The DataWeave Blog

Category: Brands Strategy

  • Bridging the Gap: How Digital Shelf Analytics Empowers Marketing Mix Modelling for Smarter Brand Decisions

    Bridging the Gap: How Digital Shelf Analytics Empowers Marketing Mix Modelling for Smarter Brand Decisions

    Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) has been a cornerstone of marketing analytics for decades: first as a service offered by large consultancies like Nielsen and IRI, and later as software solutions from NielsenIQ and Ekimetrics. By 2024, some 64% of senior marketing leaders had already adopted and used MMM solutions.

    However, despite this widespread adoption, MMM faces significant limitations in our fast-moving digital marketplace. According to Gartner, opaque pricing models and siloed data integration remain substantial barriers to actionable insights from these tools. Most critically, traditional MMM often misses vital variables influencing consumer behavior, such as:

    • Competitor price drops and promotions
    • Product availability issues and stockouts
    • Negative review trends and sentiment shifts
    • Search ranking fluctuations

    These blind spots must be addressed to unlock the full value of MMM investments and make truly informed marketing decisions.

    The Critical Data Gap In Traditional MMM

    Traditional MMM solutions expose brands to considerable risk, especially in the CPG and retail space. The fundamental challenge lies in MMM’s reliance on lagging indicators for essential metrics like historical sales and ad spend. Data inputs may be months or quarters old before they’re used for scenario analysis.

    That’s like making million-dollar marketing decisions while only looking in the rearview mirror when you need to watch the road ahead simultaneously.

    MMM tools also typically overlook external market factors that can dramatically impact performance. In today’s retail landscape, where market conditions change rapidly, being blind to real-time competitive dynamics creates significant vulnerability. Key external factors that traditional MMMs fail to capture include:

    • Competitor moves: Price changes, promotions, content updates
    • Consumer sentiment: Review trends, ratings, social engagement
    • Market dynamics: Stockouts, search ranking shifts, category growth

    How Digital Shelf Analytics Completes The Picture

    This is where Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) plays a crucial complementary role. Brands and retailers leveraging DSA gain insights into real-time market dynamics that MMM alone cannot provide. However, brands using DSA in isolation often struggle to quantify how digital shelf improvements directly impact revenue. Answering questions like “Did better product content drive sales, or was it the influencer campaign?” remains challenging.

    Bridging these disconnected platforms requires intentional integration and a DSA platform that can feed intensively cleaned and organized data into existing MMM platforms. With the right data inputs, companies establish a powerful feedback loop for agile, data-driven decisions.

    A comprehensive DSA solution like DataWeave provides granular, actionable data on critical external variables such as:

    • Daily or weekly competitor pricing movements and promotional activity
    • Product content standardization and optimization across retailers
    • Review sentiment trends and potential reputation issues
    • Share of search/shelf performance relative to competitors

    When merged with established MMM capabilities, DSA creates a complete picture that fills the blind spots holding marketing teams back from maximizing ROI.

    The DSA + MMM Advantage in Retail Media

    The popularity of retail media networks has further amplified the need for integrated DSA and MMM approaches. These advertising platforms, operated by retailers, allow brands to display targeted ads to shoppers across digital properties based on first-party customer data and purchase insights.

    The retail media revolution has transformed e-commerce pages into sophisticated search engines for product discovery. This evolution has been so impactful that retail media ad revenue surged 16.3% in 2023, reaching $43.7B in the U.S., with continued growth projected.

    Major platforms like Walmart have expanded their retail media networks to capitalize on closed-loop attribution. Since retailers own the entire customer journey, they can track everything from ad impression to purchase on their e-commerce sites. This creates a significant advantage through accurate ROI measurement, unlike traditional advertising where attribution remains challenging.

    How DSA Enhances Retail Media Optimization

    With retail media emerging as a top-performing sales channel, brands need sophisticated optimization strategies. Every brand wants to maximize visibility and performance across individual eCommerce sites, just as they optimize for Google or emerging AI platforms.

    Integrating digital shelf analytics into marketing mix models enables brands to:

    • Allocate ad spend more intelligently using real-time competitive insights
    • Identify timely campaign activation opportunities in response to market changes
    • Monitor organic ranking trends to strategically time paid promotional activities
    • Measure true campaign impact on digital shelf performance metrics

    For example, when a competitor launches an aggressive price drop in your category, DSA provides visibility into this change. This intelligence can trigger recommended campaign adjustments, such as increased sponsored ad bidding in affected categories. Traditional MMM alone cannot deliver this level of responsive optimization.

    How to Integrate DSA into MMM: A 3-Step Framework

    Digital Shelf Analytics for Marketing Mix Modeling - 3 Step Framework

    Here’s how to integrate your Digital Shelf Analytics into your Marketing Mix Models to start making better data-driven decisions for your brand.

