insights into your competitor’s pricing with our Digital Shelf Solution will help you improve seller metrics and find the right pricing strategy for your products.
5. Provide Plenty of Social Proof
Testimonials can increase sales page conversions by 34%. Social proof has emerged to be of great importance in the eCommerce world, and it isn’t limited to recommendations from people customers know in the “real world.” A survey conducted by BrightLocal revealed that 31% of consumers reported that they read more online reviews in 2020 than ever due to Covid-19.
Product ratings and reviews on Amazon are at the center of the recommended products section, product listing page, and search results. Interestingly, customer feedback also has a huge impact on a brand’s ODR or Order Defect Rate. It is one of the most critical measurements tracked by Amazon. ODR is a measure of customers who have had a negative experience with you as a seller. Amazon uses it to assess a brand’s health as a seller. The ODR indicator is driven by customer feedback, so review management is the primary step for brands to avoid an Amazon ODR warning and improve their order defect.
6. Go Global
The Amazon marketplace is available in countries and markets worldwide, allowing brands to explore new territories and sell their products globally. Each foreign territory has a unique Amazon site that resonates with its culture and audience, making it easy for global sellers to compete with other brands. If your eCommerce brand has the operation capacity to expand globally, Amazon offers state-of-the-art international logistic capabilities.
Brands can expand in European countries like France, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, etc., and Asia Pacific locations like India, Japan, and Australia. Amazon is also available in emerging eCommerce locations like the Middle East, Brazil, Turkey, and Singapore.
7. Build a Branded Store
One of the best strategies to stand out on Amazon is to feature your products on a branded Store. Amazon has free tools that allow grants to build an online store where brands and sellers can showcase products and connect with customers. These stores look different from the typical Amazon listing layout and also have the option to create detailed pages with A+ content.
Build your Brand Page
For instance, Netgear, a company that offers technology-related products has an excellent branded store on Amazon. The brand has embedded images and videos that address buyers’ needs and how users’ lives are affected by using their products. The most attractive feature about this store is that they have integrated the value offered by their products into new use cases because of the current pandemic. For example, they’ve used phrases like “Make Online Learning fast and fun” and “Work from office at office speed.” Additionally, the categories and search tab help buyers search for specific products easily.
Creating branded stores allows you to build a beautiful brand experience for customers and offers a multi-page, immersive shopping experience. Brands can pick unique designs, integrate promotions, and use rich media to create a custom curation of handpicked products.
Conclusion
Amazon has 9.7 million sellers worldwide, of which 1.9 million are actively selling on the marketplace. The competition on Amazon is fierce, and it’s continuously increasing. Despite a large number of active sellers on Amazon, only a tiny fraction generates a significant portion of its total sales. Fewer than one in ten active Amazon sellers generated over $100,000 in annual sales, and only one percent of them hit the $1 million sales mark. Use these strategies to develop a comprehensive understanding of the Amazon platform and how to sell effectively on the platform while maximizing your presence amid rising competition.
No matter where your eCommerce business sells, there are some fundamentals that brands have to get right to achieve sales targets. Brands need to find the right product/market fit, nail their lead acquisition strategy, and design a qualified sales funnel to turn prospects into leads and eventually returning customers. They will also have to analyze their customer’s buying journey and get insights into competitors’ strategies to understand what works for their business.
If your eCommerce business is struggling, read this blog to learn about steps you can take to increase sales and keep your business afloat.
1. Lack of social proof
Customers often check for reviews or testimonials before making a purchase. Our decisions are consciously or unconsciously influenced by the opinions, choices, and actions of people around us. Social proof helps brands build customer trust, adds credibility to their business, improves brand presence, and validates customers’ buying decisions. 92% of consumers are more likely to trust user-generated content (UGC) and non-paid recommendations than any other type of advertising. Additionally, brands should also find ways to combat negative reviews since bad reviews can sometimes be extremely damaging.
Understanding these reviews or the impact of your brand’s social proof is critical. At DataWeave, we help brands analyze online reviews to understand customer sentiment and adapt to feedback to enhance their experience with your brand.
2. Slow site speed
Site speed of the home page and checkout page on your D2C website can be a roadblock. Slow sections on your site like My Accounts, checkout, and cart are often overlooked when it comes to tracking site speed. Brands should run their checkout process at least once a month to ensure it’s fast, smooth, and bug-free. You can optimize images, strip unused scripts, implement HTTP/2, etc., to improve site speed and performance.
3. Poor customer service
69% of US consumers say customer service is very important when it comes to their loyalty to a brand. Guaranteeing a return customer is important to maintaining customer loyalty. While the focus is on the first purchase for new customers, your brand’s customer service will determine if first-time customers become repeat buyers. Loyal customers are known to spend 67% more on a brand product than new customers, even if they make up only 20% of your audience.
Types of customer service
4. Failure to send traffic to popular products
Be it your own D2C website, or when selling on a marketplace, you should be able to drive traffic to your best-selling products. One of the best ways for sending traffic to popular products on your website is to run paid ad campaigns and reach new audiences with influencer marketing on social media. Brands can also attract customers with organic media such as writing blogs and producing podcasts.
If you’re looking at driving traffic to key products on Amazon & other such marketplaces, sponsored ads are the way to go! Sponsored ads help your best-selling products more discoverable & helps shoppers find your brand with ease.
5. Inadequate pricing
Finding the right pricing strategy for your eCommerce business is crucial for optimizing sales and increasing revenue. The first step is to perform a competitor and historical data analysis to get a general idea of the market and then develop a pricing strategy that is the right fit for your products. Brands also have to ensure that they have dynamic pricing that can adjust according to supply and demand.
One of the biggest mistakes that eCommerce businesses can make is targeting the wrong audience. It’s crucial for brands to define that target audience and then tailor products and marketing toward them. To increase sales as an eCommerce business, brands have to understand their audience, their interests, and how to appeal to their interest. Start by creating ideal buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. Also, segmenting audiences and targeting various groups based on buyer personas for ad campaigns will lead to better sales and revenue.
Targeting the right audience
7. Poor product descriptions
One of the major and common mistakes by eCommerce brands is using irrelevant product descriptions that are not optimized for the product. Customers don’t add products to their cart if they have difficulty finding sufficient information relevant to the product. Brands should write attention-grabbing descriptions optimized for SEO that are informative for the users. Here are some tips to optimize content to drive more eCommerce sales.
Due to COVID-19, many businesses have had to modify or temporarily shut down their daily operations. However, finding new revenue streams can be a great way for eCommerce businesses to make up for the lost income and keep the company afloat. The best solution is to diversify your product offerings by offering commonly purchased products in bundles.
9. Low-quality visuals
Businesses fail to hit their sales targets because of low-quality visuals in product descriptions. High-quality and custom images can improve conversion rates from both marketplaces and image-based channels like social media. Social media users are attracted to exciting, high-quality content that conveys a desirable lifestyle. Brands should use high-resolution, attractive pictures of their products. Brands can also utilize UGC and influencers to help build up their content libraries.
Low-quality visuals
10. Wrong Assortment. Poor Availability
When your target audience lands on your eCommerce store and cannot find what they’re looking for, it leads to a poor shopping experience, but more importantly a lost sale for your brand! While you cannot have endless inventory, it’s essential to optimize your assortment & product availability to decrease the chances of your customer walking away. Assortment & availability optimization begins with analyzing current and historical inventory trends. If done manually, assortment can be a time-consuming task. A healthy assortment can increase retail sales by creating a positive shopping experience for your customers and encouraging them to return to your store again.
11. Bad eCommerce UX
Offering a sub-standard user experience is a common reason why eCommerce businesses find it difficult to increase sales. According to a study, the conversions can fall by up to 7% for every one-second delay in page load time. Businesses can use a countdown clock on their landing page and exit pop-ups to improve conversations. Your landing page and product descriptions should provide information that helps your users make a better and more informed decision.
Conclusion
If your eCommerce’s business sales are tanking, improving site speed, customer service, social proof, and product descriptions are some of the levers you can pull to remedy the situation. Brands should also work on improving online reviews & ratings, availability, assortment, visuals, and website UX to improve customer experience. These steps not only increase loyalty but also improve customer retention.
Need help tracking online pricing for your eCommerce business? Or decoding customer sentiment from reviews they’ve left for your products? Or do you need insights into your product assortment and availability? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help!
According to the Statista Fashion eCommerce report 2021, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for online fashion is predicted to be 10.3% between 2018-2023. The widespread need for trendy fashion presents a challenge for fashion brands to succeed in a highly crowded and competitive space. With eCommerce shopping becoming more prevalent, fashion brands aren’t just competing for brick-and-mortar sales. Instead, they’re also competing for those late-night or impulse purchases from online customers.
Looking to 2022 and beyond, this blog will highlight 9 things to build a thriving fashion eCommerce brand:
1. Allow shopping on multiple channels
Breakdown of Shopping journeys in Apparel
Typically buyers from diverse age groups prefer different sales channels. Some prefer large retailers, and some choose web stores. If you know where your customers like to purchase your products, you can leverage the power of search engines and marketplaces to improve your sales. Multi-channel retailing helps fashion eCommerce brands to sell and promote products on a platform and device of the audience’s choice.
A brand should offer support and access to its products across all platforms, channels, and devices. It helps fashion brands to reach customers where they prefer to shop. If your customers prefer to shop on a computer or an app, your brand can offer a seamless customer experience.
2. Don’t sell on the Homepage
Your online fashion store homepage is more about increasing credibility and trust among potential buyers. Your ideal home page shouldn’t display products or their prices. Instead, it would be best to integrate promotional and marketing strategies on the landing page to encourage visitors to explore your product categories and the rest of the website. You should have an intuitive interface that makes navigating the pages easier. You can also use the homepage to promote seasonal offers and new launches. Fashion brands can also display customer reviews, awards, brand achievements, and web security trust seals to increase the conversion rate.
Don’t sell on the homepage
3. Product Descriptions with Unique Stories
Product descriptions often get overlooked or underutilized even though they are important for eCommerce businesses. Your products won’t sell with spammy and same product descriptions. The modern product description is all about communicating a product’s worth and value with a story that captivates your buyer’s attention. Identify areas where your content & images don’t align with your product or represent it in the best light. Make sure to deliver an enhanced consistent brand experience across all online channels to improve your conversions.
4. Focus on Review and Ratings
Rating & Review of a fashion brand
Customer reviews have a huge influence on a buyer’s purchase decision, especially in the fashion industry. Encourage your consumers to leave reviews on your brand website. Reviews help fashion brands to build trust for their products and convert customers. Legitimate customer reviews help your shoppers to get crucial insights into what previous buyers liked or disliked about a particular product.
However, you should stay away from paid-for or false reviews usually encouraged by unscrupulous sellers as they are easy to spot and hurt your rankings. You must remember that receiving reviews also includes dealing with negative comments. They should be used to improve your upcoming product offerings.
5. Sell Looks
The product can be combined with in the detail page
Successful fashion brands don’t simply sell individual products. Instead, they sell complete looks that inspire shoppers to purchase the entire stylish look. As an online fashion brand, you’re not selling clothes; you’re selling an elegant collection of wearable art. When visitors reach your online store, you should appeal to their fantasies and sentiments through aesthetic look books that are both pleasing and congruent with your brand. Most successful online fashion shops are inspirational and visual. Look books help brands pair their previous season items or dead stock with new stock and increase sales. Brands can also share these look books on social media or in their monthly newsletters to increase reach.
6. Provide Promotions and Offers
Fashion brands can take advantage of plenty of sales throughout the year, from New Year celebrations to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Brands can leverage these high sales periods to sell looks and gift items to boost sales. Just make sure you’re measuring the effectiveness of your online promotions. Holiday and festive sales also offer an excellent opportunity to plan strategic discounts to get rid of old stock. Since trends in the fashion industry have been changing rapidly, you can use discounts to get rid of dead-stock or out-of-trend items each season.
7. Be active on social media
Social media is a way to promote your brand, increase trust among your audience, and entertain your audience with exciting content. You can also engage the audience by providing gift coupons or giveaways. Brands can promote products while keeping their audience engaged with engaging content and promotional offers.
Social media is a great way to get influencer support, either organically or through a paid partnership. Brands have to focus on every element of social media marketing strategy, right from choosing a platform, creating Instagram/Facebook shops, jumping on trends/events, and tracking customer sentiment.
8. High-quality product photography
Capture every detail of your product
Nothing is worse than ordering a piece of clothing online and not getting what you saw on the website. Not being able to accurately convey fashion products will hurt your bottom line. Fashion brands must use top-notch product photography that includes high-quality visuals, such as multiple angle views, 360-degree images of each product, accurate depictions of all color options, and the option to zoom in on product attributes.
High-quality product photography
A recent game-changer in the fashion industry has been including different sets of models to accurately feature clothes of various shapes, heights, and weights. Instead of displaying a dress in only one size, fashion brands can have multiple models wearing various sizes for the same article of clothing.
9. Stay up to date with new trends
Fashion eCommerce brands have to be particularly careful of continuously updating their product offering with the latest fashion trends for each season. They can boost sales with an in-demand product assortment. Continuously updated fashion inventory signifies that the brand is up-to-date with the latest fashion trends in the market and has unique products to offer. You can always get creative with new styling, better looks, and personalized product recommendations.
Conclusion
Fashion eCommerce is rapidly growing and transforming at a staggering rate as technologies continue to advance. Traditional fashion brands can now expand their reach from brick-and-mortar shops to digital and eCommerce platforms to reach shoppers across the globe. The new digital selling opportunities also come with considerable challenges – from staying up to date with ever-evolving trends to managing dead stock. Are you a fashion brand that needs help monitoring your product content? Or measuring the effectiveness of your online promotions? Or decoding customer sentiment from reviews they’ve left for your products? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help!
Online reviews have revolutionized how customers purchase products and services. In fact, eCommerce success for certain products hinges on the ratings and reviews. With this, have come the pitfalls of corruption in eCommerce.
New brands trying to establish a presence and capture critical mass have been known to resort to soliciting fake and paid reviews to uplift their brand in search rankings. Similarly, these brands can also encourage fake negative reviews on competitor’s listings to bring down their value. Bots and paid manual reviews are usually employed to rake up the review count. Review sites like TrustPilot, Google Reviews, and marketplaces like Amazon are littered with fraudulent reviews. In fact, Guardian calculated that 3.6% of all reviews on TripAdvisor were fraudulent. According to a 2021 report by Statista, 46% of the 2.7 million online fake reviews that were removed were five-star reviews!
Fake online reviews are misleading since customers shopping both online and offline rely on reviews to make purchase decisions. Fake reviews also pose further problems because they deceive consumers into spending money on a product or with a company they may not have otherwise chosen.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made a recent announcement to send penalties to over 700 brands and retailers for fake endorsements and reviews. While this notice references influencer content and testimonials, it also applies to customer reviews.
In this blog, we will discuss the importance of reviews for brands and retailers, spotting fake reviews on Amazon, and steps that eCommerce companies can take to tackle fake reviews.
Customers are more likely to purchase if other customers, even strangers, agree that it was a great purchase. Reviews also make brands more visible.
Why are fake online reviews so resilient?
A significant reason is that the ROI of getting fake reviews increases profitability & sales multifold. For example, an extra star on Yelp can increase a restaurant’s revenue by 5% to 9%. FTC has said that the expenditure on fake reviews can provide a 20x return. However, fake and incentivized reviews are a huge problem. Amazon, one of the largest eCommerce marketplaces, banned incentivized reviews in 2016. It took down suspicious reviews and has taken legal action against sellers who violate its policies.
Online Reviews
How to Spot a Fake Review on Amazon
Marketplaces, Google, and review sites like Yelp can get hundreds of thousands of reviews daily. In a survey by PCMag that interviewed 1,000 US shoppers who looked forward to shopping on Prime Day 2020, only 16% were very confident about detecting fake Amazon product reviews, and 24% were confident they could do it. The rest of the survey respondents were somewhat or not confident they could pick out the fakes on Amazon. Here are our best tips for spotting fake reviews on marketplaces like Amazon:
Duplicate Content: If you notice dozens of reviews with the same description and title as if they were copied and pasted multiple times, they’re most likely fake reviews.
Multiple Reviews on the Same Day: Another identification of fake reviews is when there are dozens or multiple reviews on a single day. There can be a bunch of both positive and negative reviews for products.
Unverified or Anonymous Reviewers: You can see if the review is from a verified buyer on Amazon. Brands can also check if they have any record of the reviewer’s purchase to weed out fake reviews.
Incorrect Language: Fake reviews can come from people outside your country. If you notice multiple reviews with similar incorrect words and common errors, there is a good chance those reviews are fake, and someone paid the reviewer to write them.
What can eCommerce brands do to protect themselves against fake reviews?
Follow a zero-tolerance policy for fake reviews.
The major step is to ensure that fake reviews are never posted on your site. Allowing fake reviews negatively affects your business and your bottom line. You can hire a third-party UGC moderator that uses data-driven, anti-fraud methods to evaluate reviews. It will be a much more successful and quicker step in protecting your brand’s reputation.
Don’t screen out negative reviews.
While receiving a negative review might be the worst nightmare, they’re necessary for a successful UGC program. Customers are more likely to purchase from a business that responds to all reviews, including negative reviews. Customers said that negative reviews have more detailed product information, while 32% of those customers think they’re less likely to be fake. Besides, brands that respond to negative reviews gain customers’ trust and loyalty. Here are some Tips on how to Respond to Negative reviews online.
Be transparent about how you collect UGC.
Brands can ensure that their customers trust user-generated content by being honest about how they collected it. Companies should never ask for paid or incentivized positive reviews. Instead, brands should empower their customers to leave honest feedback. If you’re offering free products, a chance to win something, or discount coupons in exchange for an unbiased review, then the review should specify how it was collected. For example, you can add indicators like “this reviewer received a coupon or a free product in exchange for honest feedback.
Maintain trust
Having fake reviews causes a loss of trust, with many consumers believing that they have seen fake reviews for online and offline businesses. Removing fake reviews doesn’t only help with revenue and brand trust, but it also helps brands to maintain trust among their existing and future customers.
Conclusion
Fake reviews are one of the biggest reputation killers and a huge problem for eCommerce platforms, brands, and customers. Brands must take the necessary steps to minimize the risk of fake reviews and expand businesses among authentic users. Although modern text generation tools are becoming more competent in writing realistic reviews, there are AI- and ML-backed tools that can accurately detect reviews written by other machines.
Need help tracking your online ratings & reviews? Or decoding customer sentiment from reviews they’ve left for your products? DataWeave offers a customizable and scaleable data solution to analyse ratings and reviews for online retailers and brands vis v vis their competitors. Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help.
When it comes to brands – the biggest story of 2021 was the astronomical growth of Brand Roll-ups. For the uninitiated, Brand Roll-ups are companies that acquire multiple digital consumer brands and then scale these brands 100x by leveraging their own operational expertise across eCommerce platforms, Supply Chain, Warehousing, Marketing, and so on.
Thrasio is the poster boy for the Brand roll-ups and is valued at over 10 Bn USD.
Brand rollups have raised over $12 billion in 2021 and the trend only seems to be accelerating in 2022. Not only Brand Roll ups, but VCs too have been pouring money into digital brands. In India, 77+ brands have raised more than 2B USD in 2021. In the US this number is estimated to be north of $10 billion.
Cumulative capital raised by Amazon Aggregators
Scaling fast doesn’t come easy. It comes with its own set of challenges. So even with ample experience in running and scaling brands, Brand roll-ups are posed with unique challenges.
Challenge of Scouting the right brand
There are 1000s of online consumer brands and new ones are launching every day. Every Brand roll-up wants to be the first one to scout a brand – but this is not easy.
The challenge here is to identify & pick the right brands without having access to any sales or financial data. Every Brand Rollup has a wishlist with regards to the number of SKUs, price points, reviews, and ratings as well – but don’t have tools in place to scout brands with these criteria in mind. And across multiple platforms and categories, the problem gets more complicated.
This is an ongoing problem since a brand that was not selling well yesterday may start hitting higher sales numbers a week down the line – and that is why Brand scouting has to be a continuous process.
One way these aggregators have solved this challenge is by offering mouth-watering referral fees for referring a brand. But this is not a sustainable long-term solution.
Data Comes to the Rescue
What Brand Roll-ups need is a continuous and automated data first Brand Scouting solution to enable them to scout the right brands.
What are all the brands in a category of interest?
Which of these brands is within the filters of Number of SKUs, Price Range, etc.?
Which brands have shown an exceptional rise in search rankings?
Which brands have shown the most increase in the number of ratings and reviews?
Which brands have the highest gain in the customer ratings?
What are the estimated sales and market share of the brands?
DataWeave’s Brand Scouting Solution is a comprehensive solution to help Brand Rollups and VCs scout for the ideal brand that fits their acquisition profile. We leverage public data collected from multiple eCommerce platforms to get them the desired information on brands they’re looking for.
For all the focused categories (Typically 30-40) – we collect data of all the SKUs (Typically 15,000-20,000) and aggregate that at a Brand level:
Ranking – Usually Brand Rollups are not interested in the Brands which are on the first page. But, they are interested in the brands which might be b/w 500 to 10,000 ranks but are showing an exceptional gain in ranking week on week.
Brand Discoverability & Ranking on Amazon
Ratings – It’s important to look at brands that are showing high improvement in ratings or have consistently shown high ratings. The proportion of 5 stars vs. 1 star is an important metric here.
Number of Reviews and Ratings – We enable you to find brands that have both high ratings as well as a high number of reviews. This is a very good metric to find the brands in a category that are getting exceptional customer love.
Brand Popularity Tracker
Filters – We enable filtering in terms of – No. of SKUs, Price Range, Rating and Reviews and even can eliminate established brands so that you only see the brands which qualify your criteria. We also enable you to separately analyze brands that are buying sponsored ads in a category, so you have a clear distinction between organic and sponsored growth of these brands.
Trends – What is important is not just the static performance on the day of analysis – but a trend analysis over a period of time to find the brands which are growing exceptionally.
Brand Score Trend, Average Rating trend & No of Reviews Trend
… but, wait there’s more.
We compliment Brand Scouting with three more solutions to provide the right context and further analysis needed to provide comprehensive insights into the category and platforms where you are scouting for brands:
Category Analytics: When you are looking at a category and the brands in that category, it is often important to understand how dynamic that category is. We can help analyze:
If the category is crowded with more brands per product.
Does it have space for new brands?
What is the number of new brands entering that category?
We can also help with benchmarking the category – to help understand how the brand that you are scouting is doing when compared to its category peers.
Rank Group versus Price, Rating & No of Reviews
Sales & Share: We can also provide a good directional estimate of the sales and market share of all the SKUs in the category wherein you are scouting for brands. These are estimates powered by our proprietary machine learning algorithms and can help you solidify your hypothesis around a blog or a category.
Revenue by Price Points
Sentiment Analysis of Reviews: Customer reviews tell more about the qualitative aspects of the SKU and the brand itself. Our algorithms can help understand what features of a brand or a product do customers really care about. We can answer questions such as:
Which features are mentioned most commonly?
Which features are mentioned positively or negatively?
What adjective is used to describe that particular feature?
Customer Sentiment Analysis
The suite of Brand Scouting and complementary solutions is evolving rapidly as the space is evolving rapidly. We are supporting several VCs and Brand Roll-ups globally to scout for brands.
The best aspect about DataWeave is our ability to scout brands across 2,000+ eCommerce platforms globally across geographies. We are super stoked to be playing an enabler in the Brand Rollup revolution.
The challenge for Brand roll-ups is not over by just scouting and acquiring a brand. The journey is just about starting – the next challenge that the Brand Rollup faces now is to scale up these brands.
The challenge the Brand Rollup face is unique and very different from a single brand operator or even traditional CPG conglomerates.
DataWeave’s flexible product philosophy enables Brand Roll-ups to diagnose and measure the performance of multiple brands across multiple platforms in one dashboard.
Customers love discounts, and promotions are the most effective tool to attract shoppers and increase sales during the holiday season and clearance sales. According to a survey, 76% of UK customers look for discounts before purchasing a product. Promotional discounts encourage customers to try new brands. And this is why brands often have a special coupon for first-time users.
According to Software Advice, discounting tops the pricing strategy for retailers across all industries. It is preferred by 97% of survey respondents over other promotional strategies.
Share of Respondents
Retail Trends in the UK for 2022
The arrival of the Omicron variant in December 2021 slashed the shopping mood of UK customers and led to a 3.7% monthly drop in retail sales, but sales were still higher than February 2020 levels when Covid-19 first hit worldwide. Sales during the holiday season in 2021 took a hit due to a consistent decline in product availability and an increase in prices. Inflation too started to rise in 2021 and is expected to increase by 7% by spring 2022. However, despite inflation, retail sales jumped back in January 2022. In fact, it is predicted that inflation will be a key driver of sales growth, with underlying demand across categories being uneven. Keeping that in mind, let’s look at sales growth across categories in 2021 and projected growth in 2022.
Category Breakdown: Sales growth 2021/22
Discounting Trends we saw in the UK in 2021
Methodology
We tracked prices on the three biggest Sales Days in the UK – Amazon Prime Day, June 21st & 22nd 2021 – Black Friday, Nov 26th, 2021 – Cyber Monday, Nov 29th, 2021
Categories tracked: Beauty, Fashion, Electronics, Home Improvement, Furniture
Websites tracked: Amazon UK, OnBuy, eBay UK, Etsy, Wayfair, Selfridges, John Lewis
Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are three of the biggest sales days with comparable discounts. However, according to new research, in 54% of cases, it depends on the category of product you’re after that determines the volume of discount you get. For example, tech items such as smartphones, laptops, games consoles, smartwatches, and wireless speakers were cheaper on Black Friday but may not necessarily have been cheaper on the other sale days.
We wanted to see which sale period had the most number of products on discount during the three big sale events. We also wanted to see which of those three sales would’ve been the best for consumers to get a higher section of products at a discount.
How Big were the Discounts?
Discount across 3 key Sale Days
32% of products went on discount during Black Friday, 35% on Cyber Monday, and only 6.6% on Prime Day. One factor contributing to the low Prime Day percentage is the fact that not all retailers participate in discounting wars during Prime Day since it’s an exclusive Amazon-only sale. Customers looking for the best deals would’ve gotten them during the holiday season with a combination of the Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales.
Another interesting thing to note is the percentage discount – on Prime Day, only 0.2% of products had a discount of over 50% of all the discounted products. While on Black Friday & Cyber Monday that number was 1.7% & 1.3% respectively.
In conclusion, more products were offered at a discount on Black Friday & Cyber Monday; and the total percentage discount on those products was also higher.
Which Categories had the Maximum Discount?
Discounts by category
On Black Friday, an estimated 47% of consumers in the UK planned to shop for electronics, whereas 40% of customers planned to shop for clothing and footwear during Black Friday to Cyber Monday. The top-selling categories across the 48 hours of Amazon UK’s Black Friday 2021 sale included Home, Toys, Beauty, Books, and Health & Personal Care.
Our data shows that Categories with the highest discounts were Beauty and Electronics with the highest discount on all 3 sale events. These 2 categories had discounts on over 40% products on Black Friday & Cyber Monday while categories like Home Improvement were in the 30 – 35% range, Furniture in the 27 – 32% range and Fashion has the least products on discounts at a little over 15%
In the fashion category in the UK, Amazon UK offered the highest percentage of items with a price decrease (31.6%), whereas eBay offered the most significant magnitude of price decrease (14.3%).
Which UK Retailers gave the most discounts?
OnBuy is an emerging marketplace in the UK that offers impressive discounted prices and is taking on top UK marketplaces like Amazon. It’s ranked Britain’s fastest-growing eCommerce platform in 2020 and also the fastest grower by traffic. The low listing fees starting at 5% allow sellers to competitively price their products, making them more accessible to a greater number of buyers with huge discounts. The most prominent deals and discounts are highlighted on the landing page and featured across OnBuy’s social pages to grab the audience’s attention.
Discounts by Retailer
This was clearly reflective in the data we gathered from the 3 big sales in 2021. Most retailers in the UK, including Amazon offered at best 20% of their products, in the categories we tracked, at discount. The only outlier was OnBuy – OnBuy offered close to 90% of their products at discount!
OnBuy was able to offer a comparatively high number of discounted products than their competition because the magnitude of the discount was much much lower. The platform offered minimal discounts; out of the 90% of discounted products, 80% of those products had discounts that were less than 10%. As opposed to other retailers who had under 7% of their products on discounts of less than 10%.
OnBuy’s discounting strategy built a perception that they were the biggest discounters, even when the discounts were not as deep.
Black Friday v/s Cyber Monday – which one was better for holiday shoppers?
Discount by category- Black Friday VS Cyber Monday
Black Friday kicks off the holiday shopping season and is synonymous with some of the most significant sales after Thanksgiving. But until recently, Cyber Monday has become a great way for eCommerce retailers to capitalize on holiday discounts and expand their most beneficial sales events of the year.
In 2021, retailers pulled in $8.9 billion in Black Friday online sales and a total sales of $10.7 billion on Cyber Monday. In the YOY review, Black Friday saw a decline of 1.3% from 2020’s record of $9.03 billion, and Cyber Monday saw a drop of 1.4%, only $100 million shy of $10.8 billion in 2020.
Across Beauty, Home Improvement, Electronics & Furniture categories, we saw that more products were on discount on Cyber Monday v/s Black Friday. However, the opposite was true for the Fashion Category. In the Fashion Category, we saw a marginally higher number of products on Discount during Black Friday than Cyber Monday.
Discount percentages across categories
Across both sales, the Electronics category offered the highest discounts at over 40% of products discounted compared to other categories on both Black Friday & Cyber Monday. However, a very small fraction of the products had a discount of over 50%, indicating the lack of ‘BIG blockbuster deals’ in this category. At the same time, the Fashion category offered the least number of deals with less than 20% products on discount, but the highest magnitude of discount across the board! On Black Friday, 3.8% of products had discounts higher than 50%, and 2.6% of products on Cyber Monday. In most other categories, between 1 – 1.5% of products had over 50% discount. However, Fashion brands offered more than 50% discount on 2x the average number of products on both sale days.
Why did the Fashion Category offer such high discounts? Brands are now capitalizing on customers’ need for instant gratification in the age of see-now, buy-now fashion trends by offering their products at high discounts. It also allows them to quickly eliminate overstock. However, this has given rise to fast fashion, a trend that focuses on rapidly producing low-quality clothes in huge volume. Fast fashion focuses on replicating trendy pieces like streetwear and fashion week designs, not four times a year but every week, if not daily. Fast fashion promotes brands to manufacture and sell low-quality merchandise that goes out of trend as soon as buyers wear it once. There is little to no time for quality control, and pieces are thrown away after a few wears. In the UK alone, 300,000 tonnes of used clothes are buried or burned in landfills each year. However, every element of fast fashion from rapid production, competitive pricing, to trend replication has a detrimental impact on the planet.
Conclusion
The effects of COVID-19 can be seen far and wide in the UK retail industry, especially with a steep rise in inflation. Fortunately, even though retail sales in the UK declined during the 2021 holiday season due to the Omicron variant, they increased during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Sales also jumped back in January 2022 and are further projected to grow by 5% in 2022. Additionally, brands can sustain the impact of disruptive factors throughout 2022 by ensuring their Digital Shelf is updated and flexible enough to react swiftly to both threats and opportunities in order to maximize the chances of success.
For many brands, pricing strategy boils down to guesswork — shooting in the dark and hoping consumers are willing and happy to pay. However, the ‘throw it at the wall, and see what sticks’ pricing strategy leads to big pricing mistakes. Pinning down an optimal price for products requires a clear picture of ideal customers, understanding each customer segment’s behavior, a solid grasp of your product’s value, and an analysis of competitors. Pricing analytics can help brands track a wide range of pricing metrics with cutting-edge analytical tools and use insights to get ahead of their competition. This analysis uses historical data to understand how previous pricing and promotion activities affect brand, sales, and customer price perception. It often involves identifying opportunities and weaknesses in competitors’ pricing strategies and exploiting them to improve sales and revenue.
Pricing analytics helps brands understand how product pricing and promotions affect profitability and the steps they can take to optimize their pricing structures. Brands can leverage their pricing and consumer data to design appropriate pricing models for achieving their sales goals.
Here is a brief overview of pricing analytics, its benefits, and ways to improve sales with historical pricing analytics.
What is historical pricing data analytics?
Historical Pricing Data Analytics
Pricing analytics uses historical pricing and demand data to understand how pricing activities have affected profitability and overall brand. It also helps to optimize a brands’ pricing strategy for maximum revenue. Manual tracking of pricing for brands with numerous product lines, multiple selling points, different customer tiers, and complex product bundles is a huge challenge. Brands from every sector and industry vertical, manufacturing and distribution to retail and eCommerce, can benefit from pricing analytics.
There are three types of pricing analysis:
Descriptive
Descriptive pricing analytics involves analyzing historical data to evaluate how customers have perceived and reacted to pricing fluctuations in the past. It analyzes metrics such as month-on-month sales growth, average revenue per customer, year-on-year pricing changes, or changes to the number of registrations to a particular service over a specific period.
Predictive
Although brands can’t accurately predict how pricing changes will reflect sales, they can use predictive pricing analytics to get insights into the best possible chance of doing so. Predictive pricing analyzes historical data with statistical algorithms and machine learning to predict the price and trends of products in the future. It also helps brands to optimize their prices with future goals.
Prescriptive
Prescriptive pricing analytics is the opposite of descriptive analytics. Unlike descriptive analytics that helps brands explore their historical data to understand customer response after an event, prescriptive analytics help brands design better and more informed strategies. With prescriptive analytics, brands can shape their growth strategies to achieve more sustainable results over the long term.
Benefits of historical pricing data analytics
Benefits of Historical Pricing Data Analytics
Acquire insights into customers price perception
While analyzing the metrics to understand pricing optimization, brands can also gather valuable insights into their customer’s price perception. Pricing analytics helps brands understand which customer segments are the most (and least) profitable and how each segment responds to specific pricing strategies. With historical pricing data analytics, brands can also intelligently link pricing and promotions by first determining customer price sensitivity then gauging the effectiveness of promotions.
Fully Optimized Pricing
Historical pricing analytics means eliminating guesswork from deciding the optimal pricing for a given product. By analyzing historical pricing data, brands can discover how their past pricing and promotional decisions impact profitability. Based on this historical data, they can also test various pricing strategies like value-based and dynamic pricing. It also allows brands to learn which customer segments are most likely to respond positively to price change. These insights from pricing analytics will drive more effective (and profitable) pricing decisions.
Recognize pricing tiers that work the best
Many brands have gaps in their pricing strategy — underpriced or overpriced tiers, pricing leaks, markup errors, or neglected upsell opportunities. Tiered pricing models are prevalent in subscription-based brands where brands offer tiers to meet the needs of diverse customer segments. With historical pricing analytics, brands can improve their pricing tiers and get insight into the right number of tiers and optimal prices for each. Pricing analytics will comb a brand’s historical data to find tier pricing mistakes to improve sales and revenue.
Planning Pricing Strategies and Promotions
Promotional pricing decisions are critical for any brand, as pricing perception is directly linked to consumer demand and profits. Brands have to carefully plan promotions that include variables such as list prices, special offers, advertisements, and discounts while ensuring profit margins. With predictive analytics, brands can determine optimal discount levels, keep a close eye on the competition, and announce promotional offers when customers are likely to purchase. Historical pricing analysis also helps predict revenue and determine optimal locations and platforms for promotional ads.
Discover profitable channels
Not all sales channels bring equal revenue to your brand. Historical pricing analysis can help you determine the most effective quality, volume, and revenue channels. Brands must understand which marketing and sales channels bring quality leads that convert to paying customers. It also helps to determine which eCommerce channels are most profitable so you can optimize your budget and identify channels you should be investing in as a part of future customer acquisition strategies.
Metrics to track
Metrics to Track
Here are a few pricing analytics metrics that can help brands to understand customer behavior towards pricing:
Willingness to Pay (WTP)
WTP, also known as price sensitivity, is the maximum price your potential customers are willing to pay for your service or product. It is an essential part of pricing strategy since you have no other way of understanding whether your product can yield an augmented product value. Numerous factors are responsible for a customer’s willingness to pay, and it’s not static. Brands must track willingness to pay for all customer segments to ensure that the product is priced competitively and drives maximum profit while staying in line with current market conditions.
Feature Value Analysis
Feature value analysis, also known as relative reference analysis, measures the most important features to customers in relation to other features of a product or service. Analyzing critical features to customer segments will help brands price products based on basic or premium components. It can also help to better bundle your services or products so you can drive the most revenue.
Average Revenue per User (ARPU)
The average revenue per user is the revenue generated from the sum of active users divided by the total number of users in a monthly time frame. Delving deeper into ARPU can help brands compare numbers with rivals and check how all products or customer segments perform.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Lifetime Value offers a complete picture of a user’s journey and the average revenue that the user will generate throughout their engagement as a customer with your brand. It helps brands determine various economic decisions such as marketing budgets, profitability, forecasting, and resource allocation.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
A successful and profitable brand needs to balance its customer acquisition cost or CAC. It is about spending the right amount of resources and time to drive new customers without jeopardizing their lifetime value and revenue. Correct calculation of CAC helps brands to quantify their sales funnel and determine the efficiency and profitability of their strategies.
Conclusion
Historical pricing analytics is a powerful tool, and it can make a huge difference to a brand’s potential by increasing sales and unlocking incredible profitability in a relatively short time. Historical analysis of pricing and promotions data will help brands get better marketing returns than relying on traditional pricing approaches.
Leveraging pricing analytics will prevent brands from blindly reacting to competitor price changes and support solutions for scaling up price transformation efforts. By using historical pricing data, brands can more effectively segment their customers for marketing and promotion strategies. Properly utilizing predictive analytics and past sales data can help cut costs and keep profit margins high by adjusting production and prices according to market trends. Need help tracking your competitor prices? Or want historic pricing insights for your own brand? Or need to track the efficacy of your online promotions? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help!
Most brand & marketing professionals fear negative feedback and reviews. Negative reviews and ratings can not only hurt your organic product visibility online, but they also impact real business outcomes and purchase decisions potential customers will make about your product.
… but getting negative reviews is not always a bad thing. These unflattering reviews help give consumers real insights into your product and help them understand their features, attributes, benefits, and downsides better as described by other customers to give them a more realistic picture. Shoppers trust user generated reviews more than content brands share with them, which is why it’s really important for brands to interject in these conversations, address negative reviews and nudge customers towards building trust in their products.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when responding to negative reviews.
Be actionable and solution-oriented with your responses!
Even the strongest brands can’t avoid negative reviews, but what sets one apart from the other is how they tackle these reviews. A prompt and solution-oriented response can actually help salvage a negative situation in a lot of cases.
Build Brand Trust
Let’s take a look at Clinique & the unique approach they took towards responding to negative reviews. Shown above is one of its bestselling products Moisture Surge™ 100H Auto-Replenishing Hydrator. This product got an average of 4.7 stars since its launch in early 2021. 99% of customers even said they would recommend this product. And, in comparison to the over 370 positive reviews, there were just 5 negative reviews! Instead of basking in the glory of the numerous positive reviews, Clinique chose to promptly reply instead & not dismiss negative reviews even if there were just a tiny number. This goes a long way for any brand.
Negative feedback
Clinique not only addressed the customer’s concerns but also offered a ‘no questions asked’ refund and insisted that the customer take the conversation offline through a customer care agent. This action will help Clinique build long-term trust with not only the customers who had given them a low rating but the new ones too, who may stumble upon these negative reviews and see first-hand how customer-centric the brand is.
Respond promptly to keep things under control
A quick response to a negative review is supercritical. Even if you’re unable to resolve the customer’s problem immediately, acknowledging the review promptly lets them know their concern is a priority. On the plus side, it may also help them calm down and hold them back from posting even nastier comments. Aim to respond within 24 – 48 hours from the time a negative review is posted.
The quicker a customer hears from you, the more sincere your words will feel to them.
Prompt Response
Here’s an example of how Chobani yoghurts tackled a negative review. You’ll notice, they responded almost immediately when a customer complained about the “RANCID” tasting yoghurt. Responding minutes after the review came in shows their seriousness towards dealing with the situation and that they value customer feedback. Apart from prompt response, they even offered to investigate and work towards a solution.
Look for a chance to take the discussion offline
Negative Feedback System
Take the conversation offline by giving a phone number or email where customers can connect with a real person or brand representative. The goal is to move the conversation from a public forum to a private channel where a personal touch can be added. It could be a customer care number, a DM on a social platform, or a direct call back to the customer to listen to the details of their complaint. Additionally, connecting offline helps resolve issues faster without letting the problem escalate.
Do NOT get defensive
When it comes to responding to negative reviews, as a thumb rule pushing back or getting defensive is an absolute no-no. Being humble and accepting of negative feedback is important, and responding with grace, is even more important.
Let’s look at this example of a negative review left by an irate customer about the terrible IKEA customer service. Instead of getting defensive, IKEA politely acknowledges the feedback, apologies for the inconvenience, and offered a solution to help the customer sort out the issue with the order immediately!
Customer Feedback
A brand’s response to a negative review not only helps the individual who left the review in the first place but actually impacts other customers who will read it months down the line.
Remember to follow-up
Many times brands jump in promptly when a customer posts a negative review. They’re solution-oriented and some help resolve customer issues immediately too. The hard part’s done! However, where a lot of brands fall short, is when it comes to following up with customers once their concern has been addressed and they’re back to being brand advocates again.
Keeping that thought in mind, if it’s possible to get a customer who left a negative review to update or change it after their concern has been resolved could be a very impactful way to build brand trust. According to the Retail Consumer Report, 33% of customers turned around and posted a positive review, and 34% deleted the original negative review after having received a response from the brand or retailer in question.
Conclusion
Even though brands have limited to almost no control over how customers perceive their products online, they can still participate and interact with customers to improve their online reputation. They can listen in on the online conversations and adapt to customer feedback promptly based on what shoppers are discussing via reviews. Also, don’t filter the types of reviews when responding to your customers, and aside from the positive and neutral reviews, treat your negative reviews with extra care. Resolve them responsibly to win a customer for life!
Competition is a fundamental and healthy part of commerce that protects customers by keeping prices low and the quality of services (and choice of goods) high.
Healthy competition drives prices down, but it can harm brands and their reputation without a pricing policy. The manufacturer or brand designs MAP or Minimum Advertised Pricing policies to stipulate retailers’ lowest price point to advertise the product. It is an agreement between distributors and manufacturers about the minimum price that retailers and resellers can advertise the product for sale.
Most legitimate brands have a MAP policy, especially brands that rely heavily on brand identity. It becomes critical that they maintain price parity across retailers. When a retailer violates MAP policies, brands can penalize them under the agreed-upon terms or terminate contracts.
In this blog, you will learn about MAP policy, its benefits, and tips on tackling MAP violations.
1. What is a MAP policy?
MAP Violations
MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price, and brands create MAP policies to ensure that retailers don’t advertise their products below the specified price. However, it only controls advertised prices, ensuring the retailers don’t display a lower price in online listings or advertisements. Since it doesn’t cover the checkout price, retailers can sell products at a lower price through promotional offers like discounts and cashback during checkout.
MAP policies ensure a price war between eCommerce platforms does not devalue products and that an even playing field is set among retailers that allow everyone to drive margins. Brands have a legal right to withdraw products if a retailer advertises products below the minimum advertised price. Brands can also restrict future sales or refuse to replenish products after the current stock has sold out if an eCommerce platform, reseller, or distributor violates MAP policies.
In the U.S., MAP policies fall under federal antitrust law since they restrict advertisement pricing rather than the last sales price. However, in the UK and the EU, violation of minimum advertised pricing is an infringement of current competition laws.
2. Why Does Having a MAP Policy Matter?
Having a MAP policy protects both brands and retailers while ensuring consumers get the best-priced items. Following are the benefits of having a MAP policy:
a. Prevent margin erosion
Although online retailers are willing to take a margin cut to attract traffic, selling products below MAP can significantly hurt a brand’s bottom line. Setting a minimum advertised price benefits both parties. It allows shoppers to purchase products at the best-valued price & also creates a balanced economy and prevents hyper-competition of products between retailers. However, manufacturers must set a realistic pricing policy that matches current market demand, ensuring eCommerce platforms implement MAP while taking care of the margins.
b. Retain brand identity
Brand Protection
Price is one of the essential indicators consumers use to determine the authenticity and value of a product. Constant price fluctuations can negatively impact a brand’s reputation. Brands need to safeguard their pricing to create a consistent price perception. Price changes often make the buying decision complex since consumers no longer have a clear reference of prices. It also shifts purchasers’ attention from the brand and product features to its price. With price fluctuations, brands that were used to be differentiated for their features can be seen as commodities.
Low prices & MAP violations on an online platform can even be a sign of counterfeit products or unauthorized sellers. However, customers might hold the brand responsible if they purchase counterfeit products from a retailer at lower prices. A negative product experience with a retailer will also reflect the brand’s reputation. An effective MAP policy that enforces consistent pricing will ensure that customers hunting for the best deals will stick with the most legitimate retailers.
Comparing prices has become an essential and common milestone in every consumer’s purchasing journey. It’s imperative that a brand ensures price parity across platforms and stores because substantial pricing variations on different platforms can make customers suspicious of a brand. Consistent pricing across eCommerce platforms ensures brands maintain their identity. MAP policies also allow retailers to maintain profit margins while avoiding price wars.
d. Combat revenue loss from illegitimate sales
While most authorized sellers or distributors comply with pricing policies, unauthorized sellers or grey market sellers have no obligation to follow a brand’s MAP pricing infrastructure. Brands can reduce risk with an authorized seller badge on retailer websites. This will help customers to verify authorized retailers and resellers of your products & help safeguard your brand equity online.
3. Tips on Implementing MAP policy and Tackling violations
Enforcing and tackling MAPs comes down to two things: monitoring the market for infringements and then acting on those violations. Here are a few tips for tackling MAP violations:
Implementation of MAP Policy & Tracking Violations
a. Communicate actively with retailers
To maintain a positive relationship with retailers and avoid confusion, brands should create proper communication strategies and channels to accompany the launch of the MAP policy. The policy should be easy to understand, but legal advisors are necessary to understand the jargon of the document. Brands can use checklists, videos, and well-briefed brand reps to communicate their policy clearly with retailers.
b. Reward retailers for compliance
Retailers who follow MAP guidelines can lose out to platforms that do not follow these pricing guidelines. Non-MAP following platforms undercut the price of products to drive sales and secure higher traffic. In such instances, brands can incentivize MAP following retailers to encourage them to comply with MAP guidelines while not affecting the competitive edge. It can be in the form of laxity of rules during promotion seasons like New Year, Christmas, and Black Friday sales. The laxity of rules for promotional seasons should be used as an exception to the general rule, and outlined in the guidelines.
c. Implement an AI-driven MAP monitoring
When product distribution is spread across the globe through a network of resellers and retailers, keeping a close watch on all platforms for multiple products can become difficult. With the expansion of online marketplaces, manually tracking the pricing of numerous products on multiple platforms is time-consuming and unsustainable. An automated AI-driven monitoring platform can track the pricing of all products sold across hundreds of online platforms and identify violations around the clock. Such platforms can alert brands of violations, price inconsistencies, or suspicious activities in real-time.
d. Send cease and desist to MAP violators and unauthorized dealers
Brands must enforce a MAP policy to ensure price parity among retailers and resellers. Brands must systematically monitor prices across retailers, social media, marketplaces, and price comparison websites. Whenever brands encounter a MAP violation, they should take action by sending a cease and desist letter to unauthorized sellers. For legitimate sellers, brands can notify them and outline the steps that will be taken if they don’t comply. Brands must be consistent in enforcing MAP policy violations, signaling retailers and unauthorized sellers that there will be repercussions for MAP violations.
MAP Policy
4. Conclusion
The trend towards online shopping helps businesses to cut overheads, allowing their products to be sold at a significantly reduced price. Although price appears to be the most effective consumer attraction strategy, significantly lowering product prices can devalue products and hurt brand reputation in the long term. However, including and enforcing MAP policies helps brands to manage their reputation and allows retailers to manage their margins.
Want to see first-hand how DataWeave can help brands track MAP Violations, Counterfeit products, and identify unauthorized sellers? Sign up for a demo with our Digital Shelf experts to know more.
Busy lifestyles, urbanization, aging populations, and smaller households led to the preference for convenience and efficiency in eCommerce deliveries. However, the Covid-19 pandemic caused a massive shift in customer demand and buying decisions. The modern consumer journey moved from takeaway food to online shopping to quick or same-day deliveries. With evolving digital touchpoints, customers now favor fast deliveries and convenience.
According to a 2020 survey by KPMG in the UK, 43% of consumers chose next-day delivery, a 4% increase from last year. Interestingly, 17% of consumers abandoned a brand if they faced a longer delivery. Standard delivery time has shortened from 3 to 4 days and two-day shipping to next-day or same-day delivery. This increasing trend of quick delivery has led to the boom of quick commerce or Q-Commerce. Quick commerce or on-demand delivery refers to retailers that deliver goods in under an hour or as quickly as 10 minutes. The rise of Q-commerce is caused by changing consumer behavior and rising expectations since the pandemic.
In this blog, you’ll learn about quick commerce or Q-Commerce and its benefits. You’ll also read about factors to consider for quick commerce and tips to implement this business model.
1. What is Quick Commerce?
On-Demand Delivery
Quick commerce or on-demand delivery is a set of sales and logistics processes that empowers eCommerce businesses, restaurants, grocery chains, and manufacturers to deliver products in less than 24-hours. A study shows that 41% of consumers are willing to pay for same-day delivery while 24% of customers will pay more to deliver their items within a one- or two-hour window.
Changing lifestyles and customer behavior directly impacted the rise of Q-Commerce. The takeaway food industry had used quick commerce for many years. But with Q-Commerce businesses consistently cutting delivery time, quick commerce for instant grocery delivery has become a new trend. For instance, India-based online grocery delivery firm Grofers rebranded to BlinkIt amid rising competition, promising 10-minute instant delivery.
2. How quick is Quick Commerce?
The post-pandemic lifestyle & the rise in the number of small and single-person households has led to an increase in demand for products in small quantities that need to be delivered sooner than later. Sometimes in as little as 10 minutes! This trend is oriented towards specific products such as packed or fresh foods, Groceries, Food delivery, Gifts, Flowers, Medicines to name a few.
Quick Commerce Categories
Local shops that can reach more customers with less friction have swapped traditional brick-and-mortar warehouses to cater to an urban population. These online Q-Commerce stores can deliver goods from favorite stores and offer a vast choice of products that are available 24/7. However, it requires real-time inventory management, data-driven pricing management, innovative logistics technology, a fantastic rider community, and a proper assortment.
3. Factors to consider for Quick Commerce
Competitive Assortment & Pricing
a. Assortment
With growing competition, getting product assortment right isn’t easy for quick commerce businesses, yet it’s critical to their success. To optimize assortment for quick commerce stores, they need to understand how demand differs between demographics and various stores. Since quick delivery involves packed and fresh products, it is even more essential to carry a unique assortment for each store.
Data analytics will help Q-Commerce businesses understand which products are repeatedly purchased in every store. It also helps identify high-demand gaps in your competitors’ platforms. Assortment analytics can help distinguish shifts in customer behavior across short- and long-term demands. The key to increasing sales is shaping inventory to match the overlap between market opportunity and consumer interest. With assortment analytics, they can determine the optimal mix of products for their daily inventory.
b. Pricing
Pricing information is readily available on quick commerce businesses, allowing customers to compare prices before making purchase decisions. Before deciding on a product, shoppers actively track the best deals on platforms across various Q-Commerce delivery platforms. According to a survey, 31% of consumers rated price comparisons as the essential aspect of their shopping experience. Understanding price perception can help quick commerce companies to optimize their pricing strategy while remaining competitive.
A competitive pricing strategy does not imply that Q-Commerce businesses have to cut prices. Instead, it’s about adjusting prices relative to your competitors but not significantly impacting the bottom line. Competitive pricing provides real-time pricing updates, allowing quick commerce platforms to drive sales by nailing their pricing strategy.
c. Delivery Time
Grocery Delivery Race In India
Delivery time has become the game-changer in quick commerce, with platforms fighting over shorter delivery times. Unpredictable factors such as specific delivery windows, last-minute customer requests, and traffic congestion can wreak havoc in your planning. Optimizing your delivery time can improve operational efficiency through faster delivery, quick route planning, and driver monitoring.
Big eCommerce platforms like Amazon offer same-day or next-day delivery to prime members with no extra fee on minimum order criteria. The only demand of customers who do not worry about discounts or lower wholesale prices is quick delivery. The demand for quick delivery services has led to many global retailers offering same-day delivery to meet those expectations.
d. Demand Forecasting
Since quick commerce is a viable solution for certain products, businesses must determine what customers want and when they want it. Q-Commerce businesses can use historical data to predict future sales patterns with demand forecasting. It ensures that Q-Commerce businesses can limit wastages and their inventory can cater to a targeted market. Demand forecasting also helps to replenish stock based on real-time data. Furthermore, companies can identify bottlenecks and points of wastage in the supply chain with a demand-driven system in place.
4. Benefits of Quick Commerce
Q-Commerce Benefits
a. Competitive USP
Q-Commerce businesses get new value propositions because customers that need immediate delivery are willing to try new brands and order from new stores. It also allows online Q-Commerce businesses to compete with global marketplaces and brick-and-mortar stores.
We at DataWeave have helped quick-service restaurants (QSRs) that are going the Q-Commerce route & selling via food aggregator apps to increase their revenue significantly. Our AI-Powered Food Analytic solutions have helped QSRs diagnose improvement areas, monitor key metrics, and drive 10-15% growth. Our data has helped them understand availability during peak times, monitor product visibility by region, track competitors, and choose suitable banners for promotion. Read more about that here.
b. Increase margins
A study from Deloitte suggests that 50% of online shoppers spend extra money to get convenient delivery of the products they need during the pandemic. These customers also paid extra for on-demand fulfillment and bought online pick-up in-store options.
Since the assortment of products in quick commerce is relatively small, Q-Commerce businesses can drive sales for their most profitable product lines. There is a potential for greater margins because wealthier demographics often require convenience. For instance, time-stranded professionals value convenience over discounts.
c. Customer experience is paramount
With quick commerce, retailers can meet customer expectations and exceed them, fostering brand loyalty. Quick commerce addresses customer pain points such as running out of food before a small party or getting a birthday present for your friends. It can simply help people who cannot make it to the shop or stock up essentials.
5. How to implement Quick Commerce
Implementation of Quick Commerce
a. The need for local hubs
To pack and deliver products in under an hour, businesses must be located close to the customers. Therefore, quick commerce relies on local warehouses that can serve customers in immediate proximity. Since the duration of two-wheelers is less likely to be impacted by heavy traffic or parking spaces, delivery services employ riders to deliver products.
b. Ensure you have the right analytics in place
Another essential part of running a quick commerce business is to have a web or phone application that can facilitate online ordering and offer accurate stock information to customers. Q-Commerce businesses also need a real-time inventory management tool that will provide insights into stock levels and allow for quick reordering and redistribution of products. This will also prevent deadstock and stockouts.
DataWeave’s Food Delivery Analytics product suite helps companies to increase order volumes, understand inventory, and optimize prices. It also provides access to discounts, offers, delivery charges, inventory, and final cart value across all your competitors.
c. It’s all about stock availability & assortment
Q-Commerce in the Grocery Delivery space is excellent for specific product niches like packed or fresh foods and vegetables, drinks, gifts, cosmetics, and other CPG products that customers use every day.
The stock assortment is as important in the Food Delivery space with restaurant chains like McDonald’s or Burger King that generate as much as 75% of their sales from online orders. These businesses have to make sure they’re carrying the most in-demand product assortment there is.
Conclusion
Same Day Delivery
The rise of quick commerce represents the next big change in eCommerce, accompanied by a shift in consumer behavior towards online grocery shopping and food ordering. When positioned with proper assortment and pricing, instant delivery services can allow Q-Commerce businesses to capture the influx of consumers looking for speedy delivery. By tapping into big data from quick commerce markets, Q-Commerce businesses can gain insights into consumer demands.
If you’re a Q-Commerce business in the Food Delivery or Grocery Delivery space, reach out to our experts at DataWeave to learn how our solutions can help you understand the best Pricing Strategy, Delivery Time SLAs, Assortment Mix you need in order to successfully sell on Q-Commerce platforms.
Growing awareness of personal hygiene and changing lifestyles has contributed to a significant development of India’s cosmetics, beauty, and personal care products. The Indian cosmetic industry reached a value of USD $26.1 bn in 2020. The major boom in sales is because of rising digitization, social media marketing, and the advent of eCommerce beauty platforms. However, the increase in demand and technological advancements has led to a competitive landscape for Indian and international brands competing for digital and physical channels. As of February 2019, 18.92% of respondents spent between 700 to 1700 rupees, and 43.9% spent up to 700 rupees monthly on cosmetics and personal care products in India.
Monthly spend on Personal Care Products in India
Shattering stereotypes and gender norms, India is also seeing a revolution in the male grooming industry, which is expected to reach INR 319.82 bn by 2024. The D2C market is expanding beyond metropolitan cities, and at present both D2C brands and startups have launched over 177 new products for men. “We realized there is an opportunity to create India’s first experiential brand exclusive for men,” says Hitesh Dhingra, Co-founder, The Man Company. He adds ecommerce business has grown almost by 200 percent. In a similar vein, Shantanu Deshpande, founder, and CEO, Bombay Shaving Company, concurs and adds the pandemic boosted online sales. He says that it has become easier for the company to compete with big brands on marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart.
With the onset of the pandemic, it has become more and more important for these D2C brands to have a strong digital presence and an even stronger Digital Shelf when selling on platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, and the likes. On these marketplaces, brands need to track critical KPIs like product discoverability, stock status & availability, reviews and ratings, pricing & promotions to make sure they’re optimizing product performance across all online channels to amplify their eCommerce growth.
So which beauty and grooming brands and categories have a strong Digital Shelf and are dominating on Amazon? Let’s take a look.
Men’s Grooming Brands and Categories
Methodology
We tracked the first 250 products on Amazon against certain keyword searches specific to India’s Beauty & Grooming space. – Keywords specific to women’s grooming: anti-aging Cream, Face Mask, Paraben-free Shampoo, Onion Hair Oil, Body Wash, Moisturizer – Keywords specific to male grooming: Beard Oil, Hair Wax for men, Shaving Cream, After Shave Lotion, Beard Trimmer
Share of Search (SoS) – The percentage of products that appeared on the search results page on Amazon belonging to a brand against a specific keyword or category.
Data Scrape time period: From 14th Oct 2021 to 10th Nov 2021
THE BEAUTY IS IN THE DATA
On Amazon, brands use sponsored ads to increase visibility and drive more sales. When we looked at the product category with the most aggressive ad spends, products in the men’s grooming category came out on top and had the maximum number of sponsored products. 26% of beard trimmers were sponsored, followed by Beard Wax and Beard Oil at 25%. During the lockdown, more men started searching online for new products and watching instructional videos on how to groom their beards or how to get a salon-like shave at home. Demand for razors and trimmers is up by 50% compared to last year,” said Sidharth S Oberoi, founder and CEO, LetsShave. In contrast, we saw that only 11% of after-shave lotions and 15% shaving creams were discounted.
Percentage of Sponsered Items per Product Category
For women, we saw a similar trend. 24% of products in the Paraben-free Shampoos and Onion Oil category was sponsored. In contrast, only 5% of anti-aging creams were sponsored. Additionally, 21% of products in the face mask category and 23% in body wash were sponsored.
Competition is fierce in these categories, making an artificial boost necessary for increasing discoverability. In fact, we saw that the competition was the fiercest in the face mask category, which had the highest “1st Page Change Rate.” It is an indicator of how much the results on the 1st page for a particular keyword change from time to time. This reflects higher competition and brands constantly updating their digital shelf KPIs to ensure their products appear on page 1. One of the biggest reasons why brands need to constantly gauge their online visibility is to track their sponsored & organic ranking compared to competitors.
Driving sales using a smart Discounting Strategy
Price can play a big role in the final purchase decision. So we looked at two things wrt price across all these beauty & grooming products.
Which product Category had the maximum number of products on discount?
… & how large were these discounts?
Percentage of Products on Discount
We saw that almost 55% of products in the body wash category & 46% of anti-aging creams were available at a discount. Beard Oil & Onion Hair oil had the least number of products discounted at 29% each.
Magnitude of Discount
How high were these discounts? Let’s take a look.
The highest discount was seen in the beard oil and moisturizer category, with an average discount of 17% across all products. The average discount trend across most product categories ranged between 14 to 17%, so we did see some consistency there.
Consumers worldwide don’t make a purchase decision without reading online reviews. Online reviews and ratings have become a significant milestone in the modern consumer shopping journey, and eCommerce brands can leverage reviews as valuable sales tools. Given a choice between loyalty programs, discounts, reviews, and free shipping, online shoppers say reviews are the most important factor while making a purchase. Consumers trust user-generated content (UGC) more than product information and videos created by brands.
Number of Reviews per Product Category
We looked at product reviews to check consumers of which categories are actively sharing their experience and found that three categories stood out — beard trimmers, moisturizers, and paraben-free shampoo. At the same time, beard oil was the product category with the least number of reviews.
Companies can build consumer trust by identifying and acting on negative feedback. But in order to do that, they first need to de-code and understand the collective sentiment behind these reviews. DataWeave’s AI-Powered solutions can help brands break down & analyze online reviews and give them a wealth of insights to enrich their market research as well as create a seamless customer experience.
UNDERSTANDING THE COMPETITION ON AMAZON
When selling on Amazon, brands need to make sure shoppers find their products with ease. Keyword searches are the top ways consumers discover and find products across eCommerce sites. We tracked search visibility for the following keywords to see which brands had the highest share of search and appeared on the 1st page on Amazon.
Be in any product category – moisturizers, shampoo, anti-aging cream, Mamaearth & WOW featured against most keywords, showing popularity among customers. WOW Skin Science raised $50 million in April 2021, and Mamaearth raised $50 million in July 2021. These two fresh-faced brands have built credibility among health- and environment-conscious users. They are big competitors when it comes to natural and toxin-free products. It’s their high product visibility in multiple categories that is likely leading to better discoverability, higher sales & increased valuation, and brand value.
Rankings of Top Brands in various cosmetic categories- (A)
Rankings of Top Brands in various cosmetic categories– (B)
Who were the Amazon Bestsellers?
Products on Amazon that have the highest sales in their respective categories are called Amazon Bestsellers. The Amazon Bestsellers rank is based on product sales and sales history where the list undergoes an hourly update. The bestseller ranking or bestseller badge is available in the product information section on the product page. The rankings are determined by comparing sales and historical data with products in the same category or subcategory.
Brands can make it to Amazon’s bestseller list by optimizing their listings, encouraging reviews, and listing products in the relevance of categories. Although Amazon does not consider reviews for product ranking, they help users convince them to buy your product.
Here are the Brands we say that made it to #1 on the Amazon BestSeller List for the following product categories.
Amazon Bestseller List
Gillette made it to the top in the aftershave lotion and shaving cream category, while D2C brands Ustraa made its mark bearing number 1 on Amazon Bestseller list for hair wax for men and beard oil.
Amazon Bestseller List
Products from Nivea and L’Oreal made it to #1 seller in 2 categories each. Interestingly, in the Paraben-Free shampoo category, when D2C brands like WoW, Mamaearth have a stronger value proposition, traditional brand L’Oreal had the best-selling product.
L’Oreal must’ve pulled various levers and built a robust Digital Shelf to get to the top – from optimizing their content, ensuring product availability, tracking ratings and reviews, and proper competitive pricing.
Conclusion
An increase in new D2C brands in popular and trending categories has led to increasing competition. Unless a brand can position itself in front of the target audience and command their attention right away, another brand can step in and grab the sale. Do you know if your brand is prepped and ready to make an impact on marketplaces like Amazon? Or simply just wondering if your Digital Shelf is optimized with the right price, discounts, reviews, and keywords? Our team at DataWeave can help! Reach out to our Digital Shelf experts to learn more!
Business has been anything but usual this holiday season, especially in the digital retail world. The holiday hustle and bustle historically seen in stores was once again occurring online, but not as anticipated given the current strength of consumer demand and the reemergence of COVID-19 limiting in-store traffic. While ‘Cyber Weekend’, Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, continues to further its importance to retailers and brands, this year’s performance fell short of expectation due to product shortages and earlier promotions that pulled forward holiday demand.
Holiday promotions were seen beginning as early as October in order to compete with 2020 Prime Day sales, but discounting, pricing and availability took an opposite direction from usual. This shift influenced our team to get a jump start on our 2021 digital holiday analysis to assess how drastic the changes were versus 2020 activity, and to understand how much of this change has been influenced by inflationary pressures and product scarcity.
Scarcity Becomes a Reality
Our initial analysis started by reviewing year-over-year product availability and pricing changes from January through September 2021, leading up to the holiday season, as detailed in our 2021 Cyber Weekend Preliminary Insights blog. We reviewed popular holiday categories like apparel, electronics, and toys, to have a broad sense of notable trends seen consistently throughout various, applicable marketplaces. What we found was a consistent decline in product availability over the last six months compared to last year, alongside an increase in prices.
Although retailers significantly improved stock availability in November and early December 2021, even digital commerce giants like Amazon and Target were challenged to maintain consistent product availability on their website as seen below. While small in magnitude, there is also a declining trend occurring again closer toward the end of our analysis period, post Cyber Weekend, across all websites included in our analysis.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability insights for Home & Garden, Jewelry & Watches, Clothing & Shoes, Bed N Bath, Lighting & Ceiling Fans categories
Greater Discounts, Higher Prices?
With inflation at a thirty-nine year high, retailers and manufacturers have realized they can command higher prices without impacting demand as consumers have shown their willingness to pay the price, especially when threatened by product scarcity. Our assessment is that while some products and categories have responded drastically, manufacturers’ suggested retail prices (MSRPs) have increased nearly seven percent on average from January to December 2021. MSRP adjustments are not taken lightly either, as this is an indication increased prices will be part of a longer-term shift in product strategy.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com & Target.com each month in 2021 comparing price increases from January 2021 base
Our 2021 pre-Cyber Weekend analysis reviewed MSRP changes for select categories (Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion) on Amazon and Target.com, and found around forty-eight percent of products on Amazon and thirty-five percent of products on Target.com have increased their MSRPs year-over-year, but kept pre-holiday discount percentages the same.
Looking more specifically as to what year-over-year changes occurred on Black Friday in 2021, we observed MSRPs increasing across the board for all categories at various magnitudes. This indicates why 2021 discounts appeared to be greater than or equivalent to 2020 for many categories, when in reality consumers paid a higher price than they would have in 2020 for the same items.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – MSRP Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average MSRP pricing for the same SKU count from November 20-26th 2021
On Amazon.com, categories like health & beauty have already increase MSRPs by a much greater percentage and magnitude versus Target.com leading up to and during Black Friday 2021, while other categories like furniture have increased MSRPs evenly on average across both retail websites. The below chart cites a few specific examples of year-over-year SKU-level MSRP, promotional price, and discount changes within found within the electronics, furniture, fashion, and health & beauty categories.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – MSRP Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average MSRP pricing for the same SKUs on Black Friday November 26th, 2020.
Fewer, but Deeper Discounts
From October through early November 2021, fewer products were discounted compared to this same period in 2020, and the few that were saw much deeper discounts apart from the home improvement category. The most extreme example we saw in discounts offered was within furniture where only three percent of SKUs were on discount in 2021 compared to twenty-six percent in 2020. Interestingly, the magnitude of discount was also higher pre-Cyber Weekend 2021 versus 2020, but this trend was not exclusive to furniture and was also seen within electronics, health & beauty, and home improvement.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com & Target.com Pre-Black Friday average selling price during November 20-26th 2021 versus average selling price from November 13-19th 2021 compared to Pre-Black Friday average selling price during November 19-25th 2020 versus average selling price from November 12-18th, 2020.
Within the furniture category, the subcategories offering the greatest number of SKUs with price decreases on Black Friday 2021 were rugs by a wide margin, followed by cabinets, bed and bath, and entertainment units, but the magnitude of discounts offered were all under twenty percent.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020
Accounting for this phenomenon could have been retailers’ attempts to clear inventory for SKUs which hadn’t sold even during the period of severe supply chain shortages. With more products selling at higher prices this year, retailers were also able to use fewer SKUs with greater discounts to attract buyer in hopes of filling their digital baskets with more full-priced goods, helping to protect margins heading in to Cyber Weekend. Scarcity threats also encouraged consumers to buy early, even when not on promotion, to ensure they would have gifts in time for the holidays.
The same trends seen pre-Cyber Weekend 2021 were also seen on Black Friday with a year-over-year decrease in the percentage of SKUs offered on discount versus 2020, and steeper price reductions for the discounted products which can also be attributed to the increase in MSRPs.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020
2021 Black Friday Price Increases?
We all know Black Friday is all about price reductions, discounts and deals and so it’s rare to see actual price increases, yet for Black Friday 2021, trends ran counter to this. We observed price increases across all categories for around thirteen to nineteen percent of SKUs, with an average price increase of around fifteen percent in 2021 versus an average of only two percent in 2020.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020
At an account level, we noticed a few interesting differences happening on Black Friday 2021 versus 2020 regarding category price changes. On Target.com, almost ninety percent of the bed and bath SKUs analyzed had a price change on Black Friday in 2021 versus 2020 with eighty-two percent presenting a higher price year-over-year versus only around seven percent showing a decrease, where on Amazon nearly forty-four percent of bed and bath SKUs showed an increase in price and around thirty-eight percent showed a decrease. Except for the health and beauty category on Target.com, more than half of the SKUs in each category saw a price increase on Black Friday versus a price decrease.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs on Black Friday November 26th, 2020.
The magnitude of year-over-year price changes seen on Black Friday 2021 was significant across all categories, but the magnitude of price increases found on Amazon.com within the health and beauty category outpaced the rest by far. We reviewed three hundred and sixty-five SKUs on Amazon.com within the health & beauty category and saw almost eighty-three percent of them had a price change with around thirty-one percent decreasing prices and around fifty-two percent increasing prices. This means that within the health & beauty category on Amazon.com, more than fifty percent of the SKUs tracked were sold at a one hundred and seventy-six percent higher price on average during Black Friday 2021 versus 2020.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs on Black Friday November 26th, 2020.
The subcategories offering the greatest number of SKUs with price increases on Black Friday 2021 were cameras, followed by men’s fragrances, laptops, and desktops & accessories, but the magnitude of discounts offered were all under ten percent.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020
The Aftermath Post-2021 Cyber Weekend
Extending this analysis beyond the holiday weekend, we analyzed price change activity from December third through the ninth across the top US retailers (chart below) and found that price decreases have been very minimal, comparatively speaking. Though there was a spike in number of price decreases from December 8th to the 9th, the percentage of SKUs with price decreases was still very low (less than three percent). We anticipate this trend will continue into 2022.
Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing insights for Home & Garden, Jewelry & Watches, Clothing & Shoes, Bed N Bath, Lighting & Ceiling Fans categories
A Sign of Things to Come
A confluence of inflationary trends, product shortages and consumer liquidity have driven many marketplace changes to occur simultaneously. Government programs in the form of stimulus checks, have put extra money in consumers’ hands, and so they’ve been more willing to spend. That, coupled with the shock in the supply chain, has motivated people to buy far ahead of the 2021 holiday season. Hence, retailers have needed to rely much less on across-the-board discounts. Promotions have been more strategic – we’ve seen deeper discounts over fewer products, likely used to draw consumers in to buy certain items, and once they’re there, customers are buying everything else at a non-discount level. When these factors once again normalize, we could see a return to the “race to the bottom” that has occurred since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, but for once, retailers may be able to maintain some pricing power as the 2021 holiday shopping season played out.
Even though performance was not as anticipated and holiday sales did not grow as rapidly as they did in 2020, Cyber Monday was still the greatest online shopping day in 2021. Through it all, retailers managed to keep their digital shelves stocked and orders filled in time for the holidays for the most part, running the risk of housing aged inventory if goods didn’t arrive in time. Despite predictions for steep promotions in January 2022, with supply chains still challenged and inflationary pressures still full steam ahead, we don’t anticipate much in the way of enhanced discounts to continue beyond the holidays.
Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions like how and when to address inflationary pressures, while also supporting many other day-to-day operations and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Continue to follow us in the coming weeks for a detailed 2021 year-end review across more retailers and categories. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis.
For eCommerce companies, holidays are the busiest season of the year. Whether creating brand awareness with your marketing campaigns or freshening up your landing pages or finding new ways to segment & understand your customers, the list of tasks seems endless. It’s the time of the year when most people look forward to shopping for friends and family.
The holiday shopping season begins with Black Friday and Cyber Monday and leads to the December holidays, including Christmas and New Year. Consequently, proper planning and marketing are essential for a successful holiday season.
In fact, holiday sales during November and December are forecasted to be between $843.4B – $859B, up 10.5% over 2020, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). For online stores specifically, sales are predicted to increase between 11% – 15% to a total of between $218.3B and $226.2B driven by online purchases.
This guide will share eight promotional strategies retailers can use during the holiday season. We will also discuss how data analytics can help retailers improve their promotional strategies.
Using data analytics to guide promotional strategies
Promotional Strategies
Data is the foundation of every successful marketing campaign. Data analysis helps companies understand which graphics worked well and campaigns that generated the most revenue. Gathering data and running analysis helps companies improve their next marketing campaign. Retailers can also get deeper insights into campaigns/channels with the highest conversion rate or average order value (AOV).
With data analytics, retailers can prioritize campaigns and channels that resonate the most with their customers this holiday season. But, it would be best to try more than one promotional strategy to ensure you double down on what works without placing all of your eggs in one Christmas-themed basket.
Here are four ways that data analytics can help guide promotional strategies:
a. Customized alerts for listing pages
Data analysis helps retailers determine if certain products are out of stock on their rival’s website and adjust their own pricing accordingly. It allows retailers to grab market share for trending items. For example, if you get an out-of-stock alert for a particular product at competitors’ stores, you can invest more in advertising that product on your online store. In addition, customized alerts keep retailers informed about their inventory status, allowing them to plan promotions and ads. They can see which products are becoming commoditized due to intense competition and which ones offer better revenue opportunities.
b. Maximize conversions by tracking product trends
Assortment Analytics
Customers are always looking for products that are currently trending. With assortment analytics, eCommerce companies can get insights into hot trends, allowing them to stock in-demand categories and products. Integrating assortment analytics with AI-powered image analytics can also provide insights into attributes that are popular among customers. By filling gaps in their current assortments, retailers can improve conversion rates and increase revenue.
Here’s a case study on how DataWeave helped Douglas, a luxury beauty retailer in Germany boost sales by building an in-demand product assortment
c. Monitor competitor promotions
Promotional Insights
With increased competition and consumer demand for deals, it has become important for retailers to monitor their competitor’s promotions. Monitoring promotions helps retailers to optimize their ad spend accordingly. AI-powered image analysis tools can capture important information from competitors’ ad banners and deliver insights into metrics that are working to deliver sales.
d. Optimize margins with a data-driven pricing strategy
Pricing Intelligence
It has become challenging to price products in recent years since digital tools enable price transparency across channels. Although this trend is excellent for consumers, it makes competition fierce for retailers. A data-driven pricing strategy incorporates a variety of factors, including industry needs, competitor analysis, consumer demand, production costs, and profit margins.
With data-driven competitive pricing, retailers can keep pace with the changing eCommerce environment with real-time pricing updates. It also helps them optimize margins and quickly respond to changes in prices on rival stores.
Promotional Strategies for the Holiday Season
a. Virtual Webrooms
When customers want to see a product in-person, they go to a store showroom. It helps them make a purchase decision. However, with the Internet, eCommerce companies can bring this tactic online. The only difference between showrooming and webrooming is that the former takes in-person, whereas the latter happens digitally. Webrooming grew in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of spending weekends browsing stores, consumers took to the Internet for most of their product research.
A webroom allows customers to explore products from every angle, providing them with the complete in-person showroom experience online. Webrooming is a powerful holiday marketing strategy, especially regarding expensive purchases. Customers prefer to understand how the product will look. However, building a webroom is extensive and requires retailers to hire developers and professional photographers.
Webrooms allow retailers to share their collections, schedule virtual appointments, share 3D product images, set up virtual fitting rooms for clothing products, and accept purchase orders. For example, in 2015, Tommy Hilfiger launched its first digital showroom in Amsterdam to improve sustainability and minimize its carbon footprint. Through remote wholesale selling and digital product creation, a digital showroom helped Tommy Hilfiger transform the buying journey and retail value chain.
b. Loyalty-rewarding sales and perks
Customer Loyalty
Consider building customer loyalty during your holiday promotions. First, encourage your holiday shoppers to become loyal customers by offering bonus rewards, contests, or giveaways when they sign up for your loyalty program. You can encourage them to purchase right away by providing instant discount coupons or points for a reward to redeem on their next purchase. For maximum impact, you should run this promotion throughout the holiday season.
Second, you should attract your current loyalty program members with discount codes. Offer free shipping or provide a one-day-only discount code to ensure your customers choose you during their last-minute purchases. With these rewards, you’ll attract customers who are window shopping and simultaneously bring your loyal customers back throughout the holiday season.
c. Charitable Tie-Ins
AmazonSmile
Research shows that customers are four times more likely to purchase from brands with a strong sense of purpose. With the festive season being the time of giving, working with a charity and giving back to your community is a great way to reach out to customers.
After a tough one and half years because of the pandemic, people want to give back and help those in need this holiday season. You can partner with a non-profit and run campaigns that allow customers to give back. It’s also great for sharing your brand mission with your customers. For instance, Amazon allows customers to shop from AmazonSmile, which donates 0.5% of their eligible Charity List purchases to a selected charity, at no extra cost to the customers.
Consider partnering with an organization within your industry. For example, you can pair up with a non-profit that collects and gives clothes to the needy if you sell clothes. You can involve customers by asking them to exchange old dresses for coupons or cash discounts.
d. Omni-channel customer experience
Omni-channel marketing provides customers with a seamless, consistent, and cohesive experience over multiple marketing channels. Omnichannel marketing aims to provide a meaningful and cohesive experience that inspires your customers to make a purchase. Unlike multichannel marketing, this strategy puts the customer at the center of marketing campaigns and elevates the cross-channel customer experience.
Omnichannel shoppers spend 10% more money and purchase 15% more items than the original shoppers. eCommerce companies can use historical data to analyze successful channels and create a more transparent marketing strategy for the holiday season. Omnichannel analytics will provide a holistic picture of customer data that will help retailers to better meet the customer’s requirements and predict inventory.
e. Buy now, pay later (BNPL)
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)
Technically, buy now, pay later isn’t a promotional idea since your customers will still be paying the full price. However, BNPL allows them to delay their payments and not pay in full right away at checkout. Buy now, pay later needs to be on every eCommerce company’s holiday promotions plans. Various retailers, including Walmart, offer affordable monthly payments at the pace of 3 to 24 months with Affirm. Target also has a similar scheme with Sezzle and Affirm. Whereas Sephora and Macy’s offer 4 interest-free payments with Klarna.
BNPL is especially popular with millennials and Gen Z shoppers and will factor into their 2021 holiday shopping plans. Research showed 62% growth in the use of buy now, pay later service in consumers aged 18 to 24. Giving customers a means to manage their budgets during holidays while still taking home their purchases will attract more customers. While the customer doesn’t pay the full price right away for their purchase, businesses still get the total worth of the item. In the eCommerce industry—nearly 50% of BNPL users say they use it while shopping online, and among them, 45% use the service frequently.
f. Buy One, Get One
The last promotional idea is a classic buy one, get one offer. Everyone likes a good BOGO promotional offer. In fact, 66% of shoppers from a survey preferred BOGO over other promotions. It’s a win-win promotional strategy for retailers and customers. With this offer, people shop and stock up on gifts for their friends and family, while retailers make a more significant profit than 50% off sales. People prefer to get 100% off on a product over 50% on two items.
BOGO sales are best to move inventory by giving shoppers a deal they can’t pass up. If you have stocked up extra items during Black Friday, you can move those last-minute gifts as end-of-year BOGO sales, making room for new merchandise in January.
Conclusion
In this post, you saw that there’s more to holiday marketing than a few social media posts. eCommerce companies can use these holiday promotional ideas to offer Loyalty-rewarding sales and perks, buy now pay later service, and an omnichannel customer experience. Regardless of which strategies you’re using, remember that historical data analytics and early planning will play a significant role in increasing your sales and revenue.
Proper planning backed by insights into key metrics will help your team develop a one-of-a-kind holiday marketing strategy to drive your holiday sales upward. From sharing gratitude to offering personalized experiences, retailers have various options for promoting business this holiday season.
Learn how DataWeave can help make sense of your and your competitor’s pricing, promotional, and assortment data this holiday season. Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.
Traditionally, retailers have staged multiple promotions between Black Friday and before Christmas Day to keep consumers excited about holiday shopping, so it’s easy to see why one more promotional day might fall into relative obscurity. As if ‘Early Start’ offers to Black Friday and extended ‘Cyber Weekend’ promotions weren’t enough to plan for, eBay added another day into the mix called ‘Green Monday’, much to the benefit of consumers, as it furthers the window of opportunity to secure a bargain during the holiday season.
Green Monday falls on the second Monday of December and has historically been one of the greatest sales days of the year for eBay, often attracting last-minute shoppers or those searching for last-minute deals. However, because of the 2021 Global Shipping Crisis, there is speculation that Green Monday may be the last chance this year to have items delivered in time for Christmas. For this reason, we believe it could turn into quite a fruitful event for participating retailers if it encourages procrastinating shoppers that traditionally spend closer to December 25th to buy earlier in the season.
This isn’t the first year retailers outside of eBay have offered Green Monday promotions, however. Our team has been actively monitoring activity on this day from 2017 through present, to not only assess which retailers participate in the event, but also to understand how the discounts may change surrounding the event. The categories monitored include Apparel (Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry), Bed and Bath, and Home and Garden, and we’ve identified products offered on discount by comparing each applicable product’s price on Green Monday versus the most commonly seen price for the product offered throughout the month of December.
Better Promotions Than Boxing Day
Taking a closer look at 2020 Green Monday discounts within the categories and retailers analyzed, apart from Wayfair.com, we see all offered more SKUs on discount on Green Monday versus the days leading up to and out of the event. Kohls.com led the pack with around 93% of SKUs offered on discount, followed by Macys.com with 95%, and Wayfair.com with 83%. Overall, the number of SKUs on discount on Green Monday were greater than the SKUs offered on discount on Boxing Day, which is traditionally known as a great day to bargain shop.
Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Promotional Insights tracking Apparel, Bed & Bath, and Home & Garden category product’s online price on Green Monday 2020 in the US versus regular prices for the same products in the month of December each year.
What’s in Store for Green Monday 2021?
The insights we’ve tracked over the last four years have not indicated any signs to an end for Green Monday any time soon. As we see it, for consumers it is an extremely convenient time to order holiday gifts, and for retailers it is a good time to build brand trust and loyalty by fulfilling last minute orders at a great value, in time for the holidays.
Our prediction for the categories analyzed is to expect to see more retailers participate in Green Monday 2021 to a greater degree (more SKUs on sale and enhanced promotions). For retailers in this analysis, we would anticipate HomeDepot.com to enhance the number of offers to match 2020 competitive activity, and for Wayfair.com to look at increasing the number of offers on Green Monday versus the period leading into the event.
If you are interested in learning more about the details behind this analysis or our Promotional Insights solution, be sure to contact us. We can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your holiday promotional spend with access to near real-time marketplace insights on the brands, categories, and products your rivals promote, including discounts, campaign frequency and duration and more.
To make faster, seamless deliveries possible, brands need to tighten their supply chain. The pandemic has put a lot of stress on the global supply chain. The supply shock that began in China in February and the demand shock that followed as the global economy shut down uncovered weaknesses in production strategies and supply chains. Temporary trade restrictions and shortages of pharmaceuticals, critical medical supplies, and other products, further added to the problem.
As a consequence of all this, brands have to reduce or even eliminate their dependence on sources that are perceived as risky and rethink their use of lean manufacturing strategies that involve minimizing the amount of inventory held in their global supply chains. In the post-pandemic world, the supply chain will take center stage, and managing it efficiently with technical support is going to be what gives one brand an upper hand over the others.
1. Micro fulfillment is emerging as the need of the hour
Emerging Micro Fulfillment
Retailers are now faced with unprecedented omnichannel fulfillment complexities. Not only do customers expect faster order fulfillment and delivery, but they’re also opting to ‘buy online and pick up in-store (BOPIS)’ or ‘click-and-collect’. Amazon has spent billions of dollars on building its shipping infrastructure, including its existing operating 175+ fulfillment centers across the world and investing nearly $1.5 Bn to build an air hub in the US. Walmart, on the other hand, is relying on its existing footprint across 5000+ US stores to help deliver online orders faster.
All this is hinting towards micro-fulfillment emerging as a strategy retailers are using to make the fulfillment process more efficient and their supply chain more ready — from receiving an online order to packing it and offering last-mile delivery. This approach will certainly work towards imparting speed to localized, in-store pick-up and combine it with the efficiency of large, automated warehouses. Delivery speed and costs are more important than ever to retain customers and foster brand loyalty. In fact, this will become a big differentiator for grocery e-commerce as the number of people making online grocery purchases has increased drastically the world over and a recent report indicated that in the US, 46% of people use online delivery more now than before the COVID crisis, and 40% use online pickup more.
2. Use big data to tie-in loose nodes
Supply chain management is held at the heart of every successful e-commerce company. Supply Chain efficiency always ensures that the right product reaches the right place at the right time. It ensures cost reduction and enhancement of cash utilization. That is why it is important to stay alert and tie-in all loose ends in the supply chain architecture. Big data can come in handy here and it is that quantitative method and structure that can be used to improve decision-making for all activities across the supply chain. While the role of big data is extremely exhaustive and full-pronged across the entire supply chain design, it is important to understand it in theory in a simplified way so that brands can incorporate it to make their backend operations seamless.
Big data is all about real-time analytics and it primarily does two very important things in making supply chain management easy
It expands the dataset for analysis beyond the traditional internal data held on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems.
Big data apply powerful statistical methods to both new and existing data sources. This helps give structure to new insights. This in turn allows forecasting and helps improve supply chain decision-making capabilities for your brand, all the way from the improvement of front-line operations, to strategic choices such as the selection of the right supply chain operating models.
3. Improve ROI by introducing automation to the mix
Introducing Automation to Improve ROI
Introducing automation will help take care of tasks usually done manually, such as placing orders, processing changes, data entry, and much more. This frees up time and cuts down on human errors leading to error-free, faster processes. Adidas for instance has been able to reduce 60% of its operational supply chain costs just by switching to end-to-end automation. The largest sportswear manufacturer used automation across 400 factories by bringing in standardized, reusable processes to deliver the best results in a cost-effective way across the supply chain, marketing, finance, retail, and eCommerce. On the supply chain part, with automation, the brand was able to globally attend to supply chain service desk management, vendor onboarding, PO change management, Contract form approval, product data verification, and other such tasks in real-time. This highly successful initiative helped the brand save a lot of time, it earlier lost in manually attending to internal processes and reduced the time to market for Adidas by two-thirds. Moreover, automating systems helps cut down slacks and in return allows the supply chain to stay agile and alert for any unforeseen situations. This readiness further boosts the framework towards growth.
4. Eye the future and introduce robotics
Robotics is the next big thing in Future
Autonomous technology is not the next big thing of the future but is the most important thing at present defining the face of the supply chain. Autonomous robots are expected to see strong growth over the next five years. In fact, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG),the global robotics market is estimated to reach USD 87 Billion by 2025. It is believed that more than half of this will be allocated for the retail market. In fact, it is not uncommon to find giant beetle-like robots moving around busily with vertical shelves stacked on them inside Amazon’s warehouse in southern New Jersey, US. Tesco for instance uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) robots who are used to scan inventories for entire stores in just an hour (as against seven hours for a store employee) with far fewer errors.
Even though every word of this sounds too futuristic to be believable, this is the reality for now and retailers are beginning to realize that innovation must set in holistically and extend far beyond just the warehouse or supply chain.Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are fast becoming commonplace in warehouses, helping warehouse workers to fulfill orders quickly and efficiently. There are a few different types of robots that companies are considering, and each has its own unique set of advantages. AMRs in totality enable workers to be more productive due to constant collaboration and promote agility, cutting down on slacks and errors.
A cohesive and well-defined supply chain where you can leave enough room for tweaks in the future owing to evolving trends will surely help you gain an edge over your competitors through the entire lifecycle of your product. Getting a grip over the supply chain is necessary now as, by 2025, many supply chains may shift from global flows of goods and services to national, regional, and local networks of buyers and suppliers. So, integrating the supply chain keeping an eye on the global and local is the real deal!
The explosive growth of online shopping has forced brands to re-examine their e-commerce processes to stay competitive and profitable. In particular, out-of-stocks are a common, costly retail challenge, as product shortages frustrate online shoppers – and even prompt them to leave brands.
According to McKinsey & Company, forty-eight percent of consumers switched to a different brand in 2020 because those products were in stock. Among these consumers, seventy-three percent plan to keep using the new brands, linking product availability gaps to the erosion of sales and loyalty. Conversely, brands with effective inventory planning and replenishment can keep items in stock, drive sales and improve the customer experience.
Retailers like Walmart, collaborating with these brands to meet customer demand, are still facing inventory challenges but, as noted in 2021 Q3 earnings, inventory was up almost twelve percent year-over-year as they worked to stay ahead of increased holiday demand. They have also adjusted in-store operations to accommodate ever-growing e-commerce demands, especially within grocery-centric categories, as digital grocery buyers now amount to more than half the U.S. population.
Maximizing Conversions with Category Insights
Walmart’s dot-com strategy is paying off in spades, considering they surpassed Amazon as the leading U.S. grocery e-commerce retailer in 2020 and grew another forty-one percent in Q3, 2021. Our team has been actively tracking digital shelf analytic KPIs on Walmart.com to identify inventory and promotional performance improvement opportunities at a category level to support brands in capitalizing on these digital growth opportunities.
The latest analysis is summarized below, reviewing average category availability and discount trends occurring each week of the month, from May to August 2021, at a category level. A recent report found the 29th of each month to be the busiest day for online sales because consumers often get paid at the end of the month, which made DataWeave analysts wonder:
Which categories are maximizing their growth potential on Walmart.com and where are the greatest opportunities for improvement during periods of increased demand?
How do increased demand periods (like payday) impact category online availability?
Are category promotions offered at the right times throughout the month to best support demand?
When Seasonal Demand for Groceries and Payday Merge
Across all Walmart.com food categories tracked, Week 5 – where payday commonly falls for most consumers, had the lowest average product availability, while Week 4 had the highest average product availability for all categories except Deli and Fruits and Vegetables. These findings may inspire Walmart’s brand partners to rethink their inventory and assortment planning, replenishment and even pricing efforts to maintain a healthy stock closer toward the end of the month to match higher demand.
The categories with the greatest difference in average availability during Week 5 versus the rest of the month were Snacks & Candy, Beverages and Alcohol, indicating consumers consistently made these types of purchases closest to payday, when income was highest throughout the month. Seasonality is a secondary factor that influenced demand for these items given events like Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Summer Break, and Back-to-School shopping all took place during our analysis. Additionally, most holidays overlapped payday, which also furthered Week 5 demand.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Coupling availability with discounts allows us to consider whether consumers buy more in Week 5 due to high discounts or increased purchasing power, or both. In reviewing the average category discounts offered within the same grocery-centric categories analyzed above, we found almost every grocery category showed a higher discount in Week 5 compared to the rest of the month, except for Bread & Bakery and Alcohol.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Regarding Alcohol, during Week 4, when average availability was the highest, the average discounts offered were the lowest. This can indicate inventory was primed for payday shoppers (and the holidays of course). Bread & Bakery offers the greatest average discounts when inventory levels are lowest on average, indicating Week 3 is a great time to stock up, while Week 4 might be a great time to buy the freshest inventory.
The greatest average discounts in Week 5 were in Snacks & Candy, Pantry and Fruits & Vegetables. Deeper discounts for Snacks & Candy in Week 5 may have helped brands compete for consumers’ disposable income despite being a discretionary category. Pantry brands’ discounts may have reflected a need to compete for shoppers’ attention. During this period, consumers were out of the house more and less likely to use these grocery staples compared to earlier lockdown periods and cooler months.
Making Specialty Categories and Health a Priority for Online Shoppers
Interestingly, the only two categories where inventory was higher in Week 5 versus all other weeks each month were ‘Special Diets’ foods and ‘Summer Flavors’, although ‘Special Diets’ foods consistently maintained the lowest level of average availability each week across all food categories analyzed. This consistent lack of inventory could indicate a great opportunity for brands to increase inventory for dietary products sold on Walmart.com.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
The average availability for ‘Summer Flavors’ foods verifies brands are maintaining a solid replenishment strategy for these seasonal items, and a high likelihood consumers will happily find what they need to plan their Summer gatherings on Walmart.com. One alarming factor we found was the change in average discounts offered during Week 5 versus Weeks 1 through 4, indicating promotions surrounding payday may be driving sales volume versus organic demand.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Digital Growth Opportunity in Meal Kits and Kids’ Meals
Two categories primed for growth, according to Statista, are meal kits and kids’ food and beverages. Their research indicates retail sales for kids’ food has grown steadily year-over-year since 2013, and a recent report also indicates meal kit sales are expected to more than double 2017 sales in 2022, reaching $11.6 billion in the U.S., spurred by pandemic-induced demand. A concerning find in our research indicates both categories, ‘Easy Meal Solutions’ and ‘Kid Friendly Foods’ on Walmart.com, showed great volatility when it comes to in-stock availability. For example, in Week 1, ‘Easy Meal Solutions’ had an average availability nearly half the average of the rest of the month (around nineteen percent versus nearly thirty-eight percent), and in Week 5, payday week, ‘Kid Friendly Foods’ saw the biggest drop in average availability compared to Weeks 1 through 4 (over sixty-seven percent versus seventy-five percent) indicating supply may not be keeping up with the heightened demand.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
The heightened average discounts offered during Week 5 for ‘Baby’ and ‘Pets’ items indicate two categories consumers will most likely stock up on during payday.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Back to School Stock-Outs
U.S. retail sales unexpectedly increased in August, likely boosted by back-to-school shopping and child tax credit payments. Meanwhile, product shortages and other supply chain issues slowed 2021’s back-to-school sales, possibly affecting school supplies’ and clothing availability on Walmart.com. According to our analysis, the average product availability in Walmart.com’s school supplies category fell from over sixty-two percent during Weeks 1 through 4 to nearly forty-two percent in Week 5.
Warmer weather, seasonal events, reduced lockdowns, and vaccination efforts led more Americans to resume in-person socializing, giving reason to update their spring and summer wardrobes. In July, Forbes shared that three-quarters of shoppers are purchasing apparel, accessories and shoes the most. On average, only around sixty-three percent of clothing items were available on Walmart.com during Weeks 1 through 4. However, in Week 5, that figure plummeted to just over thirty-eight percent, the most significant drop among all categories.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Demand for new fashion remained high throughout this period, seemingly fueled organically, as only moderate additional discounts took place in Week 5, and although the average discount on school supplies was only around twenty-seven percent during Weeks 1 through 4, it surged to just over forty-seven percent in Week 5. Generous additional discounts in Week 5 may have inspired online shoppers to shift spending from clothing to school supplies in late July and August ahead of students’ return to the classroom.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Prioritizing Product Availability with Digital Advertising Strategies
Seventy-eight percent of B2C marketers increased their 2021 digital advertising spend to fuel online product discoverability (Share of Search), and sales and market share, but out-of-stock experiences simultaneously surged 172% this year from pre-pandemic levels. Paying for ads that drive traffic to your out-of-stock products can be as detrimental to your brand as a bad user experience. Our review of the ‘Featured Products’ sold on Walmart.com show consistent, low-levels of product availability each week throughout the months reviewed.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
Additionally, the average discount offered on these products tended to be higher than most other categories reviewed, indicating brands participating in the featured product section of the website were not only investing in digital ads, but also doubling down with promotional activity as well.
Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).
How Brands can Replenish Their Digital Shelf
It is well known just how important it is to have products available during the right time of day, week, month, or season to improve customer satisfaction rates, but with your e-commerce store open 24/7 and omnichannel fulfillment strategies in place, it drastically changes the way in which strategic execution is prioritized for a retailer to reduce basket abandonment and for brands to build loyalty.
Our greatest takeaway from this analysis is realizing how crucial it is for brands to proactively track product availability and competitive pricing insights to stay ahead of the curve and achieve their digital growth goals. Early visibility to stock replenishment could help brands align with heightened cyclical and seasonal demand to avoid out-of-stocks and grow e-commerce sales.
This is why more leading brands now rely on our Digital Shelf Analytics solutions, including Pricing and Availability insights, to keep eCommerce planning agile, to maximize online conversions, and ultimately maintain shopper satisfaction and loyalty.
As eCommerce grows in complexity, brands need new ways to grow sales and market share. Right now, brands face urgent market pressures like out-of-stocks, an influx of new competition and rising inflation, all of which erode profitability. As online marketplaces mature, more brands need to make daily changes to their digital marketing strategies in response to these market pressures, shifts in demand, and competitive trends.
eMarketer forecasts 2021 U.S. eCommerce will rise nearly 18% year-over-year (vs. 6.3% for brick-and-mortar), led by apparel and accessories, furniture, food and beverage, and health and personal care. The eCommerce industry is also undergoing fundamental changes with newer entities emerging and traditional business models evolving to adapt to the changed environment. For example, sales for delivery intermediaries such as Doordash, Instacart, Shipt, and Uber have gone from $8.8 billion in 2019 to an estimated $35.3 billion by the end of 2021. Similarly, many brands have established or are building out a Direct to Consumer (D2C) model so they can fully own and control their customer’s experiences.
In response, DataWeave has launched the next generation of our Digital Shelf Analytics suite to help brands across retail categories directly address today’s costly market risks to drive eCommerce growth and gain a competitive advantage.
“Our new enhancements help brands improve online search rank visibility and quantify the impact of digital investments – especially in time for the busy holiday season.” ~ Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder, DataWeave
The latest product enhancements provide brands access to tailored dashboard views that track KPI achievements and trigger actionable alerts to improve online search rank visibility, protect product availability and optimize share of search 24/7. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics platform works seamlessly across all forms of eCommerce platforms and models – marketplaces, D2C websites and delivery intermediaries.
Dashboard for Multiple Functions
While all brands share a common objective of increasing sales and market share, their internal teams are often challenged to communicate and collaborate, given differing needs for competitive and performance data across varying job functions. As a result, teams face pressure to quickly grasp market trends and identify what’s holding their brands back.
In response, DataWeave now offers executive-level and customized scorecard views, tailored to each user’s job function, with the ability to measure and assess marketplace changes across a growing list of online retail channels for metrics that matter most to each user. This enhancement enables data democratization and internal alignment to support goal achievement, such as boosting share of category and content effectiveness. The KPIs show aggregated trends, plus granular reasons that help to explain why and where brands can improve.
Brands gain versatile insights serving users from executives to analysts and brand and customer managers.
Prioritized, Actionable Insights
As brands digitize more of their eCommerce and digital marketing processes, they accumulate an abundance of data to analyze to uncover actionable insights. This deluge of data makes it a challenge for brands to know exactly where to begin, create a strategy and determine the right KPIs to set to measure goal accomplishment.
DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics tool enables brands to effectively build a competitive online growth strategy. To boost online discoverability (Share of Search), brands can define their own product taxonomies across billions of data points aggregated across thousands of retailer websites. They can also create customized KPIs that track progress toward goal accomplishment, with the added capability of seeing recommended courses of action to take via email alerts when brands need to adjust their eCommerce plans for agility.
“Brands need an integrated view of how to improve their discoverability and share of search by considering all touchpoints in the digital commerce ecosystem.” ~ Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder, DataWeave
Of vital importance, amid today’s global supply chain challenges, brands gain detailed analysis on product inventory and availability, as well as specific insights and alerts that prompt them to solve out-of-stocks faster, which Deloitte reports is a growing concern of consumers (75% are worried about out-of-stocks) this holiday season.
User and system generated alerts provide clarity to actionable steps to improving eCommerce effectiveness.You also have visibility to store-level product availability, and are alerted to recurring out-of-stock experiences.
Scalable Insights – From Bird’s Eye to Granular Views
DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics allows brands to achieve data accuracy at scale, including reliable insights from a top-down and bottom-up perspective. For example, you can see a granular view of one SKUs product content alongside availability, or you can monitor a group of SKUs, say your best selling ones, at a higher level view with the ability to drill down into more detail.
Brands can access flexible insights, ranging from strategic overviews to finer details explaining performance results.
Many brands struggle with an inability to scale from a hyper-local eCommerce strategy to a global strategy. Most tools available on the market solve for one or the other, addressing opportunities at either a store-level basis or top-down basis – but not both.
According to research by Boston Consulting Group and Google, advanced analytics and AI can drive more than 10% of sales growth for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, of which 5% comes directly from marketing. With DataWeave’s advanced analytics, AI and scalable insights, brands can set and follow global strategies while executing changes at a hyper-local level, using root-cause analysis to drill deeper into problems to find out why they are occurring.
As more brands embrace eCommerce and many retailers localize their online assortment strategies, the need for analytical flexibility and granular visibility to insights becomes increasingly important. Google reports that search terms “near me” and “where to buy” have increased by more than 200% among mobile users in the last few years, as consumers seek to buy online locally.
e-Retailers are now fine-tuning merchandising and promotional strategies at a hyper-local level based on differences seen in consumer’s localized search preferences, and DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution provides brands visibility to retailer execution changes in near real-time.
Competitive Benchmarking
Brand leaders cannot make sound decisions without considering external factors in the competitive landscape, including rival brands’ pricing, promotion, content, availability, ratings and reviews, and retailer assortment. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution allows you to monitor share of search, search rankings and compare content (assessing attributes like number of images, presence of video, image resolution, etc.) across all competitors, which helps brands make more informed marketing decisions.
Brands are also provided visibility into competitive insights at a granular level, allowing them to make actionable changes to their strategies to stay ahead of competitors’ moves. A new module called ‘Sales and Share’ now enables brands to benchmark sales performance alongside rivals’ and measure market share changes over time to evaluate and improve competitive positioning.
Monitor competitive activity, spot emerging threats and immediately see how your performance compares to all rivals’, targeting ways to outmaneuver the competition.
Sales & Market Share Estimates Correlated with Digital Shelf KPIs
In a brick-and-mortar world, brands often use point of sale (POS) based measurement solutions from third party providers, such as Nielsen, to estimate market share. In the digital world, it is extremely difficult to get such estimates given the number of ways online orders are fulfilled by retailers and obtained by consumers. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution now provides sales and market share estimates via customer defined taxonomy, for large retailers like Amazon. Competitive sales and market share estimates can also be obtained at a SKU level so brands can easily benchmark their performance results.
Additionally, sales and market share data can also be correlated with digital shelf KPIs. This gives an easy way for brands to check the effect of changes made to attributes, such as content and/or product availability, and how the changes impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how modified search efforts, both organic and sponsored, correspond to changes in sales and market share estimates.
Take Your Digital Shelf Growth to the Next Level
The importance of accessing flexible, actionable insights and responding in real-time is growing exponentially as online is poised to account for an increasing proportion of brands’ total sales. With 24/7 digital shelf accessibility among consumers comes 24/7 visibility and the responsibility for brands to address sales and digital marketing opportunities in real-time to attract and serve online shoppers around the clock.
Brands are turning to data analytics to address these new business opportunities, enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, drive growth and gain a competitive advantage. Companies that adopt data-driven marketing strategies are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year, and DataWeave is here to help your organization adopt these practices. To capitalize on the global online shopping boom, brands must invest in a digital shelf analytics solution now to effectively build their growth strategies and track measurable KPIs.
DataWeave’s next-gen Digital Shelf Analytics enhancements now further a brand’s ability to monitor, analyze, and determine systems that enable faster and smarter decision-making and sales performance optimization. The results delight consumers by helping them find products they’re searching for, which boosts brand trust.
Connect with us to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs. No project or region is too big or small, and we can start where you want and scale up to help you stay agile and competitive.
Content is the reigning king for e-commerce & plays a big role in driving sales and conversions. And, consumer-centric content that drives traffic is vital for e-commerce sales. Unlike offline retail where the sales staff on the ground is always available to answer customer queries, online that is not the case. When shopping online, customers rely on audio & visual product content to give them the information they need in order to make purchase decisions. Understanding that your product speaks to your customers directly on online channels is critical – so optimizing your product content to represent your brand in the best light is very important.
Here are the Top 4 ways to optimize content & drive ROI.
1. Focus on your customer & set a brand tone
Who is your customer? And what type of product is your brand selling? The golden rule togetting the right content for your brand is to answer these two questions right. For instance, if you’re selling furniture and focusing on a family audience then using flowery language will not help your cause. You need to share factual, product-specific content, calling out furniture specs from color, fabric, size, and so on.
Take for instance ProFlowers – a US-based flower retailer who created an entire Florapedia® – an in-depth flower guide. This content helped their customers learn more about the various flowers & discover new flowers they never knew of when making purchase decisions. To drive e-commerce sales, ProFlowers set the brand tone using educational content. On the other hand, if you are selling clothing or lingerie, you need to be extremely specific about the details of each product. Let’s look at reputed outdoor clothing brand Jack Wolfskin – they use high-quality images for content optimization and showcase real instances and moods in which the clothing can be worn or what they can be paired with. This is a good way to allow customers to picture themselves owning the item, as well as research their unique qualities.
Educational, visual-heavy, or fun & quirky – pick your content style based on your brand tone.
2. Use videos as a powerful content optimization tool
Videos empower content and hook your customers in. In a report, Cisco had earlier projected that by the year 2022, videos will be responsible for 82% of all consumer internet traffic. For e-commerce, video content can not only deliver a message but is easily shareable across all platforms. Videos not only possess the power to captivate people for extended amounts of time, but according to research, if a video is embedded on your website, you’re 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google.
Videos work as a descriptive medium to give more details about your product. Further, explanatory videos relieve consumer fears regarding the quality of the product by allowing viewers to visually experience its usages and benefits. MAC for instance uses a host of make-up tutorials and other video content on their website.
Videos bring brand storytelling to life and keep visitors informed. In the case of the videos created by MAC, they are not only informative and engaging, but they also help the brand answer common shopper questions with live examples. Customers who land upon the MAC website can watch videos relevant to the products they want to shop for, understand the product details and then decide if the product is for them. Thus, brands using videos can create a better customer experience by giving the visitors an immersive brand exposure online, just like they could have got offline.
3. Focus on making your product page consumer-centric
A product page can be highly discoverable if it aligns with the best practices & standard e-commerce algorithms put in place by popular marketplaces and e-commerce channels. This is because the organic product ranking algorithms vary across channels and are composed of direct and indirect factors used to match a consumer’s popular search queries to products they are most likely to purchase. For better content optimization that ensures visibility, start by mapping platform-specific content standards. Then follow the SEO trends and tweak your product titles and description, to give your brand content a boost.
Love Hair Product
Take for instance the LOVE Hair product pages – the product titles are crafted using product features and benefits like revitalizing, nourishing, volumizing. Consumers searching for shampoos normally type in these attributes to look for shampoos that may suit their requirements – so using attributes as a hook in the product title is a great idea to make the product more discoverable against that keyword or attribute.
Next, keeping these standards as a backbone, fine-tune the product details you are putting out on the page. Your product features are the reasons why your consumer will buy your brand as compared to your competitors, so your descriptions should be crisp, easy to read, highlighting all the product features & facts that help them make that purchase decision. Let’s look at the Fitbit product page…
Fitbit Product Page
4. Optimize content based on devices
With mobile commerce reaching the tipping point in the e-commerce sales funnel, you cannot ignoreattending to content optimization for hand-held devices. Many times, buyers on the go use mobile devices to conduct their research and your success lies in being able to entice them with a perfectly optimized e-commerce page even on their mobile device. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
Keep their reading experience in mind. Use shorter titles, and bite-sized product information so key points are upfront and visible on a tinier screen
Be concise with your content presentation
Video content should not autoplay on mobile. The less invasive your content, the better
Keep video & image file sizes small so that page load time is quick
E-Commerce Product Page
A perfectly balanced e-commerce product page is even more vital in the new normal, given that COVID has accelerated e-commerce, globally. So, whether you are selling furniture, books, clothes, or health juices, with the right focus on product content, you can convert shoppers into customers more easily and increase your sales & revenue. Feel free to take inspiration from some of the examples above to apply some of these strategies to your online store.
Building the right product page with the right content is not enough. You will also need to keep rehashing your product pages with reviews, offers, and other such relevant nodes to deliver the right punch. After all, delivering the right customer experience starts with a product page done right.
Want to see first-hand how DataWeave can help brands with content optimization? Sign up for a demo with our Digital Shelf experts to know more.
With the holiday shopping frenzy right around the corner, brands need to do everything they can to win their customer’s share of wallets. ‘Tis the season shoppers have longer shopping lists and will likely buy products they’ve never purchased before for gift giving. This makes it even more critical for brands to make sure they make it easy for shoppers to find their product at the time right time, with the right deals and discounts. Watch the webinar with Karthik Bettadapura – CEO, Co-Founder at DataWeave & Vladimir Sushko– E-Retail Director at Anheuser-Busch InBev & learn about the key levers brands need to pull to get their Digital Shelf ready for the Holiday Season
Let’s start with Product Search…
Organic levers you can pull for Search Optimization
Key Highlights:
Product content is not a one-time fix. It’s seasonal. Seasons change and so does your product. Your content needs to reflect these dynamic changes.
Fact – Search rankings drop when product availability starts dipping. Lesser known fact – even after stock replenishing, your search ranking does not bounce back immediately. The opportunity cost of dwindling product stock is high.
Being optimized for the right keyword is good. Being optimized for the right keyword, with a higher ranking than your competitor is great!
Ratings & Reviews have a large correlation with search ranking and impact on sales.
We then asked the audience what factors they thought had the biggest impact on search rankings…
Listen to the experts answer questions that have been on everyone’s mind this Holiday Season!
Vladimir: How do you approach Search at Ab InBev?
Vladimir: Favourites have an impact, but is this something you can influence? If yes, how?
Vladimir: When it comes to growing your online sales via marketplaces what’s the one lever you pull most aggressively?
Karthik: Optimizing Share of Search on Marketplaces v/s traditional online retailers
Vladimir: What organic efforts do you use to improve your share of search?
Vladimir: When it comes to sponsored search do you use an always-on strategy or are ads spent strategically?
Karthik: Sponsored or Organic? What’s your advice to brands?
Vladimir: Are you tracking your competitor’s Digital Shelf?
Karthik: Which competitor KPIs do you recommend brands should track?
Vladimir: What’s your strategy to make sure you have a high share of search during Christmas – the busiest shopping season.
Karthik: What’s your advice for brands for the festive season?
Do you know if your brand is prepped and ready to make an impact during the biggest holiday season of the year? Or simply just wondering if your Digital Shelf is optimized with the right price, discounts, reviews, and keywords? Our team can DataWeave can help! Reach out to our Digital Shelf experts to learn more.
Customers expect personalization. Unless they have a seamless experience on your online channels, they’ll leave for a different retailer. Retail analytics can solve these problems for merchants looking to increase customer satisfaction and sales. It provides insights into inventory, sales, customers, and other essential aspects crucial for decision-making. Retail analytics also encompasses several granular fields to create a broad picture of a retail business’s health and sales, along with improvement areas.
Big data analytics in the retail market
Big data analytics in the retail market is expected to reach USD 13.26 billion by the end of 2026, registering a CAGR of 21.20% during the forecast period (2021-2026). The growth of analytics in retail depicts how it can help companies run businesses more efficiently, make data-backed choices, and deliver improved customer service.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the top 10 analytics that retailers are using to gain a competitive advantage in accurately evaluating business & market performance.
Top 10 of Retail Analytics You Must Know
1. Assortment
Assortment planning allows retailers to choose the right breadth (product categories) and depth (product variation within each category) for their retail or online stores. Assortment management has grown beyond simple performance metrics like total sales or rotation numbers. Instead, retail analytics offers a comprehensive analysis of product merchandise and an estimated number of units at the push of a button. Retailers that effectively apply assortment analytics can enjoy increased gross margins and prevent significant losses from overstocks sold at discounted prices or out-of-stock inventory leading their customers to buy from competitors.
It also helps retailers gain insights into the trendy and discoverable brands and products on all e-commerce websites across the globe. They can boost sales by making sure they have an in-demand product assortment. They can also track pricing information and attributes common across popular products to drive their pricing and promotion strategies.
2. Inventory Management
An inadequately maintained inventory is every retailer’s worst nightmare. It represents a poor indicator of inadequate demand for a product and leads to a loss in sales. Data can help companies answer issues like what to store and what to discard. It’s beneficial to discard or increase offers on products that are not generating sales and keep replenished stocks of popular items.
In 2020, the estimated value for out-of-stock items ($1.14 trillion) was double that of overstock items ($626 billion). A similar trend was especially prominent in grocery stores, where out-of-stock items were worth five times more than overstock items.
Unavailability of high-selling products can lead to reduced sales, ultimately generating incorrect data for future forecasting and producing skewed demand and supply insights. Retailers can now use analytics to identify which products are in demand, which are moving slowly, and which ones contribute to dead stock. They can know in real-time if a high-demand product is unavailable at a specific location and take action to increase the stock. Retailers can use this historical data to predict what to stock, at what place, time, and cost to maintain and optimize revenue. It helps satisfy consumer needs, prevents loss of sales, reduces inventory cost, and streamlines the complete supply chain.
3. Competitive Intelligence
Market intelligence & Competitive Insights
The ability to accurately predict trends after the global pandemic and with an unknown economic future is becoming the cornerstone for successful retailers. Smart retailers know how important it is to Pandemic-Proof their retail strategy with Market Intelligence & Competitive Insights
With 90% of Fortune 500 companies using competitive intelligence, it’s an essential tool to gain an advantage over industry competitors. Competitive Intelligence allows you to gather and analyze information about your competitors and understand the market–providing valuable insights that you can apply to your own business. A more strategic competitor analysis will explain brand affinities and provide insights on what to keep in stock and when to start promotions. Customer movement data will also give you access to where your customers are shopping.
4. Fraud Detection
Fraud Detection
Retailers have been in a constant struggle with fraud detection and prevention since time immemorial. Fraudulent products lead to substantial financial losses and damage the reputation of both brands and retailers. Every $1 of fraud now costs U.S. retail and eCommerce merchants $3.60, a 15% growth since the pre-Covid study in 2019, which was $3.13. Retail Analytics acts as a guardian against fraudsters by constantly monitoring, identifying, and flagging fraud products and sellers.
5. Campaign Management
Some of the challenges of the retail industry are that it’s seasonal, promotion-based, highly competitive, and fast-moving. In today’s competitive marketplace, consumers compare prices and expect personalized shopping experiences. Campaign management allows marketing teams to plan, track, and analyze marketing strategies for promoting products and attracting audiences. Retail analytics can help businesses predict consumer behavior, improve decision-making across the company, and determine the ROI of their marketing efforts.
According to Invesp, 64% of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial in the economy. Retail analytics can help businesses analyze their data to learn about their customers with target precision. With predictive analysis, retailers can design campaigns that encourage consumers to interact with the brand, move down the sales funnel, and ultimately convert.
6. Behavioral Analytics
Retail firms often look to improve customer conversion rates, personalize marketing campaigns to increase revenue, predict and avoid customer churn, and lower customer acquisition costs. Data-driven insights on customer shopping behaviors can help companies tackle these challenges. However, several interaction points like social media, mobile, e-commerce sites, stores, and more, cause a substantial increase in the complexity and diversity of data to accumulate and analyze.
Insider Intelligence forecasts that m-eCommerce volume will rise at 25.5% (CAGR) until 2024, hitting $488 billion in sales, or 44% of all e-commerce transactions.
Data can provide valuable insights, for example, recognizing your high-value customers, their motives behind the purchase, their buying patterns, behaviors, and which are the best channels to market to them and when. Having these detailed insights increases the probability of customer acquisition and perhaps drives their loyalty towards you.
7. Pricing
Competitive pricing in retail
Market trends fluctuate at an unprecedented pace, and pricing has become as competitive as it’s ever been. The only way to keep up with competitive pricing in retail is to use retail analytics that enables retailers to drive more revenue & margin by pricing products competitively.
A report from Inside Big Data found companies experience anywhere from 0.5% up to 17.1% in margin loss purely because of pricing errors. Pricing analytics provides companies with the tools and methods to perceive better, interpret and predict pricing that matches consumer behavior. Appropriate pricing power comes from understanding what your consumers want, which offers they respond to, how and where they shop, and how much they will pay for your products.
In 2021, the price optimization segment is anticipated to own the largest share of the overall retail analytics market. Retailers can identify gaps and set alerts to track changes across crucial SKUs or products with pricing analytics. Knowing your customer’s price perception will increase sales and also allow you to design promotions that’ll attract customers. Pricing analytics also accounts for factors like demographics, weather forecasting, inventory levels, real-time sales data, product movement, purchase history, and much more to arrive at an excellent price.
8. Sales and Demand Forecasting
Sales and demand forecasting allow retailers to plan for levels of granularity—monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly—and use the insights in their marketing campaigns and business decisions. The benefits of a granular forecast are apparent since retailers don’t have to bank on historical data of previous clients and customers to predict revenues. Retailers can plan their strategies and promotions that suit their customer’s demands.
With sales and demand forecasting, retailers can also consider the most recent, historical, and real-time data to predict potential future revenue. Sales and demand analytics can predict buying patterns and market trends based on socioeconomic and demographic conditions.
9. Customer Service and Experience
With the development of eCommerce, more and more customers prefer to browse and interact with the product before purchasing online. They look for better deals and discounts across stores and platforms. 3 out of 5 consumers say retail’s investment in technology is improving their online and in-store shopping experiences. To enhance merchandising and marketing strategies, retailers can gather data on customer buying journeys to understand their in-store and online experiences.
Retailers can run test campaigns to know the impact on sales and use historical data to predict consumers’ needs based on their demographics, buying patterns, and interests. Retail analytics help retailers to bring more efficiency in promotions and drive impulsive purchases and cross-selling.
10. Promotion
Analyze Competitors’ Promotions
Promotions are potent sales drivers and need to be cleverly targeted towards specific customers with precise deals to generate outstanding sales. Retail analytics allows companies to study their customers and competitors to a vastly elevated level.
To be an industry leader, retail companies not only have to understand their customers, but they must also analyze competitors’ promotions to improve their marketing strategies. Analyzing your competitor’s promotional banners, ads, and marketing campaigns are no more associated with imitation.
With data analytics and AI, retailers can watch their competitors’ commercialization strategies. It can uncover vital information about their target audience, sales volume fluctuations, popular seasonal product types, product attributes of popular items, and significant industry trends. Knowing exactly which products and brands are popular among your competitor’s campaigns can help retailers improve their promotional strategies.
Conclusion
The benefits of retail analytics are spread across various verticals, from merchandising, assortment, inventory management, and marketing to reducing losses. The need for analytics has become even more apparent considering the growing eCommerce platforms, changing customer buying journeys, and the complexity of the industry. Understanding which products sell best among which customers will help retailers to deliver an optimized shopping experience.
Want to drive profitable growth by making smarter pricing, promotions, and product merchandising decisions using real-time retail insights? DataWeave’s AI-powered Competitive Intelligence can help! Reach out to our Retail Analytics experts to know more.
With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, beauty and cosmetics companies are exploring new possibilities. According to a report by Avendus, the global beauty and personal care market are expected to touch US$725 billion by 2025 and the young Indian market is expected to grow to $28 billion by then. This segment is a space of opportunity and today we have more than 80 Indian brands in this domain.
D2C beauty brand logos
While technology in this space plays a very important role, Artificial Intelligence (AI) amongst everything else is giving the beauty industry a makeover. This is because, AI can create an impact on all stages of the beauty value chain — from research & development to supply chain management to product selection, marketing, and more! Resonating this thought, Chaitanya Nallan, CEO & Co-Founder, SkinKraft Laboratories mentions “As a digital-first brand, we sell across multiple e-commerce platforms as well as through our own website. Thus, it is very important that we track and maintain inventory across all channels in real-time to avoid stock-outs and loss of sales. We use AI for this. We have built an in-house data tracking dashboard that pulls in inventory information from all warehouses and maps them against sales to give us an accurate estimate of days of inventory across all SKUs and across all platforms. This information directly feeds into our procurement dashboard and also helps the marketing team to create the right sales strategy.”
Stock availability is crucial to driving sales. If you need help tracking your online inventory – DataWeave can help give you a near real-time view of your product stock status across marketplaces.
With AI being a powerful technology wand, here is how it can drive the future of beauty brands within the D2C segment in India.
Making Virtual Product trials a reality
Virtual Product Trial
Augmented Reality (AR) is a prevalent term and many companies are already using it on an everyday basis. More commonly, the Snapchat and Instagram filters we use are all powered by AR. In a similar vein, virtual images can be laid over actual images in real-time using AI. And keeping this concept handy, beauty brands are bringing to the front the AR-powered ‘virtual mirrors’ that let consumers try on cosmetic products in real-time. Modiface by L’Oréal is a perfect example of VR-mirrors, which has pioneered the AR-powered makeup try-ons in the market. These virtual mirrors use AI algorithms to detect the user’s face through a camera by focal points and map the face. Then using AR, images of makeup are adjusted according to the terms obtained and overlaid over the features on the face giving consumers a virtual feel of what they’d look like wearing the product.
Virtual Try-on
Much recently, Indian brand Lakme has made ‘virtual try on’ possible by creating a smart mirror on its official website that allows customers to watch their reflection, try on different shades, and customize those shades according to their preferences. Shade matching until a few years back was an entirely on-ground phenomenon and customers visiting a local cosmetics store were able to choose and match the shade of compact, eye shadow, and lipstick against their true skin tone. Today AI can allow you to narrow down on products based on a virtual shade card, put them against your skin in real-time.
Make it Truly Personalised
Every customer is unique, and one size does not fit all. Everyone has a personalized beauty regime they follow & understanding this could be the key to success for beauty brands. For this reason, the future of beauty lies in harnessing AI and AR solutions to tailor the beauty shopping experience to match the needs of the individual consumer. This not only enhances digital engagement but also increases purchasing confidence which in turn helps brands drive conversion and brand loyalty.
Pre-pandemic, offline beauty advisors played a consultative role when customers were making purchase decisions. A lot of this has moved online – take for instance Olay. It launched an online “Skin Advisor” app based on a deep-learning algorithm that analyses a consumer’s skin using a simple selfie! Armed with information on their skin type, customers can make an informed, personalized purchase that’s right for their specific skin type.
Skin Advisor App
Understanding customer preferences and using data from their past purchases also help with personalized marketing in a big way. “Data-driven personalization gives brands insight into what their customers are interested in. We integrate this data into our marketing campaigns and deliver specific, personalized, and relevant content. This way, we make sure to target the right audience with the right messaging. This, in turn, helps us increase engagement and retain customers. Moreover, this combined data, allows us to get repeat sales through upselling and cross-selling. Further, knowing customers beyond just simple demographics helps us improve our targeting and helps us predict future behaviour. We’d like to know, for instance, if a customer clicked on our advertisement, liked, or commented on our social media product displays, signed up to our email list, etc. These analytics reveal a customer’s interest. Combine it with demographics – and you get a sense of what the customer is interested in,” Dhruv Madhok, Co-Founder, ARATA highlights.
Boost Product Development
Social listening
AI algorithms can be used to study and analyse customer feedback. The algorithm works towards interpreting customer comments, reviews, and feedback on a brand’s website, social media channels, and other online platforms. Artificial Intelligence can also decode and analyse questionnaires and feedback forms that the customers may have responded to online or offline.
The beauty and personal care industry is largely driven by usage and customer preferences, so gauging how customers feel about key products can help businesses create & develop products that customers will most likely prefer to buy. For instance, reputed beauty brand Avon recently mentioned that it developed the True 5-in-1 Lash Genius Mascara based on actual consumer feedback! They used machine learning & artificial intelligence to read, filter, process & rank thousands of online consumer comments to determine the top features they crave in a mascara. Using this customer gathered intelligence, they developed a unique product that consumers we’re “asking for”!
True 5-in-1 Lash Genius Mascara by beauty brand Avon
More and more brands are listening to customer responses closely to give way to new products, bring in tweaks to their existing basket, and innovate further. “Our ORM team is leading the knowledge accumulation as far as social listening is concerned. They are not just responsible for responding to customer queries, they are also instrumental in highlighting key insights based on user behaviour being observed,” Chaitanya of SkinKraft Laboratories further asserts.
Bombay Shaving Company too with its data-centric culture leverages customer responses for decision making & product development. “In-home personal care and hygiene exploded during the pandemic. We used data analytics to explore different dimensions of in-home experience-driven needs (new usage occasions, need for convenience and DIY, etc.). We listened to our customers & were able to introduce our women’s brand, with innovative hair removal products in a big way during this period. Which today contributes to a significant percentage of our business,” Shantanu Deshpande, Founder & CEO, Bombay Shaving Company mentions.
Given the scope and scale of the beauty and personal care industry that is major ‘usage’ driven, Artificial Intelligence with its diverse potential can bring a paradigm shift in the industry. AI can help not only with virtual trials, personalization, listening in to customers’ feedback but also with monitoring a brand’s Digital Shelf. Brands can amplify their online sales by tracking Digital Shelf KPIs like share of search & product visibility, pricing & discounting, product content, availability & assortment. Reach out to our Digital Shelf experts to learn more.
The festival of lights symbolized the victory of light over darkness, good over evil & knowledge over ignorance. Over the years, Diwali has become all that and more. It has single-handedly become the biggest shopping season in India! Splurging on a new Smart TV or Fridge, or a furniture upgrade at home has become customary during Diwali. Not to forget buying gold and gifts for all your loved ones!
As more and more people are doing their Diwali shopping online, we decided to look at the data, see what people were browsing and buying. And more importantly, which brands spruced up their Digital Shelf & put their best foot forward this Diwali Season.
Methodology
We tracked the first 250 products on Amazon & Flipkart against specific keyword searches & product categories.
Share of Search (SoS): The percentage of products that appeared on the search results page on Amazon or Flipkart belonging to a brand, against a specific keyword or category.
Dates of Crawl during the Flipkart Big Billion Day / Amazon Great Indian Festival. – Pre-sale period: 1st October 2021 – Sale Period: 3rd to 10th October 2021 – Post Sale Period: 11th – 18th October 2021
India’s E-Commerce Gold Rush
YouGov reported that almost three in ten urban Indians (28%) are planning to spend on gold in the next 3 months. Seven in ten (69%) of these prospective gold buyers agreed with the statement, “Diwali is the best time to buy gold”, highlighting their inclination to spend during the festive season. Also, the same survey showed that Tanishq was the most trusted gold brand. With Kalyan Jewellers, Malabar Gold & Diamonds and PC Jewellers also making it to the top 5 list.
While traditionally Gold was mostly sold offline, that trend has fast changed. We tracked brands that had the highest Share of Search against the keyword “Gold Coin” on both Amazon & Flipkart to see if Tanishq, Malabar Gold, PC Jewellers – the big trusted names in jewellery were making their mark online.
Search Insights for Gold Coin
On Amazon, MMTC-PAMP (a joint venture between Switzerland-based PAMP SA & MMTC Ltd, a Government of India undertaking) and Kundan had the highest visibility for the keyword “Gold Coin” at 10%, followed by Malabar Gold at 9%. (Refer to above graph of Search Visibility on Amazon)
MMTC-PAMP used the help of Sponsored ads to get this visibility. They sponsored 9 products during the sale, while ACPL, the largest supplier of silver in India sponsored 26 products and New Delhi-based PC Jewellers sponsored 12 products. (Refer to above graph of Sponsored Products on Amazon)
As recently as 2 weeks ago, MMTC-PAMP launched their e-commerce portal following in the footsteps of other jewellery brands. According to a report by the World Gold Council, the jewellery industry went through a massive slowdown amid the pandemic and prepping their e-commerce & digital strategies are likely going to be the only way forward.
On Flipkart, PC Jewellers, Malabar Gold & Kundan occupied the top 3 spots on the search results page. While PC Jewellers sponsored 12 products on Amazon, on Flipkart they sponsored zero. Malabar Gold on the other hand sponsored a whopping 25 products on Flipkart! Interestingly Malabar Gold sponsored no products on Amazon for the keyword Gold Coin. (Refer to above graph of Sponsored Products on Flipkart)
Unboxing the love – Branded Diwali Gift Hampers
Branded-Diwali-Gift-Hampers
Now let’s talk about Diwali Gifts. How often have you thought of buying someone a Diwali gift but had absolutely no idea what to get them? You’re not alone! A lot of consumers would simply run a search for “Diwali Gift Hampers” or Diwali Gifts” in the hope to stumble across a great gifting idea and make an instant purchase! Smart brands who know this make sure their products have organic or sponsored visibility against these keywords
OnAmazon, Tied Ribbons, a D2C gift and Décor company had the highest number of Sponsored products (15) against the keyword Diwali Gift followed by the iconic Brand Archies with (14) products. Flipkarthad a whole bunch of smaller brands and sellers optimizing their products for this keyword. Some bigger, more known brands like Chaayos, Cadbury, D2C Tea brand Vahdam did have visibility for the keywords “Diwali Gift Hampers/ Diwali Gifts” but they were way down on the list, at the bottom of the search results page, or on Page 2.
Was this a missed opportunity for them?
Give your home a festive upgrade!
Diwali is a perfect time to upgrade or buy new electrical appliances for your home. Great prices, new product launches, and an unmatched festive feeling make it even more ideal to make new purchases. If you’re eyeing smart innovative electrical appliances for your home this year and decided to go make your purchase during the Flipkart Big Billion Day or Amazon Great Indian Festival, let’s take a look at which brands made sure they showed up right on top in your online search.
We tracked search visibility for 5 keywords in the home appliance space – Smart TV, Washing Machine, Microwave, Air Conditioner & Refrigerators to see which brands had the highest share of search
Brands with the Highest Share of Search on Amazon
On Amazon, both Samsung & LG had high visibility across all products except Air Conditioners!
For ACs, Voltas had the highest share of search even though they sponsored 0 products! And that’s definitely noteworthy. So what really gave them the edge and put them in this winning position?
We took a look at their product reviews to draw an analysis. Voltas ACs had close to 10k reviews! The highest in the AC category. Ratings & Reviews play a key role in helping brands drive their Digital Shelf experience. Customers trust user-generated content more than information brands share with them. Also, Amazon’s A9 algorithm prioritizes products with better reviews & shows them higher up in search – a low-cost & organic way for brands to get to the top without spending money on Sponsored ads!
Most loved Air Conditioner brand
When it comes to washing machines, Lloyd & White Westinghouse (trademark by Electrolux) sponsored the maximum number of products in the category, this gave them the highest Sponsored SoS (13%) on the first page.
While their sponsored visibility was high, their overall SoS was low which is why they didn’t organically feature in the top 5. Sponsoring products is a great but expensive way to artificially boost product visibility during sale periods. Brands need to go the Voltas route by optimizing their reviews & rating or content, to organically gain and sustain product visibility.
… & here are the brands that made it to the top on Flipkart.
Brands with the Highest Share of Search-on-FLIPKART
Gift-worthy gizmos!
Buy the latest gadgets and pamper yourself this Diwali or gift them to your loved ones! You could be looking to upgrade your laptop, or buying a fancy DSLR or Smartwatch, buying it online may be your best bet. Discounts have dwindled over the years but you may still get the most lucrative discounts online. Let’s look at the discounts offered on Amazon & Flipkart for some gift-worthy gizmos like Laptops, Cameras, Smart Watches & Headphones this festive season.
The platform that offered the highest number of products in their catalog at a discount
On Amazon, during the sale, the headphones category offered a 75% of products on discount as compared to the pre-sales period. That number was just around 51% for cameras. Far more number of products were discounted on Flipkart – 87% for headphones & laptops. And cameras 77%. So if you were looking to shop for gadgets around Diwali, Flipkart would’ve been a better bet.
Let’s look at which platform offered the highest percentage of discounts on products.
Discounts were higher across all 4 product categories!
Apart from more products being discounted on Flipkart, Flipkart also offered higher discounts across these 4 categories. Discounts were higher across all 4 product categories!
Do you know if your brand is prepped and ready to make an impact on a Big Festival Sale Day? Or simply just wondering if your Digital Shelf is optimized with the right price, discounts, reviews and keywords? Our team can DataWeave can help! Reach out to our Digital Shelf experts to learn more.
Around 30 percent of electronic products across Amazon and 19 percent across Flipkart continued to be sold without any discount during October which is ironically seen as the festive month where the two companies make tall claims about deals and discounts offered around Indian festivals.
Out of the 70-80 percent products where discounts were available, Flipkart surprisingly turned out to be more generous than Amazon during the period under review.
As per the data exclusively shared with Moneycontrol by digital commerce analytics platform DataWeave, Flipkart on an average offered 26.3 percent discounts across the categories mentioned as compared to Amazon which had just 10.6 percent discounts.
What makes it more interesting is that while Amazon was officially running its flagship sale The Great Indian Festival for the entire month, Flipkart had concluded its The Big Billion Days on October 10th itself.
However, it looks like the latter was in no mood to let the competition have it all.
The pattern is slightly different from the week-long data which was reported by Moneycontrol last month. During the first week of the festive sale, both the two companies offered no additional discounts across 30 percent of the products across the electronics category which houses products like refrigerators, air-conditioners, and laptops.
While Amazon continues to stick to the trend, Flipkart seems to have become a little aggressive there.
On a product level, across air conditioners, while Flipkart offered discounts across 84 percent of the products, Amazon offered it only across 73.1 percent of products. Laptops saw at least 87 percent of products on Flipkart having discounts while on Amazon it was across 76.3 percent.
Smart TV interestingly had a different pattern. While Amazon had 72.1 percent of the products at a discounted price, Flipkart had just 63.7 percent of smart TV’s on discount.
Interestingly, on Amazon and Flipkart at least 2.5 percent and 3.1 percent of electronic products also had a price hike during the period under review respectively.
This is a far cry from discounts in the 60-70 percent range that the two companies advertise across electronics and appliances categories on their platforms during the sale period to lure customers.
“Sellers decide the price of their products on Amazon. Our investment in technology and infrastructure has allowed them to save costs and consistently offer great prices to customers. Our partnership with banks, sellers, and ecosystem partners allow us to add further value through exchange offers, no-cost EMI, instant bank discounts among others, ” said an Amazon spokesperson.
Flipkart did not respond to queries.
Bengaluru-based Dataweave counts Japanese ad-tech firm FreakOut Group and domestic venture capital firm Blume Ventures among its investors. The data was shared exclusively with Moneycontrol.
The price comparisons were made with rates displayed on October 1, the last business-as-usual day before the sale started and the month-long sale period beginning October 3.
For this analysis, DataWeave crawled pages of the electronics category, which houses products, including air-conditioners, cameras, headphones, laptops, microwave ovens, refrigerators, smart televisions, smartwatches and washing machines. The firm scanned 2,285 products on Amazon and 3,131 on Flipkart.
Counterfeits pose a dangerous threat to any retail brand. Since every single sale is a pivotal branding opportunity, especially for young, burgeoning eCommerce brands, an online marketplace flooded with counterfeits can be particularly dangerous. One in five customers will boycott a brand after mistakenly purchasing a counterfeit product, and that’s not the kind of ratio that any retailer –– from the smallest Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) site to the behemoths like Amazon –– can afford to ignore.
In the age of online reviews, it’s especially dangerous to have counterfeits floating around. Customers that have a bad experience with a counterfeit can take to the internet to disparage your brand without ever actually interacting with your company or trying your product. That’s why consistent and thorough content audits are paramount to ensuring your brand’s authentic products are highly discoverable, and brand protection and governance processes are in place to safeguard brand integrity across all applicable eCommerce websites.
The Holiday Counterfeit Boom
The holidays are a time when customers search for gifts for their friends and family, which means exploring brands outside of their usual fare. Many consumers will be exposed to your brand’s Digital Shelf for the first time over the holiday season, creating an opportunity for brand growth. But if you don’t have eCommerce brand protection initiatives in place, the holidays can be detrimental to brand positioning, customer trust, and your bottom line.
As consumers boost their online spending and web traffic increases over the holidays, so does the likelihood of them purchasing counterfeit goods online. eMarketer predicts that retail eCommerce sales will comprise almost 20 percent of total holiday retail sales this year. As such, there will also be a surge in counterfeit inventory. So, this is an ideal time to invest in a brand protection solution to help you stay ahead of unauthorized sellers entering the marketplace.
Brand Integrity Helps Suppliers Save
Implementing a solution to mitigate the risks of counterfeit products should be at the top of every retailer’s “To-Do” list this year. However, for many retailers, this means manually reviewing numerous websites and third-party marketplaces for violations. Not only is manually reviewing content, images, and seller authenticity a time-consuming process, but it also leaves a lot of room for human error – making it possible for counterfeits to slip through the cracks and into the hands of unsuspecting customers. Not to mention your time should be spent fulfilling orders and increasing customer satisfaction during the high-traffic holiday season, not distracted by monitoring counterfeits.
Fortunately, that’s not the only way to identify counterfeits and protect your brand online. An effective content auditing tool can help you monitor, detect, and determine systems to identify and act on identified violations, saving time and labor hours normally spent on manual auditing processes. Content audit software also often contains helpful features to help you run your business more strategically by monitoring online hygiene factors like product titles and description. It works across all online channels by highlighting content gaps, which can then be remedied to improve product visibility and conversions. Through online content optimization, you can save money (in unnecessary labor costs), improve your Share of Search, and increase sales and share, with a modest up-front investment.
Brand Value Protection Boosts Consumer Confidence
Brand image protection doesn’t just protect retailers, it also protects customers from unintentionally buying dangerous counterfeit goods. Counterfeiting has skyrocketed during the pandemic. The International Chamber of Commerce reports that, by 2022, counterfeit goods will be a $4.2 trillion industry, and global damage from counterfeit goods is projected to exceed $323 billion. Studies show one in four customers has unknowingly purchased a counterfeit item online.
As counterfeits increase in number, so does the risk of counterfeit consumption by unwitting consumers. Counterfeit goods are as dangerous as they are ubiquitous. Customs and Border Patrol has found ingredients such as cadmium, arsenic, lead, and cyanide inside of counterfeit cosmetics. Consumers are aware of these risks. So, as a retailer, you need to be able to reassure customers that they can trust the authenticity of the goods they are purchasing at your online store.
A counterfeit detection tool can help you identify fakes and image replicas across multiple online marketplaces, so you can get fake products delisted. Automated counterfeit solutions can increase customer satisfaction in their purchasing experience, since they know they’re getting an authentic product right off the bat. This type of online brand protection creates increased brand loyalty over time, as well as more positive first-time product interactions.
Making a Measurable Impact: A Counterfeit Detection Case Study
Classic Accessories is a leading manufacturer of high-quality furnishings and accessories. The company’s investment in a counterfeit detection tool paid off in spades for their organization. After noticing a surge in counterfeit versions of their goods being sold via online, global marketplaces, they decided they needed to change their manual counterfeit and image violation detection process to an automated one to proactively respond to concerned activity in a timely manner.
Their goal was to achieve streamlined, actionable insights across all retail websites to account for varied violation submission processes, and to reduce the timespan in which insights were generated, ultimately eliminating the need to conduct daily, manual audits. They partnered with DataWeave, who built out a fully customized program to automate Classic Accessories’ content inventory management process, and identified SKU-level violations by matching names and images in diverse online marketplaces.
During the first three months of onboarding, Classic Accessories was able to detect more than 25,000 violations, submitting notices to each marketplace, and even achieved a 100% removal rate across all Amazon sources. Additionally, they also achieved their goal of saving time (22 hours per week) in automation processes, translating to a $68,000 savings opportunity in labor costs.
Closing Thoughts
Prioritizing your online brand protection strategy is imperative to growing your online presence and achieving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Fortunately, there are options like DataWeave’s brand protection tool available to help curate your online content, provide consistency across online channels, and improve consumer confidence by addressing and removing counterfeit violations. Implementing the right solution can help find counterfeit products in real-time to keep your brand safe –– and your reputation intact –– throughout the 2021 holiday season. The right brand protection software will provide both Brand Protection and Content Audits, so your brand is optimized from every possible angle for truly competitive results.
Lessons from Kroger, Albertson’s, and Safeway’s Optimized Online Positioning
As consumers continue their migration to online shopping through and after the pandemic, Halloween shopping is no exception.
If that’s the new paradigm, what clues should retailers and brands be looking for to enhance their sales? With Halloween around the corner, the analyst team at DataWeave wanted to see how successfully grocers are partnering with brands to prepare for the influx of online Halloween shoppers. We tracked insights from September 14 to 24, 2021, using data from Kroger, Albertson’s, and Safeway websites to understand the preparedness of each retailer, their partnered brands, and how their online strategies compare with one another.
There are hundreds of ways for a consumer to search for a brand’s products online and of critical importance, almost 50 percent of traffic across the top 1000 retailers come through search. At the same time, consumers are becoming less brand conscious. This is a significant development, and there are significant ramifications to consumers searching for products using generic category specific keywords without including brand names in the search. Consequently, we can’t sufficiently stress how understanding online channel experiences is critical to successful outcomes. Retailers and brands alike need an integrated view of how to improve their discoverability and share of search by considering all touchpoints in the digital commerce ecosystem.
The Importance of Product Descriptions, Assortment, Sizes, Price Points
With 75 percent of people never scrolling past the first page of a website when searching for the goods they desire, getting products to page one is imperative to a brand’s success. While in-store, festive displays will help drive traffic and availability awareness, the ‘digital shelf’ is a totally different locus of opportunity. Here, brands rely on proper product descriptions, the right assortment, sizes, and competitive price points to stand out among the crowd and modify their positioning, given each retailer’s consumer base and assorted competitive brands.
Optimizing the Digital Shelf and leading Share of Search for page one across all retail websites isn’t achievable overnight, but it is never too early or too late to start, given the 24/7 visibility your products have online. When it comes to Halloween candies, confectionery brands must consider many factors when differentiating their online positioning, such as finding the ‘sweet spot’ for pricing, size, and variety within each product offered, and knowing the right and wrong times to drive promotions. Additional elements to consider when introducing seasonal candies include cannibalization of non-holiday inventory, which can increase spoilage for aged inventory, or if holiday items are successful, could cause an abundance of markdown items to be sold before replacement inventory can be ordered.
To better understand what retailers are doing—or should be doing—to optimize their Halloween holiday sales, we turned to our DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics data to answer these questions:
Which brands and products are dominating “Share of Search” page one results across all three retailer websites?
How do discounts and promotions vary among candy brands and retailers?
How does each retailer use Halloween-specific and ‘variety’ labeling within the product descriptor to differentiate their holiday season assortment?
What sizes of candy packages is each retailer offering, and how does this play out in online positioning?
Winning Candy Brands
Which Halloween candies are people searching for—and presumably buying? Our data shows that Hershey’s branded candies achieved the greatest page one ‘Share of Search’ results across all three retailers’ websites—Albertson’s, Kroger and Safeway. This was unsurprising, given their total SKU count as well as the brand loyalty Hershey’s steadily maintains throughout the year. There is a high likelihood of consumers buying what they see on page one, so in our analysis, Hershey’s has the best chance of ‘winning’ this holiday season within all three of these retail channels.
That said, looking more specifically at how candy items are labeled and bundled adds another layer of insight to how candy brands are performing at each of these retailers.
Historically speaking, Snickers is almost always within the top five confectionery brands sold during the Halloween season, but with the migration of more consumers shopping online, Mars may be leaving opportunity on the table this year. Our data shows that Snickers had the lowest Share of Search percentage on page one results on Safeway.com and Albertson’s.com for brands carrying 8 or more SKUs each, indicating they will most likely not make the first page results—and therefore may end up as a clearance item after Halloween if relying on online promotional efforts to achieve sales goals.
Source: DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Solution: Data aggregated from 9/14/21-9/24/21 for Albertson’s.com and Kroger.com, and 9/17-9/24 for Safeway.com; Analysis was conducted reviewing product information for items falling within the ‘Halloween Candy’ listing category
What Size Candy Packages Are Retailers Carrying/Betting On?
For example, Albertsons.com and Safeway.com’s assortment includes 124 SKUs and 108 SKUs respectively with most of those items falling within the 5 to 16-ounce (averaging 25 percent) and 32 to 64-ounce (averaging 29 percent) sizes, Kroger.com is betting on a ‘smaller is better’ strategy, with a majority (63 percent) of their candies sold in the 5 to 16-ounce package size.
The average Hershey candies available through all three retailers happen to be much greater in size and price point, on average, than other top ranked items, and while these larger items appear to mostly be variety packs, a majority are not labeled as ‘Halloween’ candy.
Source: DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Solution: Data aggregated from 9/14/21-9/24/21 for Albertson’s.com and Kroger.com, and 9/17-9/24 for Safeway.com; Analysis was conducted reviewing product information for items falling within the ‘Halloween Candy’ listing category
How Important Is Halloween-Specific Branding?
Our data shows that Kroger.com included the name ‘Halloween’ within the product description for most (around 80 percent) of the candies sized 16 ounces or smaller, and overall have labeled more than two-thirds of their total candy items sold as ‘Halloween.’ This indicates they are staged well for the peak of the seasonal demand and anticipate their shoppers to buy smaller unit sizes, comparatively speaking.
Source: DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Solution: Data aggregated from 9/14/21-9/24/21 for Albertson’s.com and Kroger.com, and 9/17-9/24 for Safeway.com; Analysis was conducted reviewing product information for items falling within the ‘Halloween Candy’ listing category
Taking a closer look at all items positioned as ‘Halloween’ across the three retailer websites, Hershey’s brand Reese’s is set for success at Kroger.com for total Share of Search percentage, considering they carry eight Reese’s, non-variety SKUs. Competing in the audience of others leading with variety packs indicates the weight the Reese’s brand carries and also indicates they will also have a great likelihood of success for increased sales this Halloween season.
Mars M&M’s brand came out on top at Safeway.com and Albertsons.com within the ‘Halloween’ labeled SKUs, but a majority (around 70 percent) of these are variety packs that leads with the M&M’s brand versus an M&M’s only bag.
Source: DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Solution: Data aggregated from 9/14/21-9/24/21 for Albertson’s.com and Kroger.com, and 9/17-9/24 for Safeway.com; Analysis was conducted reviewing product information for items falling within the ‘Halloween Candy’ listing category
How Much (Less) Are People Paying for Halloween Candy?
To determine whether candy promotions are increasing Share of Search, DataWeave measured the average promotional discount these retailers and top candy brands are offering online. When looking only at brands offering discounts on 100% of the SKUs they carry within each retailer, Brach’s brand is performing best on Albertson’s.com, and Hershey products are positioned at the top for Kroger.com and Safeway.com.
Source: DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Solution: Data aggregated from 9/14/21-9/24/21 for Albertson’s.com and Kroger.com, and 9/17-9/24 for Safeway.com; Analysis was conducted reviewing product information for items falling within the ‘Halloween Candy’ listing category
Do Consumers Search For ‘Variety’ Candy Bags, or One-Product-Only Bags?
DataWeave tagged the word ‘variety’ and found that across all three retailers’ websites, non-variety candy bags take up a greater overall Share of Search than ‘variety’ bags. Either this isn’t an important search word or retailers could try adding ‘variety’ to product descriptions to increase Share of Search.
Source: DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Solution: Data aggregated from 9/14/21-9/24/21 for Albertson’s.com and Kroger.com, and 9/17-9/24 for Safeway.com; Analysis was conducted reviewing product information for items falling within the ‘Halloween Candy’ listing category
Time to Make a Change
Getting products to page one on retailers’ websites can improve sales by as much as 50 percent, but determining the right levers to pull to get there is no easy feat. Based on our preliminary analysis of Halloween insights, our advice to confectionery brands this Halloween season is to invest now to increase visibility to the fast-changing market, to get orders right and on time, establish effective pricing and promotional plans, and get the right candies in stock, to the right locations. Retailers able to get an end-to-end view of the online competitive landscape will be able to make calculated marketing decisions that stand to help generate growth and profitability.
We are now within the prime Halloween shopping season, given that 55 percent of candy sales usually happen in the last two weeks of October (According to Timothy LeBel, President of U.S. Sales for Mars Wrigley). With online sales still growing as consumers have shifted their comfort level in buying more online, retailers should be looking for ways to optimize their product positioning, increase their Share of Search, to improve the likelihood of consumers ordering their brand’s candy to ply those Trick-or-Treaters knocking on their doors.
About DataWeave
DataWeave is a leading provider of advanced sales optimization solutions for e-commerce businesses, consumer brands and marketplaces. The AI-driven proprietary technology and language-agnostic platform aggregates consumable and actionable Competitive Intelligence across 500+ billion data points globally, in 25+ languages, with insights to performance for more than 400,000 brands across 1,500+ websites tracked across 20+ verticals, to ensure online performance is always optimized.
Traditionally, Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) such as McDonald’s or Burger King, have been strategically operating on a brick and mortar model. However, according to some studies, an average QSR generates as much as 75% of its sales from online orders.
With the advent of delivery apps such as Uber Eats and Doordash, a significant portion of QSRs’ business has moved to these platforms. The war to top rank on one of these platforms is an even greater feat. With each brand competing for the top listing, it’s much less about the dollars you pay and much more about optimizing your investments.
The relationship between QSR chains and food delivery apps has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the critical grouses QSRs have against food apps is the incremental marketing spend required to participate on the platform and the inability to measure the impact of their investment. What makes matters worse is the limitation in metrics even available to measure the impact – neither the food apps provide them, nor does anyone else.
At DataWeave, we have made it our mission to enable QSRs to not only define measurable metrics to achieve a positive ROI for food app marketing investments, but we also equip QSRs with the tools to track their competitive performance at granular, zip code-based level so that localized strategies can be modified as needed. Below is an example of a 1000+ store chain QSR we partnered with to optimize a pre-existing investment made with a large food aggregator app. Within months of engagement with us, they were able to achieve a 3X increase in sales without adding any additional marketing dollars.
Below are the pain points we identified and solved together:
1. No Defined Metric
Problem – No leading metric to track marketing performance
One of the first issues we realized was that sales was not a good metric for tracking marketing performance as it’s a lagging metric and doesn’t capture the issues that help grow or suppress sales.
Most of the sales are driven by rank in the cuisine category and searches for branded keywords. But, the QSR chain had no way to track these ranks.
In fact, 70%+ sales go to the first five restaurants for the category and keyword
Comparing ranking on food delivery platforms across different categories and times
Solution – Establish ranking as a clear marketing metric
By aggregating data across different food app platforms comprehensively, i.e. across locations, at different times of the day, we established the ranking of the QSR chain in critical categories and for priority keywords, identifying where they under or over-performed relative to the competition. As we did this daily- this became a straightforward metric that helped establish the performance of their marketing campaign.
2. Geographical & Categorical Challenges
Problem: Identifying poor-performing stores and zip codes
We realized it was not a simple exercise to identify well performing stores on food apps since sales depend on many factors such as competition, population of the area, local cuisine preference, etc.
Solution: Zip Code Ranking and Attributes
We tracked the ranking of each store within each Zip Code for keywords and created a list of poor-performing stores. We also extracted attributes such as estimated time of arrival (ETAs), Delivery Fee, Ratings, Reviews, etc., for each of these poor performing stores, to identify the reasons for the poor ranking.
Analysing key metrics at a store level – identifying worst & best performing stores
E.g., We realized 356 of the stores were not populating on first page results, primarily because of poor ratings and High ETAs. After the focused initiative, 278 of these stores started showing on the first page and increased sales by 23%.
3. Sensitivity Analysis Deficiency
Problem: Not clear about the contribution of Rating, ETAs, Fees, etc. on the Ranking
The exact ranking algorithms of these food apps are not publicly shared – so the QSR chain wasn’t clear which variable of rating, ETAs, fees, ad spend, or availability contributed more or less to the overall ranking.
Solution: Sensitivity analysis for measuring contribution
Comprehensive data for multiple zip codes in various timestamps was analyzed to determine which variable contributes most significantly to the rankings and when. We also conducted A/B testing – simultaneously testing two different variables, such as reducing ETAs at one store and improving ad spend at another, calculating which led to greater rank and sales impact.
For example, we realized reducing publicized ETA’s (even by decreasing the delivery radius) contributed much more to improve the rankings than changes to ratings.
4. An Unknown Competitive Landscape
Problem: Tracking competitor performance
For example, we found the QSR chain performed well in key urban centers, but the competition was doing even better, but there wasn’t a good way to track and compare the performance of the competitors.
Solution:
We started tracking the QSR chain and the competition for each of the metrics and started comparing performance.
Analysing competitive performance on key metrics such as ETA, Availability etc
We quickly realized ranking started quickly improving as we gained a slight edge in each metric against the competitors. For example, 5 minutes less ETA adds to higher ranking.
In six months of this exercise with the QSR chain, we improved the average ranking from 24 to 11 for the QSR chain, getting them featured on the first page.
5. Blind Advertising Investment Opportunities
Problem:
The QSR chain was not clear on which banners (Popular near you, National Favorites, etc.) to choose to invest in, and had to depend on the recommendations of the food platforms entirely.
They weren’t even provided a clear view of which position made the banner visible and at what rank among those banners was their promo visible. They were at times the 7th promo in the 6th banner, which has almost zero probability of being discovered by the user – this happened despite paying heavily for the banners.
Solution:
We aggregated data for all banners populated within each zip code and found out the ranking and in which position the QSR chain was visible.
Identifying and analysing right banners for advertising spends
The QSR chain invested in 630 zip code-based banners with guaranteed visibility, but our assessment indicated the banners were only visible in 301 zip codes. After selecting suitable banners for promotions, we improved visibility to 533 zip codes within enhancing the budget.
We are now using the same strategy for refining discounts, offers, promotions, and coupons.
6. Lack of Campaign Performance Monitoring
Problem: Unsure of the long-term impact of marketing spend
In general, increasing marketing spend does give a temporary boost to sales, but the QSR chain’s question was, how can we measure the long-term impact i.e., ranking keywords and the targeted zip codes.
Solution:
We created a simple widget for every marketing campaign which showed the rank for the keywords for selected zip codes before the campaign, during the campaign, and post the campaign, clearly establishing the midterm impact of the campaign. This constant monitoring allowed the QSR to also quickly pivot on their strategy on account of national holidays etc, and act accordingly.
7. Non-Existent ROI Measurement
Problem: Establishing the impact of ranking on sales
Though the QSR chain could track sales that were coming via the food app channel, they had no way of knowing incremental organic volume driven by marketing efforts.
One missing variable here was how much of extra sales could be attributed to improvement of QSR ranking?
Solution:
By combining the sales data with aggregated insights over time, we established for the QSR chain how much increase in sales they could anticipate from an increase in ranking, also knowing which changed variables led to the percentage of change increase.
So, in essence, we were able to tell the QSR chain that for each store how much sales would increase by improving ETAs, rating, ad visibility, availability, etc., enabling precise ROI calculations for each intervention they make for their stores.
Increasing sales by 3x within six months was only the beginning, and the journey of driving marketing efficiency using competitive and channel data has only just begun.
DataWeave for QSRs
DataWeave has been working with global QSR chains, helping them drive their growth on aggregator platforms by enabling them to monitor their key metrics, diagnose improvement areas, recommend action, and measure interventions’ impact. DataWeave’s strategy eliminates the dependence on food apps for accurate data. We aggregate food app data and websites to help you with analysis and the justification of marketing spend and drive 10-15% growth.
DataWeave’s strategy eliminates the dependence on food apps for accurate data. We aggregate food app data and websites to help you with analysis and the justification of marketing spend and drive 10-15% growth.
If you want to know learn how your brand can leverage Dataweave’s data insights and improve sales, then click here to sign up for a demo
Prime Day or not, brands need to make sure their Digital Shelf is well stocked, highly discoverable in crowded marketplaces, have the right offers and discounts to stay competitive, all while making sure their products have glowing reviews, ratings and optimized content. While this is a year-round effort, brands go the extra mile on Prime Day to make sure they’re putting their best foot forward.
Methodology To understand how brands adapted their digital shelf for Prime Day, we examined data insights across Amazon in 6 markets and compared the following brand KPIs:
Share of voice (SOV): The percentage of a brands products that appear in the search results page for relevant keywords on Amazon.
Availability: The percentage of products in stock on Amazon for Prime Day.
Additional discounts: The reduction in the listing price of a product during Prime Day compared to before or after the event to see how brands adapted their pricing strategies to stand out from rivals
Winning brands made sure their products were ‘highly’ discoverable
With all the global lockdowns, home entertainment hit a new high. So we looked at the word “TV” to see which brand had the highest share against this keyword during the Prime Day event.
In the US – Samsung won hands down with close to 15% SOV. LG came in at a not so close 2nd with 9% SOV.
In the UK – Samsung won again with a whooping 16.7% SOV with Sharp at # 2 at 12%.
Now let’s look at some key European markets
On Amazon Italy we saw a similar trend – Samsung & LG, neck to neck at 22% & 19% respectively.
Amazon Germany was no different – Samsung had the highest SOV at 15% and Philips far behind at 7%.
Samsung has such a strong association with the keyword TV. This means, when customers are searching for TVs on Amazon in these regions – the brand that has the largest selection up on display for them to choose from is Samsung! That’s definitely going to have a positive impact on sales, don’t you think?
Do you know which keywords you should be tracking for your brand? And do you know your Brand’s SOV against those keywords?
… & finally, an outlier!
In Amazon France, LG took the lead for a change – with 15% SOV. But we have Samsung not far behind at 13%.
Kudos to team Samsung!
Winning Brands kept a close eye on product availability
Poor product availability leads to lost sales. But not on Amazon Prime Day! Bigger brands that sell over 500 products created artificial scarcity by listing a chunk of products out of stock before the sale. And restocked aggressively during the sale.
In contrast, the smaller brands that sold fewer than 100 products didn’t dare make such bold moves and stayed stocked up even pre-event to avoid even a single day of lost sales.
Let’s look at some data from the US
The average availability for bigger brands selling 500+ products before the sale was 41% and then went up dramatically to 81.4% the day of the sale when they aggressively restocked.
Similar trend in the UAE
Availability pre-sale was 26.2% and during the sale shot up to 87.6%!
Various other markets displayed similar patterns. And this was only possible because these brands were able to track their availability with precision and plan their stock levels accordingly.
How are you tracking your availability across marketplaces? Do you know when your products are out of stock and are in immediate need of replenishment?
Winning Brands made strategic pricing and discounting decisions
Discounts matter. Period. And brands that use discounts strategically, win.
Let’s look at Airpods on Amazon in the US.
During the event, Apple had the highest SOV for the keyword Airpod at 7.5% followed by SkullCandy, an American audio accessory manufacturer at 5.6%.
Here’s the interesting part – during the sale Apple offered just 3.4% additional discounts while SkullCandy offered 32.1% additional discount to try and win sales from Apple. And looks like it worked! Apples SOV dropped from 13.5% before the event to 7.5% during the event and SkullCandy’s SOV improved
Now let’s look at the same data cut in the UAE – a market where Apple products have a fair penetration, but not as high as in the US. They needed a more aggressive discounting strategy in this market.
In the US, during the sale, Apple offered additional discounts on just 30% of products. However, in the UAE that number rose to 90% – a clear strategy to make their product pricing more attractive to customers to win sales
Discounts and markdowns aren’t always the answer to improving sales, but when used strategically can drive significant impact to your bottom line.
Are you tracking your competitor pricing? Do you know if they’re keeping tabs on your pricing strategy to get ahead of you?
Winning Brands made it to the Amazon Best Seller list
Amazon Best Sellers are products that have the highest sales on Amazon. Products with a higher Amazon Best Seller Rank have higher sales.
In the US, Nintendo had the highest share in the Electronics Best Seller category during the sale at 18.6%. Before the sale their share stood at 22.5% – so they lost ground a little ground with a 27.2% drop in their Best Seller share. While they gave additional discounts of 17%, only 27% of their catalogue was discounted.
But here’s a brand that knocked it out of the park! The Razer had an SOV of just 1.18% before the sale and during Prime Day it shot up to 6%! A clear indication that sales for the Razer spiked exponentially during Prime Day. Could this be because Razer offered 100% of their catalogue on an additional discount of 31%? It’s a bold move that could have paid off and contributed to super high sales.
Now let’s look at France – the Fashion Capital of the World and which brand came out on top in the Fashion Best Seller Category
Footwear brand Havaianas had the highest SOV on Prime Day (13.48%) Not too surprising because before the sale they were at 14.09%
Now let’s look at the Best Seller Rank – Lacoste secured BSR #1 at the event. Pat on the back for them because before the sale they were at Rank 46! And post-sale they dropped to #6. Definitely a combination of techniques involved here that got them from #46 to #1 at super speed!
What techniques have you tried to boost sales for your products on Amazon?
Brands that do not optimize their Digital Shelf risk losing out on their share of basket. If you’ve been thinking about how to optimize your Brands Digital Shelf, then get in touch & learn how DataWeave can help!
After demonetization, Covid-19 has probably been one of the worst scenarios for the retail sector in India. The entire nation went into lockdown and the industry noticed some big changes around the entire globe. From remote working to shopping, everything turned to digital and Bharat witnessed new trends across payments, e-commerce, and more.
Not surprisingly, D2C has been a favorite amongst businesses thanks to its agility. More than 800 brands have joined the direct-to-consumer bandwagon in order to reach their audience quickly and in an efficient way. Where brands such as MamaEarth, Clovia, Bewakoof, Lenskart have been some of the popular brands in the sector, last year even traditional giants such as LG, Ajanta-Orpat, Piaggio, Havells also adopted the D2C model.
Brands are more focused on making the user experience better and it will be safe to say that this year, D2C will be the highlight of the e-tail ecosystem. Naturally, e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Flipkart have played an important role in this revolution. Amazon, which has over 100 Million registered users in India, announced that it will host its flagship event, Prime Day this year on 26-27 July.
Let’s look at some of the things brands can do to leave their mark this Prime Day in India.
Given that the pandemic has accelerated online shopping nationwide, Digital Shelf Optimisation (DSO) should be the key lever for any brand to accelerate its digital commerce growth. Events such as Prime day are significant for a brand’s reputation, customer experience, overall sales and can help you build a loyal customer base.
With that in mind, we have prepared a list of things to consider, in order to help brands stand out from the crowd.
Pricing and Discounting: Offer discounts and deals to attract customers.
It is obvious that Prime Day will see a tremendous influx of shoppers. Noticeably, impulsive shopping is a trend during these sales, as everybody loves a good product for a discounted price. Make sure to offer discounts and deals to attract customers.
Another suggestion is to keep a track of competition, their pricing and promotional strategies and keep an eye on price changes happening across relevant categories or SKU’s (Stock Keeping Unit). Competition analysis is a powerful tool and having accurate data on their sales, market share is a critical part of this.
Product Visibility: Lakhs of sellers & brands are vying for the same spot
Marketplaces are crowded, and getting discovered is already hard. Lakhs of sellers & brands are vying for the same spot. And with more people moving online, it’s going to get increasingly harder for brands to stand out. Optimize your search visibility using the right keywords relevant to your brand, strategically spend on Sponsored Ads to secure high visibility placements on Amazon and lastly make sure your online product packaging via product pages contain attractive images to position your product in the best light.
Product Availability: Have plenty of stock available
Make sure to have plenty of stock available as shoppers are likely to turn to other brands/products in case your product is unavailable. Also, keep in mind that people are generally more open to trying new products during a sale as it offers discounts. Track your products’ stock status to make sure they’re available 24 x 7.
As the foremost goal during sales is to move inventory as much as possible, offering a large assortment is a good idea. Create product bundles that complement each other.
A+ Content is King: The new age packaging for your product
Content is the new age packaging for your product. Content is crucial to change consumer shortlists & considerations into conversions.
Your content tells your product story & gives customers the information they need to make a purchase. Use high resolution and accurate images, add features, benefits, USPs of your products clearly. It is advisable to use more than one image to show your product more clearly. Make sure all your brand & product pages on Amazon are optimized.
Reviews and Ratings: Feedback is a very important e-commerce tool.
Why would shoppers rely on word-of-mouth when they can take help from millions of people from the community? Not said enough, feedback is a very important e-commerce tool. Amazon’s A9 algorithm presents the choices to the consumers but reviews and star ratings still play an influential role in the journey from consideration to conversion.
Brands could consider partnering with Dataweave, to keep track of reviews and manage negative ratings on Amazon.
Summary
According to a report by EY-IVCA Trend Book 2021, “ The e-commerce industry in India is expected to reach $99 Bn by 2024 and penetration of retail is expected to be 10.7% by 2024, compared to 4.7% in 2019.”
Source: Statista
The same report also revealed that India will have 220 Million online shoppers by 2025. With e-commerce growing at an exponential rate, brands are advised to be more statistical & data-driven to win a larger % of online sales. If you think this is the right time to optimize your digital shelf, take a look at our products and services.
We at DataWeave would be happy to be a part of your e-commerce and digitization journey. You can sign up for a demo with our team to know more
Show moms extra love this year. With Mother’s Day coming up fast, savvy beauty and fashion brands will use this special occasion to inspire pampering and gift giving to fuel their e-commerce sales growth.
This year, beauty and fashion are poised to boom, as 40% of consumers plan to buy beauty products and 37% will buy new outfits for going out. 1 According to eMarketer,apparel and accessories e-commerce sales will grow nearly 19% this year due to pent-up demand for clothing, while health and beauty sales will rise 16%. 2
“People will be happy to go out again … there will be a fiesta in makeup and in fragrances.”
~L’Oréal CEO and Chairman Jean-Paul Agon
After beauty and apparel sales declined last year, brands now seize every opportunity to capitalize on the categories’ resurgence in 2021. To differentiate their goods, brands can use e-commerce marketing best practices to position their fashion and beauty items as spectacular gifts that moms will love.
Aligning with the latest trends can help brands boost online growth.
Hot trends dominating beauty and fashion
This Mother’s Day, shoppers can delight moms with beauty bestsellers like:
Mask-friendly makeup: As we continue to wear masks over the short-term, cosmetics like false lashes, smudge-proof mascara and ultra-hypoallergenic eyeshadow will remain popular. 3
Fragrances: Online fragrance sales rose 45% year-over-year in 2020. Clean and organic beauty categories grew 56% with fragrance brands growing the most. 4
Purpose-led brands: Consumers crave companies that care. More online searches contain keywords like “ethical beauty” and “sustainable makeup” for products that help consumers look good and feel good. 5
Online fashion is in vogue
Before the pandemic, consumers bought less than one-third of their apparel or footwear online; last year, the proportion surged to an astounding 51%. In 2021, consumers will invest even more in their wardrobes, including trends like:
Comfort: Athleisure will remain in demand as many consumers still prefer comfortable clothing when they work from home. 7
Beloved staples: Classic pieces like jeans, dresses and simple yet elegant tops are making a comeback as consumers start to go out more. 8
Retro ‘80s: Ladies are ready to party like it’s 1984. Bright and metallic colors and sequins for occasionwear (and even NFL linebacker-inspired shoulderpads) are recreating a fun, indulgent ’80s vibe. 9
Brands’ secret weapon for a competitive advantage
For successful Mother’s Day campaigns, more fashion and beauty brands will use digital shelf analytics for marketing decisions that maximize their ROI and e-commerce sales.
To ensure online shoppers discover Mother’s Day products with ease, brands are usingShare of Searchinsights to measure their share of digital shelf. These DataWeave analytics tell brands which keywords perform best. Brands can also benchmark their search and navigation visibility against rivals’ rankings across e-commerce categories, websites and geographic regions.
Using Content Auditinsights tells brands how their content is performing. They can discover and fill content gaps so their products show up more prominently. Optimizing content (like keywords, product page titles, descriptions, ads and sponsored space) and images to align with the retailers’ search algorithms ensures a consistent brand experience across all online channels. Improving content helps brands connect to consumers with marketing that resonates and inspires them to buy. Brands also use
Pricing and Promotionsinsights to measure the effectiveness of their online promotions and secure sales. Brands can stay competitive by ensuring their pricing and promotions are in line with rivals’ offers, such as identifying first movers and rivals with the deepest discounts across retailers and SKUs. Brands can even determine how imitating rivals’ pricing and promotional moves could impact revenue and sales volume.
Help shoppers make Mom’s day
Since Mother’s Day is almost here, beauty and fashion brands can apply these data insights to connect consumers with a variety of products moms will love. Digital shelf analytics from DataWeave can help brands deliver timely campaigns, improve their return on digital marketing spend and make effective marketing decisions to drive e-commerce sales.
1 Howland, Daphne. Wells Fargo sees permanent behavior shifts from the pandemic. Retail Dive. March 29, 2021. 2 Droesch, Blake. US Ecommerce by Category 2021. eMarketer. April 27, 2021. 3 Wood, Dana. Is Makeup Dead? The Robin Report. April 18, 2021. 4 Larson, Kristin. Fragrance Sales Pick Up As Consumers Reengage With The Outside World. Forbes. April 27, 2021. 5 What Can Brands Learn About Sustainability From Green Beauty Consumers? Beauty Business Journal. June 15, 2020. 6 Howland, Daphne. Wells Fargo sees permanent behavior shifts from the pandemic. Retail Dive. March 29, 2021. 7 Ibid. 8 Bhattarai, Abha. Americans are starting to buy real clothes again. The Washington Post. March 18, 2021. 9 Warren, Liz. Loose Denim and Bold Occasionwear on Full Display for Fall 2021. Sourcing Journal. April 2, 2021.
The proliferation of informed shoppers, e-commerce sites, and competitors of all sizes has increased the complexity of – and lucrative opportunities in – brand management.
Now more brands rely on data insights to uncover specific ways to make their digital marketing more arresting, effective and profitable. Many brands struggle with e-commerce profitability due, in part, to advertising expenses that often yield lackluster results.1
Analytics are growing in retail significance, as 88% of retail and consumer goods marketers say data improves their marketing by allowing them to personalize touchpoints. Relevant marketing and great marketers helps brands connect with consumers. Let’s see why leading brands are adding data insights to their 2021 marketing strategies to fuel online sales growth.
Brands discover how to get discovered
Consumer goods brands no longer leave it up to chance that consumers will find them online. The digital migration of companies and consumers over the past year means more noise for brands to breakthrough.
Now search is growing in importance to improve brands’ online product discovery. Here’s why:
87% of shoppers begin their hunt in digital channels3
17% rise in paid search in late 20204
24% rise in paid social advertising during the same period5
To grab consumers’ attention by being easier to see, more brands are turning to data insights to track their online visibility.
Brands need to look for ways to mitigate the high costs of acquiring customers online6
Brands use marketing analytics related to keywords and navigation searches help brands know exactly how much space on the digital shelf they occupy across different online platforms.
These DataWeave’s Share of Search solutions help brands understand what percentage of the digital shelf they command through either keywords or navigation. These insights can help brands decide whether to boost their brand visibility using sponsored ads to ensure their products show up more prominently in online search results to boost brand reach and awareness on each channel. For instance, brands can tell whether consumers search for products using branded, generic or category-specific keywords to align their marketing accordingly.
In addition, brands can see how their organic and sponsored results rank compared to their competitors to spot ways to improve their visibility rank and decrease customer acquisition costs.
Content differentiates a brand’s digital shelf
For a striking digital presence and enhanced discoverability, leading brands measure how effectively their content inspires online shoppers to choose them.
Brands can improve their digital marketing results by using Content Audit insights to spot patterns among their top-performing campaigns. They can also benchmark their content with category bestsellers to discover how to optimize their online performance to grow sales volume and market share.
Strategic advertising requires high-quality photography and data-driven content7
Using these data insights from DataWeave helps brands determine how well their content (including product description pages and images) align with e-commerce algorithms and lead to online traffic, engagement and sales. Brands also adapt faster by adjusting underperforming campaigns to reduce costs and optimize their digital marketing spends.
Brands can fill content gaps across online channels with enhanced product information that aligns content and images with brands’ product information management (PIM). Using analytics to deliver a consistent brand experience across all online channels can help brands build relationships with consumers and earn their trust.
Alluring promotions help brands secure the sale
As e-commerce evolves, brands have matured beyond Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns to offer targeted promotions across digital touchpoints, which increases marketing reach and complexity.
To boost clarity, be in demand and drive sales across online platforms, more leading brands use data insights to measure the effectiveness of their digital Promotions. Promotional insights from DataWeave keep brands informed of trending categories and products to keep their online offerings relevant and timely. Brands can pinpoint exactly which products to promote and which e-commerce sites help them drive the most profitable results with compelling digital offers.
Brands that respond quickly to their customers’ needs have the upper hand8
Analytics also keep brands competitive and relevant by benchmarking their promotional strategies with their rivals’ and continuously monitoring rivals’ online moves. For instance, brands can track the promotions their competitors offer for similar products across different e-commerce sites. These competitive insights help brands quickly spot opportunities to optimize their online conversions with appealing promotions that reflect market trends.
Better marketing decisions can help brands grow sales and share
Data insights make brands more enticing by connecting the dots among their online visibility, content and promotions. Brands uncover ways to make smarter marketing decisions faster to improve their top line and decrease customer acquisition costs. DataWeave analytics also help brands stand out and improve product discovery, engagement and sales. As a result, brands save time and boost their agility with relevant marketing that resonates and inspires shoppers to keep coming back.
1 Jansen, Caroline, Cara Salpini and Maria Monteros. 8 DTC trends to watch in 2021. Retail Dive. February 3, 2021 2 Casna, Kathryn. Ecommerce Trends That Are Shaping the Way Businesses Sell Online. Salesforce. 2021. 3 Casna, Kathryn. Ecommerce Trends That Are Shaping the Way Businesses Sell Online. Salesforce. 2021. 4 The Future of eCommerce in 2021. Shopify Plus. 2021. 5 The Future of eCommerce in 2021. Shopify Plus. 2021. 6 Jansen, Caroline, Cara Salpini and Maria Monteros. 8 DTC trends to watch in 2021. Retail Dive. February 3, 2021. 7 Glasheen, Jasmine. 2021 Forecast: Next Gens in a Brand-New World. The Robin Report. January 3, 2021. 8 Monteros, Maria. Forrester: Few brands can anticipate and act on consumer needs. Retail Dive. February 10, 2021.
Brands that build consumer trust will win big as online shopping explodes this year. As the COVID-19 pandemic propels more shoppers online, an astounding $5 trillion (30%) of annual global retail sales is up for grabs as the market shifts to e-commerce, according to Boston Consulting Group.[1]
Notably, e-commerce has changed brands’ retail processes. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, the digital shelf is where brands manage their company and products among online shoppers, influencing what they browse and buy.
Rather than stocking merchandise through retailers’ physical stores, brands can now manage their online products by working with logistics experts like Fulfillment by Amazon. Instead of merchandising in stores with planograms and endcap displays, brands promote their digital assortment with targeted product content that resonates and keeps them coming back.[2] The evolution of retail can help brands save time and effort, and increase their agility and effectiveness.
Gaining high visibility on the digital shelf can help brands boost their reach, brand awareness and sales. That’s why more brands are now investing in proven e-commerce best practices to increase consumer confidence by offering reliable products, relevant marketing and a smooth online experience. Now that the 2020 holiday sales season is underway, it’s the perfect time to see how leading brands compete in the increasingly crowded online market by demonstrating credibility and consistency.
Market fragmentation increases brand complexity
Selling across multiple online touchpoints means brands have more e-commerce websites and digital shelves to monitor to ensure compliance with brand guidelines to ensuring a consistent customer experience. To engage online shoppers, brands’ marketing strategies must now diligently manage their digital shelf across diverse online shopping arenas, including:
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) sites: More brand manufacturers are shortening the supply chain by bypassing retailers and selling directly to consumers, including sales through their own e-commerce websites.eMarketer predicts that U.S. DTC e-commerce sales will grow by 24% to reach nearly $18 billion in 2020.[3]
Retailers’ e-commerce sites: Brands are also migrating online because the retailers who sell their merchandise moved online this yearto adapt to the pandemic and survive shuttered storefronts. As of April 21, e-commerce grew 129% year-over-yearin U.S. and Canadian orders and U.S. e-commerce sales are on track to hit nearly $710 billion this year.[4] More than ever, sharing timely, accurate product information with retail partners is essential for success.
Online marketplaces: A growing number of brands are investing in digital advertising and content to stand out on popular, high-traffic online marketplaces. Global e-commerce leaders Amazon, eBay and China’s Alibaba and JD, are mostly search-based sites, as users know what they want and search for it, which makes product description pages and ads important marketing tools. Conversely, China’s Pinduoduo platform involves group-buying and interactive games to boost brand awareness and sales by entertaining online consumers and inspiring flattering word-of-mouth.[5] Among online marketplaces, digital content fuels brand discovery and sales.
Last-mile delivery channels: Brands can also sell in collaboration with their last-mile partners. Last-mile experts like Peapod, Instacart, Uber and Shipt offer online advertising opportunities for brands to reach new audiences. For instance, Instacart launched a self-serve advertising platform that lets brands promote their products in search results. Brands can choose the products to promote, set a budget and pay when users engage with those products.[6]
Social media: To reach and influence consumers where they already spend their time, more brands are investing in social media promotions and even embracing social commerce innovation. Social media matters to brands’ marketing effectiveness, as 52% of online brand discovery happens on social feeds.[7] Also, 92% of Instagram users say they’ve followed a brand, visited their website or made a purchase after seeing a product on Instagram.[8]
Brand promotions have evolved beyond Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns. Now promotions include digital content and ads across all of these digital touchpoints, which increases the scope of brand marketing efforts to reach online consumers.
How brands transform digital shelf complexity into clarity
To earn online shoppers’ trust across e-commerce arenas, more leading companies are turning to a common solution: data.
Too often, online shoppers abandon their cart due to concerns that they will unwittingly buy inauthentic products from fraudulent sellers. To protect their brands, manufacturers use data insights to pinpoint and prevent unauthorized sellers, counterfeit products and minimum advertised price (MAP) violations to demonstrate authenticity, accountability and price parity.
“Digital is the new normal” ~ Nike CEO John Donahoe[9]
To invigorate underperforming online promotions, brands rely on analytics to connect the dots among their online promotions, marketing performance and share of voice. Insights on advertising, keywords and consumer reviews help brands make better marketing decisions faster. These insights help brands stand out from competitors and build relationships with shoppers by ensuring their promotions resonate and drive more sales online.
To overcome low online traffic and sales, more brands apply data insights to improve their digital presence, visibility and sell-through rates. Brand analytics measure their popularity on e-commerce websites and track their stock status to improve accessibility, optimize digital shelf velocity and deliver a reliable customer experience that builds trust.
Watch over your brand: To stay competitive and earn consumer trust, more brands now rely on data insights to make fast, effective decisions that enhance their reputation and boost online sales.
As e-commerce explodes, more leading brands are collaborating with DataWeave for actionable brand analytics to protect their digital shelves, decrease complexity and boost consumer trust. These accurate, trusted insights help brands gain clarity to make smarter e-commerce decisions faster. Making data-driven brand management, promotional and digital marketing decisions helps brands prove their authenticity, improve marketing effectiveness and boost online sales. To see how DataWeave helps brands stand out, sell more and stay competitive, visit www.dataweave.com.
[1] Taylor, Lauren, Chris Biggs, Ben Eppler, Henry Fovargue and Gaby Barrios. How Retailers Can Capture $5 Trillion of Shifting Demand. Boston Consulting Group. August 31, 2020.
[2] Gibbons, David. Ecommerce and content: How retailers have shifted strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital Commerce 360. August 18, 2020.
[3] US Direct-to-Consumer Ecommerce Sales Will Rise to Nearly $18 Billion in 2020. eMarketer. April 1, 2020.
[4] Wertz, Jia. 3 Emerging E-Commerce Growth Trends To Leverage In 2020. Forbes. August 1, 2020.
[5] Lee, Emma. The incredible rise of Pinduoduo, China’s newest force in e-commerce. TechCrunch. July 26, 2018.
[6] Goyal, Vivek. Browsing e-commerce: An untapped $250B+ opportunity. Medium. September 27, 2020.
[7] Cooper, Paige. 43 Social Media Advertising Statistics that Matter to Marketers in 2020. Hootsuite. April 23, 2020.
[8] Cooper, Paige. 43 Social Media Advertising Statistics that Matter to Marketers in 2020. Hootsuite. April 23, 2020.
[9] Grill-Goodman, Jamie. ‘Digital is the New Normal,’ Nike CEO Says. RIS News. September 23, 2020.
As DataWeave continues to engage with brands and manufacturers of all sizes, a consistent theme keeps emerging, “click and collect tracking”. Right now, brands rely on manual-store checks or waiting upwards of two weeks for a retailer to report sales data, which reveals low sales because a product is out of stock. In addition, there are always questions about the local price of your products compared to top competitors in the category. This is where DataWeave’s CPG Brand Monitor solution can help.
On a daily basis, we track over 13,000 variant level SKUs across 100 stores, via seven of the top grocery retailers. We have selected the largest grocers in each region of the US, to allow for the widest coverage. These grocers include Albertsons/ Safeway in the west, HEB in Texas, Kroger in the upper mid-west, Wegmans in the Mid-Atlantic and Publix in the Southeast.
How does it work?
In the application, you will see the list of all the SKUs we’re covering, with filters on the left side of the page to help with navigation. You can sort by Brand, Category, Store/ City, State, etc. After the filters are applied, the SKU list will be displayed based on these filters. On the right side of the screen, you will see all the product level details including a 7-day price history, individual store level pricing/ stock availability and exportable charts and graphs.
How do I get access?
Simply access the CPG Brand Monitor page, fill in your credentials via “Start Free Trial” and your login will be sent directly to your inbox. No commitments or phone calls are needed to test out the data. After a few days, our team will be in touch to make sure you understand how to navigate the tool and take you through our subscription options.
What else do we offer?
DataWeave also offers a full Digital Shelf Analytics suite that covers Share of Voice (keyword, navigation and banner audits), Content Audit/ Optimization, Ratings/ Review Sentiment Analysis, Promotional Analysis, and much more.
We’re thrilled to announce that we have teamed up with Kenshoo to offer an integrated marketing solution that combines DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics and commerce intelligence platform with Kenshoo’s ad automation platform. This in turn, provides better recommendations on promotions to retailers and consumer brands.
As e-commerce surges, consumer brands can now promote their products through retail-intelligent advertising. Product discoverability, content audit, and availability across large marketplaces can be critical to a brand’s success. Using DataWeave’s digital shelf solutions, Kenshoo now can offer marketers greater visibility into a brand’s performance.
Even large retailers and agencies can use our commerce intelligence platform to improve their price positioning, address category assortment gaps, and more.
Through this partnership, Kenshoo – a global leader in marketing technology, can help its significant base of consumer brands and retailers invest their marketing dollars intelligently and in a timely manner.
At DataWeave, we have constantly strived to bring in a holistic approach to help our customers optimize their online sales channels. This partnership furthers our resolve in this direction. As we collectively strive to adjust to a post-COVID-19 world, we are observing an acceleration towards digital commerce. This acceleration and change in consumer behavior is going to be a lasting change, creating significant growth opportunities for both DataWeave and Kenshoo.
With this partnership, we look forward to helping our customers make timely, intelligent, and data-driven decisions to grow their business.
Among Amazon’s most prominent and decisive steps in achieving retail dominance over the last few years has been its focus on expanding its private label portfolio.
The most recent collaborative report between DataWeave and Coresight Research determines that Amazon’s private label assortment in early 2020 has grown three-fold over the previous two years, most of which is in categories outside of apparel and accessories.
In addition, the report covers various facets of Amazon’s private label penetration and strategy. These include the size of Amazon’s private label portfolio, the distribution of private label products by category, the product ratings and number of reviews, the average price points across products and brands, and more.
Our detailed and proprietary Amazon private label dataset includes information on over 20,000 products and 111 brands.
Around half of the private-label products are in clothing, footwear and accessories, which is lower than the three-quarters found in our similar research from June 2018, indicating Amazon’s push into a broader range of categories.
The average Amazon private-label product generates a customer rating of 4.3 out of 5, representing positive customer feedback overall.
The number of private-label products—22,617—is more than triple the total of 6,825 from June 2018 (see our previous report). The number of private-label brands also increased substantially (up 50% versus June 2018), indicating that the e-commerce giant has stepped up its private-label strategy.
Around Half of Private-Label Products Are in Clothing, Footwear and Accessories
Just over half of Amazon’s private-label products are in “clothing, footwear and accessories,” versus almost three-quarters when we undertook similar research in June 2018, indicating Amazon’s push into a broader range of categories. Other categories that feature more than 1,000 private-label products include “home and kitchen,” “grocery and gourmet food” and “tools and home improvement.”
Source: DataWeave/Coresight
The Average Amazon Private-Label Product Generates a Customer Rating of 4.3 out of 5
We examined feedback provided by Amazon’s private-label customers: Customer satisfaction can be measured by the average star rating that customers have left in reviews. We chart both average star rating and average number of customer reviews per product in the graph below.
The average Amazon private-label product generates a customer rating of 4.3 stars out of 5, suggesting overall solid customer satisfaction levels.
Source: DataWeave/Coresight
The full report is available for Coresight’s premium subscribers. It includes further details of categories and subcategories that suggest longer-term implications—including how Amazon targets a niche customer base through specific category labels but appeals to broader consumer needs by offering multicategory labels.
To access DataWeave’s proprietary database on Amazon’s private label brands and products, reach out to us today!
Over the last three years, I have helped deploy eCommerce analytics solutions for several brands and manufacturers globally. During this time, I have conversed with day-to-day users up through C-Suite executives of some of the world’s most successful brands, while also working with the founders of startup brands who were simply trying to find their place in the world of commerce.
As I look back on my time to date, I have noticed a few themes emerge from my diverse client conversations with brands, which are indicative of an ecosystem that’s only now coming to terms with retailers and consumers moving online. Here are three fundamental problems I’ve seen brands often run into as they adapt to the world of eCommerce:
1. “We have no idea what we are doing”
My favorite part about being an analytics solution provider is the introduction session with a new client. I always entered these conversations with a few key questions:
– What are your top three eCommerce initiatives for the next 12 months?
– How does your team and other internal resources align with these initiatives
– How do you envision using this type of tool to help you succeed with your goals? What made you choose ours?
Early in my career, what always amazed me was that these enormous brands – wildly successful brands – entered into a partnership without a clear plan to execute. Many would fumble through what I thought were very basic questions. After a few of these conversations, I came to the realization that most brands have a limited understanding of what they are doing in eCommerce.
How could this be possible?
I remember a conversation with a large CPG brand executive. He said, “Keep in mind, most of the people doing these jobs are from a bricks-and-mortar world. They don’t have eCommerce experience because no one does. It is too new. We don’t have the resources to hire more people because eCommerce makes up less than 1% of our total revenue.”
As an industry, brands are collectively making it up as they go. Few admit it, but the industry is growing and evolving so fast, the best that some do is hold on for the ride (while taking a few calculated chances along the way).
2. “We measure success poorly”
I have noticed that, with time, many brands are starting to get a better grasp on how to operate online, though there is still a long way to go for many. The best evidence for this improvement is the growth in the number of job posts for eCommerce-focused roles, new vendors popping up in this space, and industry centers of excellence being developed. As more people choose eCommerce roles, the biggest challenge that I see is the lack of effective measurement and training processes.
Often, the issue is that many brands take a long-standing, loyal executive and assign them as the eCommerce leader. When this person is not forward thinking, analytical or open to trying things a new way, brands fail. The reason startup brands are winning online is because they are entering the eCommerce game with an open and fresh perspective. Forcing old ways into eCommerce will surely lead to failure.
I have worked with many brands that have developed eCommerce centers of excellence and have shared best practices on how to measure teams and success. The most painful to deal with were the organizations that brought their bricks-and-mortar measurements into the eCommerce world. The data used to measure success was the wrong data. The KPIs were set in a way that people would surely fail.
In my opinion, the best measurements for success are sales growth (not share growth), digital shelf KPIs (search and content first), and a subjective measure on maturity in the industry. The best first step is to have someone lead the team who understands how to measure success and execute in a cutting-edge and evolving environment.
3. “We sign up with either too many or the wrong service providers”
The final observation is one that is costing many teams a lot of money. Many brands start to move into eCommerce based on their old team structures. Each team has a separate eCommerce objective, budget, and set of tools to execute with.
Then, when the centralized eCommerce team (Center of Excellence) gets established, they will likely find many teams working with many tools. Sometimes, they see many teams signed up, via separate contracts, with the same tool. Worse still – it’s often the wrong type of tool.
As brands evaluate tools, they need to ask questions such as:
Does this vendor provide global coverage, so that we can establish a global way of thinking and executing (with the ability to customize for local consumption when required)?
Does this vendor have the backbone (people and technology) to scale with my business?
(The best question, in my opinion) Does this vendor have people who are willing to listen and understand my business, or are they simply people who want to sell me a cookie-cutter solution?
In my experience, I have seen brands spending way too much time, effort, and money on vendors who do not check the boxes listed above.
Summing up…
As I look back over my time serving brands in the eCommerce analytics space, I have seen an industry morph and transform time and time again. I have seen companies shift, re-shift, panic and pivot.
If you’re a brand, my encouragement to your team is to hit the pause button. Ask the right questions. Evaluate your goals, your team structure, and your vendor partners. If the strategy, execution, people, and measurement, are not aligned, come up with a plan to get them back on track. Be willing to learn a new way to do business.
With bricks-and-mortar stores steadily increasing their online presence, the balancing act of pricing online and in-store is now more important and complex than ever. Companies spend years building brands and brand equity. Yet, a misplaced or poorly executed pricing strategy to handle both online and offline pricing can erode that equity with consumers very quickly.
This problem is not new. It first started when Clubs like Costco and Sam’s started popping up in the 80’s. Suddenly, brands had to figure out a way to balance Club and Grocery pricing while taking advantage of a new, fast-growing channel. The biggest difference between now and then is that consumers now can check prices within seconds on their phone.
So, how do you avoid losing your brand equity while ensuring price parity across online and offline channels?
The key areas to consider are:
1. Product Mix
Do you have a broad enough mix of product sizes and case configurations for each channel? To maximize your sales and minimize your price disruption, reviewing your supply chain and product mix to ensure you are able to deliver value to both online and offline retailers is critical. Each channel is looking for ways to improve and maximize your brand sales. If you do not give them the right size and case configuration to enable them to increase margins, you will end up relying disproportionately on trade spend (dollars a brand spends with a retailer to promote products) to do so, or find your product on page 212 of every search.
Examples of this strategy can be seen with companies offering only “bundled” items such as 12 cans or a large case on online marketplaces, while other retailers offer individual cans for purchase. This allows your online partners to make up margin by shipping a full case and not going through the process of breaking down a case and shipping single units. Also, this allows bricks-and-mortar retailers to have a sharper price point to lure consumers into the store. This strategy has played out well for many brands as they dealt with the rise of Club stores and can be played successfully in e-commerce as well, benefiting all parties.
2. Price Lists
Do you have harmonized price lists that do not favor one channel over another? If you do not, you are likely subsidizing the higher list cost in a channel with trade spend, which is highly inefficient. A single price list that provides an adequate price slope between the various sizes across your product range will maximize your ability to manage both channel pricing and brand equity.
The single largest mistake brands tend to make is thinking that offering “net price” price lists to online marketplaces will benefit them while they use trade dollars in bricks-and-mortar stores to cater to EDLP (Everyday low price) customers. This approach is quite inefficient in many ways, and consumes valuable time and resources that can otherwise be better utilized. Having a single price list with the same price offered to all retailers allows for a more manageable and equitable pricing environment. It also enables a more profitable distribution of trade spend across the most effective areas to invest in for each retailer.
I have worked with two brands in the past – one that managed two separate price lists and one that we implemented as a single-standard. While the one with the single price list saw sales grow and trade spend remain constant, the other saw trade spend double in just two years as it got caught in a scenario of always having to placate one side of the equation or the other.
3. Trade Spend
Today’s brands need to focus on a balanced trade spend strategy to address each channel’s unique needs. Using trade spend with online retailers can be tricky, as the channel is usually assumed to be the lowest priced anyway. Still, it can be used to drive traffic and offset supply chain costs, in order to ensure sufficient margins for the retailer, which will keep you off the CRAP (Can’t Realize A Profit) lists. Meanwhile, as JC Penny quickly learned when it made the disastrous shift to EDLP, consumers still want in-store discounts and sales.
The best approach I have worked with is to set a single dead net price inclusive of all trade. For example, if your product’s standard list cost is $6.80 and you have a dead net price for promotions (or EDLP) of $5.40, then all retailers – online and bricks-and-mortar – are on equal footing. The only variance in the price for consumers will be the margin each operator chooses to take. This approach is not without issues, as you have to apply all elements of trade spend (such as ad fees, etc.) to the promotional unit costs to ensure you are truly capturing the dead net cost of the retailer.
Still, the advantage of utilizing this approach is that when a retailer complains about the price another is offering to consumers, the conversation turns to margins being taken and not the cost of the product. At the very least, this approach provides a common ground on which to have a constructive conversation with all retailers.
So why does this all matter so much to a brand?
The road to selling online is littered with disaster and missed expectations for sales. Most manufacturers that jumped to online sales without considering pricing quickly learned that abandoning one channel for another does not lead to increased sales. Conversely, we have seen a few brands go from online only to in-store as well. These brands seem to have learned from the others’ mistakes and rarely will you find price variances between the online and offline channels. Instead, you tend to see these brands growing, as online consumers start experiencing the brand in-store.
A Business To Community study by Larisa Bedgood in 2019 showed that “lower price” was second to only “convenience” for why consumers shop online, while 51% of consumers said that the biggest drawback to shopping online was not being able to touch and feel the product. Brands that are able to bridge the gap and provide consumers with the convenience of online while also showing up well in-store at the right price point will be able to break out of the stagnate 1-2% (if they are lucky) growth most CPG companies are experiencing. If online selling is growing 40-50% a year, why are these companies only managing brand declines and flat growth? I believe it is mainly due to the lack of a proper pricing parity strategy for the two channels along with a lack of actionable e-commerce data.
Brands that do not focus on all three areas listed above often find themselves in a constant churn of conversations with retailers on all sides, which will typically lead to either online marketplaces or bricks-and-mortar stores deprioritizing the brand in promotions or search. Finding and setting a level playing field will allow for a balanced trade spend and growth for brands on both platforms, while also enabling a brand to break out of the net 1% growth that is plaguing a lot of CPG brands today.
Outside of deploying basic pricing principles for your brand, I would also suggest early and strong investments in data, systems and people to monitor your brand’s health and pricing. Many brands jumped online without any way to monitor the consumer conversation around the brand or the pricing of the brand online. Not having the tools and resources in place to do this can lead to a quick and long-lasting erosion of brand equity and sales. Most, if not all, large manufacturers have subscribed to POS data for years and fully understand how to analyze this data. But the world has shifted. If your organization has not invested in digital shelf analytics, you may be driving blind and unaware that your brand is losing equity, which equals losing consumers and sales.
Using a combination of pricing principles and e-commerce data mining tools will help you maintain price parity and brand relevance, while keeping you from becoming the last brand of choice for consumers, regardless of where they shop.
Online retailers in the US have enjoyed an impressive turnover during 2018’s Thanksgiving weekend sale. Over the last few weeks, DataWeave has published deep-dive reports on the performance of top US retailers in fashion and consumer electronics during this period, detailing their discounting and product strategies across several product types.
In continuation of our series of articles on the Thanksgiving weekend sale, this article focuses specifically on the top brands across all retailers analyzed.
While a lot of attention from the media and analysts during these sale events is often focused on the strategies and performance of retailers, the festive sale period is equally vital for consumer brands. Both established brands and new entrants across all categories compete aggressively to gain market share during a period that accounts for a substantial portion of annual sales turnover.
For brands, the two primary drivers of conversion specific to sale events are competitive pricing and prominent brand visibility. At DataWeave, we went about analyzing which brands came out on top across retailers and categories during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, based on these two factors.
Our Methodology
We tracked the pricing of 6 leading fashion retailers and 5 major consumer electronics retailers to study the pricing strategies of brands during the sale events. Our analysis focused on additional discounts offered during the sale period to evaluate the true value of the sale event to customers. To calculate this effect, we compared the pricing of products on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday to the pricing of products prior to the sale commencing. We considered the Top 500 ranked products on 11 product types across Men’s and Women’s Fashion and 11 popular consumer electronics products for this analysis.
Consumer Electronics Brands
In digital cameras, Canon’s traditional role as a discount leader was on show, featuring on both Best Buy (14%) and Target (20%), the two most aggressive price discounters in consumer electronics. Nikon took Canon’s place in DSLR cameras, for Best Buy (13%), New Egg (10%) and Walmart (4%), albeit at a comparatively low additional discount point.
Razor benefited from Amazon’s strategy of promoting its lower-priced products, promoting a modest 9% additional discount but across its entire range of laptop products. The competitiveness of this category between brands is shown by Samsung’s decision to give an additional 53% discount across 36% of its product line at Best Buy.
The strategic approach brands take with different retailers was illustrated by HP’s 30% additional discount on 31% of its products at Target while over at Walmart, HP had a dire a 4% additional discount on a mere 13% of its products. A similar strategy was employed by LG with its televisions. On Amazon, its TVs had a 10% additional discount applied to 46% of its products, while at New Egg that translated to 25% and 8% respectively.
Among the fast emerging wearables category, under-pressure Chinese firm Huawei dropped an aggressive 46% additional discount on 100% of its product range at Best Buy. By comparison, the next highest in this category was Marc Jacobs at Target with 33% and 40% respectively.
Most Visible Brands Across Product Types
In our analysis, brand visibility is represented in terms of both the number of products for each brand, as well as the average rank of all its products (“lower” the rank value, higher is the visibility).
The influence an online retailer exerted on a brand’s average ranking is illustrated by Canon’s digital cameras. On Amazon, its 296 products had an average ranking of 272, while on Best Buy it was 30 and 48, 73 and 212 on New Egg and 20 and 69 on Walmart. For all these retailers, Canon was the most visible brand in digital cameras, despite such variation.
It was a similar story on laptops, with HP’s Amazon ranking of 298 based on 166 products, contrasting with a Target ranking of 14 on 18 products and Walmart ranking of 21 on 20 products.
These patterns appear to play out in TVs too, with Samsung’s Amazon average ranking of 292 based on 150 products contrasting with Walmart average ranking of 10 across 7 products.
Unsurprisingly, across our analysis of additional discounts and brand visibility, the top brands are well known and recognizable brands in each product type, with very few new entrants breaking out from the pack. This story, though, takes a turn in the following analysis on visibility growth.
Brands With Highest Growth in Visibility
To perform this analysis, we developed an index for the visibility of a brand based on the number of products available per brand as well as the average rank of those products. We then compared this score for each brand between before and during the sale period, and subsequently calculated the percentage growth.
The list of brands that showed the highest growth in visibility for each product type is an interesting mix of well established and newer brands. The usual suspects included the likes of Philips, Fitbit, Sony, Kodak, Nikon, etc. The presence of brands like Apple, Google, and Bose is surprising as they would be expected to command strong visibility even before the sale. Some of the newer brands include Rha, Westinghouse, Garmin, Lanruo, and more.
Some brands showed a dramatic increase in visibility. Examples include Bose on Walmart (698%), HTC on New Egg (657%), Galanz on Amazon (657%), and Jlab on Target (608%).
Kodak’s digital cameras (2% growth) on Best Buy took the honors for the lowest increase in visibility, just ahead of HP laptops (3%) on Walmart, Nostalgia Electrics refrigerators (4%) and Belkin Tablets (7%) both on sale at Target. These numbers indicate a relatively static assortment for the respective retailers and product types.
Fashion Brands
Moving over to the Fashion category, we observed significantly more aggressive discounting activity, as expected. Parent’s Choice T-shirts recorded the highest additional discount (80%) applied to the widest product range (Walmart 91%). Similarly, Fruit of the Loom saw Amazon promote a 78% additional discount applied across 20% of its products.
In shoes, Macy’s promoted a 60% additional discount on 50% of Kenneth Cole’s product range. In watches, Amazon featured a 57% additional discount on 50% of Kate Spade New Year branded products. Meanwhile, in sunglasses, Ray Ban in Bloomingdale’s enjoyed a 20% additional discount spread across a whopping 95% of its products, compared to just a 14% additional discount applied to a mere 10% of Ray Ban products in New Egg.
In stark contrast to what was observed in Electronics, the Fashion category saw fewer large brands dominate the discounting landscape across categories. This isn’t surprising given how the Fashion category tends to be cluttered with a plethora of brands, while the Electronics category usually consists of a leaner set of popular brands in each product type.
Most Visible Brands Across Product Types
In casual shoes, Nike’s ranking of 264 on 93 and Converse’s ranking of 239 on 89 products contrasted with Vision Street Wear’s ranking of 8 on 9 products and Time And Tru’s 15 ranking on 14 products.
Another point of contrast was Micheal Kors (Handbags) cross-retailer platform performance - its average ranking of 184 on 102 products on Macy’s while its average ranking on New Egg was 20 across 12 products. Still, it appears the brand discounted heavily in New Egg to compensate for its relatively low visibility on the website.
Ray Ban recorded a category high ranking of 209 based on 321 products on Macy’s. By comparison, Ray Ban had a ranking of 17 on 34 products at New Egg. Over at Amazon, Ray Ban managed a creditable 189 ranking on 124 products and a 163 ranking on 120 products at Bloomingdale’s.
Brands With Highest Growth in Visibility
Compared to the Electronics category, Fashion consists of certain brands that skyrocketed in their visibility. Examples include Next Level T-shirts (Amazon 2,000%), Michael Kors Watches (Walmart 1,424%), Dakota Watches (Target 751%) and Adidas sports shoes (Amazon 516%).
Bloomingdale’s delivered amazing visibility growth for key brands, with Burberry (527%), Reiss (500%), The Kooples (%00%), Tory Burch (500%), J Brand (475%), and Adidas (300%) all enjoying strong visibility growth.
At the other end of the visibility growth spectrum, the growth rates of Lucky shirts (New Egg, 11%), Micheal Kors (New Egg, 20%) Dickies jeans (Target, 22%), Tasso Elba shirts (Macy’s, 23%), and Puma Casual Shoes (Target, 25%) indicate a relatively more static assortment in their respective product types.
Depth Of Product Range And Discounting Strategy Matters
Across the three sales, DataWeave identified several different additional discounting and product assortment strategies by both the retailers and the brands.
While retailers are increasingly discounting the lower priced products to shape price perceptions among shoppers (take a bow Amazon), what are the implications for brands? Firstly, a thin product range is going to make achieving visibility more challenging. Secondly, brand strategies across online retailing platforms will need to be more clearly defined and executed. Thirdly, those brands that treated Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday as discrete events are going to have to rethink their approach as these lines increasingly blur with time.
If you’re interested to learn more about how DataWeave aggregates and analyzes data from online sources as massive scale, as well as how we provide competitive intelligence to retailers and consumer brands, visit our website!
As with many other product categories, Amazon has made a significant incursion in Apparel — a key battleground category in retail today. Recently, DataWeave once more collaborated with Coresight Research, a retail-focused research firm to publish an in-depth report revealing insights on Amazon’s approach to its US fashion offerings.
Since our initial collaborative report in February this year, we have witnessed some seismic shifts in the category at both the brand and the product-type level.
Research Methodology
We aggregated our analytical data on more than 1 million women’s and men’s clothing products listed on Amazon.com in two stages:
Firstly, we identified all brands included in the Top 500 featured product listings for each product subcategory in both the Women’s Clothing and Men’s Clothing sections featured on Amazon Fashion (e.g., the top 500 product listings for women’s tops and tees, the top 500 product listings for men’s activewear, etc.). We believe these Top 500 products reflect around 95 percent of all Amazon.com’s clothing sales. This represents 2,782 unique brands.
We then aggregated the data on all product listings within the Women’s Clothing and Men’s Clothing sections for each of those 2,782 brands. This generated a total of 1.12 million individually listed products. This expansive list forms the basis for our highlights of the report.
Third-Party Seller Listings Are Rising Sharply
We identified a total of 1.12 million products across men’s and women’s clothing — a significant increase of 27.3 percent in the seven months between February and September 2018. The drivers of this sharp spike are third-party seller listings. In contrast, the report indicates only a 2.2 percent rise in first-party listings over the same period, compared to a 30.5 percent jump in third-party listings.
In addition, Amazon has listed just 11.1 percent of all clothing products for sale, with third-party sellers offering the remaining 88.9 percent — an indication of the strength of Amazon’s open marketplace platform.
A Major Brand Shift On Amazon Fashion Is Underway
In just over six short months, major brand shifts on Amazon Fashion have taken place. The number of Nike listings has plummeted by 46 percent, driven by a slump in third-party listings following Amazon’s new partnership with Nike — a story recently covered by Quartz. Limited growth in Nike clothing first-party listings failed to compensate for this decline.
Gildan’s spike in total product listings appears to be fueled by increased first-party listings off a low base. Calvin Klein’s 2017 agreement to supply Amazon with products appears to be driving the Calvin Klein brand’s double-digit uptick in first-party listings on Amazon Fashion.
Aéropostale’s decline appears to be entirely driven by a drop in its third-party listings. The brand itself is not listed as a seller on Amazon.com.
Amazon Is Rebalancing Its Apparel Portfolio and Switching Its Focus from Sportswear To Suits
As its Fashion footprint rapidly matures, Amazon now appears to be rebalancing its portfolio with strong growth being shown in listings for formal categories such as suits and away from sportswear. We recorded a 98.6 percent increase in listings of women’s suits and blazers complemented by a 52.2 percent rise in men’s suit and sports coat listings between February and September 2018.
Generic “Non-Brands” Are Surging On Top 25 Brands List
Over the past six months, low-price generic brands have made major inroads into Amazon’s listings. Four unknown “brands” captured the top positions on the list of brands offered on Amazon Fashion. The WSPLYSPJY, Cruiize and Comfy brands appear to be shipped directly to customers from China.
Source: Coresight/DataWeave (Amazon Fashion: Top 25 Brands’ Number of Listings, February 2018 vs. September 2018)
Source: Coresight/DataWeave (Amazon Fashion: Top 25 Brands’ Number of Listings, February 2018 vs. September 2018)
WSPLYSPJY alone accounts for fully 8.6 percent of Amazon men’s and women’s clothing listings. Cruiize accounts for a further 3.2 percent of listings while Comfy chips in another 3.1 percent.
Amazon Appears To be Executing A Strategic Pivot
Amazon’s fashion offering is fast maturing. We saw substantial growth in the number of listings for more formal categories. The realignment in third-party listings by Nike together with increased first-party listings for Calvin Klein and Gildan appear to be driven by alliances with Amazon.
Simultaneously, ultralow-price generic clothing items delivered on order from China have inundated the “Most-Listed Products” rankings. Third parties now represent nearly 90 percent of Amazon Fashion’s offering.
While Amazon Fashion shoppers enjoy a wider choice than they did even six months ago, we believe a stronger emphasis on first-party listings would grow the products eligible for Prime delivery. This tactic could strengthen Amazon Fashion’s long-term appeal as a shopping destination.
If you’re interested in DataWeave’s technology, and how we aggregate data from online sources to provide unique and comprehensive insights on eCommerce products and pricing, check us out on our website!
Two years ago, not many would have foreseen this sentence capturing the imagination of the country like it has. Demolishing all regional barriers, the movie has grossed over INR 500 crores across the world in only its first three days.
While the first movie received lavish praise for its ambition, technical values, and story, the sequel, bogged by bloated expectations, has polarized the critics fraternity. Some critics compare the movie’s computer graphics favorably to Hollywood productions like Lord of the Rings. Others find the movie lacking in pacing and plot.
The masses, however, have reportedly lapped the movie up. Social media channels are brimming with opinions, and if one is to attempt finding out the aggregate views of audiences, Twitter is a good place to start.
At DataWeave, we ran our proprietary, AI-powered ‘Sentiment Analysis’ algorithm over all tweets about Baahubali 2 the first three days of its release, and observed some interesting insights.
Twitterati Reactions to Baahubali 2
Overall, the Twitterati’s views on the movie were overwhelmingly positive. We analysed over 75,000 tweets and identified the sentiments expressed on several facets of the movie, such as, Visuals, Acting, Prabhas, etc. The following graphic indicates how the movie fared in some of these categories.
The Baahubali team, Anushka (actor), Rajamouli (director), and Prabhas (actor), are all perceived as huge positive influences on the movie. Rajamouli, specifically, met with almost universal approval for his dedication and execution. Several viewers cheered the movie on as a triumph of Indian cinema, one which has redefined the cinema landscape of the country. There was considerable praise for the story, Rana (actor), and acting performances, as well.
The not-so-positive sentiments were reserved for the reason behind Katappa killing Baahubali (no spoilers!), the visuals, and the second half of the movie. Many viewers found the second half to be slow, with unrealistic visuals and action sequences. For example, one of the tweets read:
“First half was good, but the second half is beyond Rajnikanth movies: humans uprooting trees!”
While these insights seem simple enough to understand, the technology to filter inevitably chaotic online content and extract meaningful information is incredibly complex.
Unearthing Meaning from Chaos
At DataWeave, we provide enterprises with Competitive Intelligence as a Service by aggregating and analyzing millions of unstructured data points on the web, across multiple sources. This enables businesses to better understand their competitive environment and make data-driven decisions to grow their business.
One of our solutions — Sentiment Analysis — helps brands study customer preferences at a product attribute level by analyzing customer reviews. We used the same technology to analyze the reaction of audiences globally to Baahubali 2. After data acquisition, this process consists of three steps –
Step 1: Features Extraction
To identify the “features” that reviewers are talking about, we first understand the syntactical structure of the tweets and separate words into nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. This needs to account for complexities like synonyms, spelling errors, paraphrases, noise, etc. Our AI-based technology platform then uses various advanced techniques to generate a list of “uni-features” and “compound features” (more than one word for a feature).
Step 2: Identifying Feature-Opinion Pairs
Next, we identify the relationship between the feature and the opinion. One of the reasons this is challenging with twitter is, most of the time, twitter users treat grammar with utter disdain. Case in point:
“I saw the movie visuals awesome bad climax felt director unnecessarily dragged the second half”
In this case, the feature-opinion pairs are visuals: awesome, climax: bad, second half: unnecessarily dragged. Clearly, something as simple as attributing the nearest opinion-word to the feature is not good enough. Here again, we use advanced AI-based techniques to accurately classify feature-opinion pairs.
We classified close to 1000 opinion words and matched them to each feature. The infographic below shows groups of similar words that the AI algorithm clustered into a single feature, and the top positive and negative sentiments expressed by the Twitterati for each feature.
While our technology can associate words with similar meaning, such as, ‘part after interval’ and ‘second half’, it can also identify spelling errors by identifying and grouping ‘Rajamouli’ and ‘Raajamouli’ as a single feature.
Adjectives like ‘magnificent’ and ‘creative’ were used to describe the Baahubali team positively, while words like ‘boring’, ‘disappointed’, and ‘tiring’ were used to describe the second half of the movie negatively.
Step 3: Sentiment Calculation
Lastly, we calculate the sentiment score, which is determined by the strength of the opinion-word, number of retweets and the time of tweet. A weighted average is normalized and we generate a score on a scale of 0% to 100%.
A Peephole into the Consumer’s Mind
As more and more people express their views and opinions in the online world, there is more of an opportunity to use these data points to drive business strategies.
Consumer-focused brands use DataWeave’s Sentiment Analysis solution as a key element of their product strategy, by reinforcing attributes with positive sentiments in reviews, and improving or eliminating attributes with negative sentiments in reviews.
Click here to find out more about the benefits of using DataWeave’s Sentiment Analysis!
We all know, online shopping offers a lot of benefits to shoppers. Apart from the convenience it offers access to a wide-assortment base and, of course, discounts are an added benefit. Often we see, retailers claiming large discounts on products.
Many-a-time, the percentage discount that is mentioned drives price perception. Customers when comparing prices across stores view larger percentage discounts as a better deal. However, this is not necessarily the case. To present this case, let us look into how discounts are calculated:
Percentage discounts are a function of the MRP / MSRP and the Selling Price. The MRP / MSRP is set by the manufacturer and the selling price is more often than not determined by the retailer.
Selling price of products being different across retailers is a well-known fact. When the MRP of the same products tend to vary across retailers, it gets confusing for a customer, which in turn leads to a brand equity dilution of the brand or manufacturer.
To analyse how deep this discord is, we decided to dive deeper into its working dynamics. Amongst all the data that we aggregate at DataWeave, analysing discounts of the same product across retailers gives us the ability to discern pricing strategies of retailers. We used this dataset to monitor and analyse MRPs.
What we found
1. We analysed MRPs of around 400 brands across 10 categories. Around 44% of products in these brands have no variance in MRPs across retailers
2. This also means there is a variance in 56% of products
3. Products in the ‘Mobile Phones and Tablets’ category have the most price variance; 65% of the products have price variance
4. Fashion and Fashion accessories have the least price variance; around 20%
5. Brands having the most variance:
6. Brands having the least variance:
What are the implications of the above insights?
Brands & manufacturers need to be aware of how their brand products are being represented and sold online
Consumers shopping online need to look at end prices, and not focus on the discount percentage, before making a purchase-decision on a particular store
This article was previously published on Yourstory
DataWeaves Brand Intelligence provides consumer brands with the ability to track their products, pricing, discoverability vis-a-vis their competitors across e-commerce platforms.
[This post was written by Dipanjan. Dipanjan works in the Engineering Team with Mandar, addressing some of the problems related to Data Semantics. He loves watching English Sitcoms in his spare time. This was originally posted on the PriceWeave blog.]
This is the second post in our series of blog posts which we shall be presenting regarding social media analysis. We have already talked about Twitter Mining in depth earlier and also how to analyze social trends in general and gather insights from YouTube. If you are more interested in developing a quick sentiment analysis app, you can check our short tutorial on that as well.
Our flagship product, PriceWeave, is all about delivering real time actionable insights at scale. PriceWeave helps Retailers and Brands take decisions on product pricing, promotions, and assortments on a day to day basis. One of the areas we focus on is “Social Intelligence”, where we measure our customers’ social presence in terms of their reach and engagement on different social channels. Social Intelligence also helps in discovering brands and products trending on social media.
Today, I will be talking about how we can get data from Twitter in real-time and perform some interesting analytics on top of that to understand social reactions to trending brands and products.
In our last post, we had used Twitter’s Search API for getting a selective set of tweets and performed some analytics on that. But today, we will be using Twitter’s Streaming API, to access data feeds in real time. A couple of differences with regards to the two APIs are as follows. The Search API is primarily a REST API which can be used to query for “historical data”. However, the Streaming API gives us access to Twitter’s global stream of tweets data. Moreover, it lets you acquire much larger volumes of data with keyword filters in real-time compared to normal search.
Installing Dependencies
I will be using Python for my analysis as usual, so you can install it if you don’t have it already. You can use another language of your choice, but remember to use the relevant libraries of that language. To get started, install the following packages, if you don’t have them already. We use simplejson for JSON data processing at DataWeave, but you are most welcome to use the stock json library.
Acquiring Data
We will use the Twitter Streaming API and the equivalent python wrapper to get the required tweets. Since we will be looking to get a large number of tweets in real time, there is the question of where should we store the data and what data model should be used. In general, when building a robust API or application over Twitter data, MongoDB being a schemaless document-oriented database, is a good choice. It also supports expressive queries with indexing, filtering and aggregations. However, since we are going to analyze a relatively small sample of data using pandas, we shall be storing them in flat files.
Note: Should you prefer to sink the data to MongoDB, the mongoexportcommand line tool can be used to export it to a newline delimited format that is exactly the same as what we will be writing to a file.
The following code snippet shows you how to create a connection to Twitter’s Streaming API and filter for tweets containing a specific keyword. For simplicity, each tweet is saved in a newline-delimited file as a JSON document. Since we will be dealing with products and brands, I have queried on two trending products and brands respectively. They are, ‘Sony’ and ‘Microsoft’ with regards to brands and ‘iPhone 6’ and ‘Galaxy S5’ with regards to products. You can write the code snippet as a function for ease of use and call it for specific queries to do a comparative study.
Let the data stream for a significant period of time so that you can capture a sizeable sample of tweets.
Analyses and Visualizations
Now that you have amassed a collection of tweets from the API in a newline delimited format, let’s start with the analyses. One of the easiest ways to load the data into pandas is to build a valid JSON array of the tweets. This can be accomplished using the following code segment.
Note: With pandas, you will need to have an amount of working memory proportional to the amount of data that you’re analyzing.
Once you run this, you should get a dictionary containing 4 data frames. The output I obtained is shown in the snapshot below.
Note: Per the Streaming API guidelines, Twitter will only provide up to 1% of the total volume of real time tweets, and anything beyond that is filtered out with each “limit notice”.
The next snippet shows how to remove the “limit notice” column if you encounter it.
Time-based Analysis
Each tweet we captured had a specific time when it was created. To analyze the time period when we captured these tweets, let’s create a time-based index on the created_at field of each tweet so that we can perform a time-based analysis to see at what times do people post most frequently about our query terms.
The output I obtained is shown in the snapshot below.
I had started capturing the Twitter stream at around 7 pm on the 6th of December and stopped it at around 11:45 am on the 7th of December. So the results seem consistent based on that. With a time-based index now in place, we can trivially do some useful things like calculate the boundaries, compute histograms and so on. Operations such as grouping by a time unit are also easy to accomplish and seem a logical next step. The following code snippet illustrates how to group by the “hour” of our data frame, which is exposed as a datetime.datetime timestamp since we now have a time-based index in place. We print an hourly distribution of tweets also just to see which brand \ product was most talked about on Twitter during that time period.
The outputs I obtained are depicted in the snapshot below.
The “Hour” field here follows a 24 hour format. What is interesting here is that, people have been talking more about Sony than Microsoft in Brands. In Products, iPhone 6 seems to be trending more than Samsung’s Galaxy S5. Also the trend shows some interesting insights that people tend to talk more on Twitter in the morning and late evenings.
Time-based Visualizations
It could be helpful to further subdivide the time ranges into smaller intervals so as to increase the resolution of the extremes. Therefore, let’s group into a custom interval by dividing the hour into 15-minute segments. The code is pretty much the same as before except that you call a custom function to perform the grouping. This time, we will be visualizing the distributions using matplotlib.
The two visualizations are depicted below. Of course don’t forget to ignore the section of the plots from after 11:30 am to around 7 pm because during this time no tweets were collected by me. This is indicated by a steep rise in the curve and is insignificant. The real regions of significance are from hour 7 to 11:30 and hour 19 to 22.
Considering brands, the visualization for Microsoft vs. Sony is depicted below. Sony is the clear winner here.
Considering products, the visualization for iPhone 6 vs. Galaxy S5 is depicted below. The clear winner here is definitely iPhone 6.
Tweeting Frequency Analysis
In addition to time-based analysis, we can do other types of analysis as well. The most popular analysis in this case would be frequency based analysis of the users authoring the tweets. The following code snippet will compute the Twitter accounts that authored the most tweets and compare it to the total number of unique accounts that appeared for each of our query terms.
The results which I obtained are depicted below.
What we do notice is that a lot of these tweets are also made by bots, advertisers and SEO technicians. Some examples are Galaxy_Sleeves and iphone6_sleeves which are obviously selling covers and cases for the devices.
Tweeting Frequency Visualizations
After frequency analysis, we can plot these frequency values to get better intuition about the underlying distribution, so let’s take a quick look at it using histograms. The following code snippet created these visualizations for both brands and products using subplots.
The visualizations I obtained are depicted below.
The distributions follow the “Pareto Principle” as expected where we see that a selective number of users make a large number of tweets and the majority of users create a small number of tweets. Besides that, we see that based on the tweet distributions, Sony and iPhone 6 are more trending than their counterparts.
Locale Analysis
Another important insight would be to see where your target audience is located and their frequency. The following code snippet achieves the same.
The outputs which I obtained are depicted in the following snapshot. Remember that Twitter follows the ISO 639–1 language code convention.
The trend we see is that most of the tweets are from English speaking countries as expected. Surprisingly, most of the Tweets regarding iPhone 6 are from Japan!
Analysis of Trending Topics
In this section, we will see some of the topics which are associated with the terms we used for querying Twitter. For this, we will be running our analysis on the tweets where the author speaks in English. We will be using the nltklibrary here to take care of a couple of things like removing stopwords which have little significance. Now I will be doing the analysis here for brands only, but you are most welcome to try it out with products too because, the following code snippet can be used to accomplish both the computations.
What the above code does is that, it takes each tweet, tokenizes it and then computes a term frequency and outputs the 20 most common terms for each brand. Of course an n-gram analysis can give a deeper insight into trending topics but the same can also be accomplished with ntlk’s collocations function which takes in the tokens and outputs the context in which they were mentioned. The outputs I obtained are depicted in the snapshot below.
Some interesting insights we see from the above outputs are as follows.
Sony was hacked recently and it was rumored that North Korea was responsible for that, however they have denied that. We can see that is trending on Twitter in context of Sony. You can read about it here.
Sony has recently introduced Project Sony Skylight which lets you customize your PS4.
There are rumors of Lumia 1030, Microsoft’s first flagship phone.
People are also talking a lot about Windows 10, the next OS which is going to be released by Microsoft pretty soon.
Interestingly, “ebay price” comes up for both the brands, this might be an indication that eBay is offering discounts for products from both these brands.
To get a detailed view on the tweets matching some of these trending terms, we can use nltk’s concordance function as follows.
The outputs I obtained are as follows. We can clearly see the tweets which contain the token we searched for. In case you are unable to view the text clearly, click on the image to zoom.
Thus, you can see that the Twitter Streaming API is a really good source to track social reaction to any particular entity whether it is a brand or a product. On top of that, if you are armed with an arsenal of Python’s powerful analysis tools and libraries, you can get the best insights from the unending stream of tweets.
That’s all for now folks! Before I sign off, I would like to thank Matthew A. Russell and his excellent book Mining the Social Web once again, without which this post would not have been possible. Cover image credit goes to TechCrunch.