    Step 1: Map DSA Variables to MMM Inputs

    Begin by mapping specific DSA variables to your static MMM inputs. Ensure that competitors are properly configured for monitoring in your DSA platform and that metrics like price changes and search ranking positions are linked with your MMM’s models.

    This integration is crucial because traditional MMM models rely exclusively on historical data for forecasting. Adding real-time inputs delivers several benefits:

    • More accurate elasticity curves reflecting current market conditions
    • Better understanding of root causes behind demand shifts
    • Prevention of misattributing sales changes to your marketing activities when external factors may be responsible

    At DataWeave, our comprehensive coverage spans 500+ billion data points, 400,000 brands, and 1,500+ websites, ensuring brands never miss a competitor move and maintain complete visibility across the connected e-commerce landscape.

    Step 2: Feed High-Quality DSA Data into MMM Platforms

    Next, integrate critical digital shelf metrics into your MMM framework:

    • Review and sentiment scores and trends
    • Content quality measurements
    • Competitive positioning data
    • Price gap analytics
    • Search ranking performance

    DataWeave employs a rigorous data accuracy validation process to ensure teams work with the cleanest, most reliable data possible. Our sophisticated processing pipeline removes anomalies and standardizes information across retailers, providing the consistent, high-integrity data foundation that robust marketing mix modeling demands.

    Step 3: Validate and Iterate

    A powerful DSA solution helps measure whether your marketing efforts achieved their intended impact on the digital shelf. Use your DSA platform to assess campaigns’ actual effect on key performance indicators:

    • Do promo-driven sales lifts correlate with improved search rankings?
    • How do content improvements impact conversion rates?
    • What is the relationship between paid media and organic visibility?

    DataWeave enables users to correlate metrics across the entire consumer journey, from awareness through post-purchase. Rather than focusing solely on short-term spikes, brands can measure lasting impacts on digital shelf health. This end-to-end visibility empowers teams to make increasingly informed decisions with each campaign cycle.

    Executive Decision Support in Uncertain Times

    It is no surprise to anyone that we are living through volatile times. Executives may be uncomfortable if they cannot provide their teams with strategic direction based on data or the tools they need to accelerate their workdays.

    By integrating DSA with MMM, companies gain early warning signals about market shifts, enabling smarter resource allocation during budget constraints. This integration helps organizations move from tactical execution to strategic direction by:

    • Providing cross-channel impact analysis to understand the full marketing ecosystem
    • Equipping category managers with tactical optimization tools that support broader strategic objectives
    • Identifying competitive threats before they impact sales
    • Forecasting potential ROI impacts across various spending scenarios

    These capabilities help prevent wasted ad spend, missed opportunities, and lost sales.

    Future-Proofing with DSA-Driven MMM

    Several emerging trends highlight the growing importance of DSA-enhanced marketing mix modeling:

    • Trend 1: Navigating Economic Volatility – Brands can use DSA to track how competitors adjust pricing in response to cost shocks like tariffs and inflation. This real-time intelligence directly improves MMM’s inflation modeling accuracy.
    • Trend 2: AI-Powered Predictive Insights – Combining DSA trend detection (such as viral product reviews or sudden inventory fluctuations) with MMM helps forecast demand spikes from otherwise unforeseen events.
    • Trend 3: Automated Optimization – Smart campaign activations and adjustments based on real-time DSA triggers drive efficiency. DataWeave’s vision includes an automated retail media intelligence layer that optimizes spend across channels based on integrated insights.

    DataWeave’s Unique Advantage

    At DataWeave, we’ve seen our digital shelf analytics customers significantly improve their organic search rankings because of better-sponsored ad campaigns. What makes our approach to DSA-MMM integration uniquely powerful? Our platform is specifically designed to address the challenges of modern marketing mix modeling:

    • Superior data refresh rates ensure timely insights when they matter most
    • Unmatched marketplace coverage across more than 1,500 eCommerce sites globally
    • Advanced data normalization that standardizes metrics across disparate categories and retailers
    • API-first architecture enabling flexible data access and utilization

    Conclusion – From Hindsight to Foresight

    In the past, companies relied primarily on historical data for their marketing mix models. Today’s market leaders are incorporating digital shelf analytics to unlock superior insights, improve decision accuracy, and drive measurable ROI.

    DataWeave serves as the essential bridge between MMM systems and real-time, comprehensive market intelligence. When DSA and MMM work together, brands gain a complete picture: MMM shows precisely what happened, while DSA explains why it happened—and together, they reveal what’s coming next.

    Ready to transform your marketing mix modeling from hindsight to foresight? Contact us today to discover how our Digital Shelf Analytics can enhance your existing MMM investments and drive measurable business results.

  • Standard Reporting vs. Competitive Intelligence: What Retail Leaders Need to Know

    Standard Reporting vs. Competitive Intelligence: What Retail Leaders Need to Know

    Back in the day, pricing strategies were a lot easier. These days, not only do teams need to have robust standard price reporting workflows, but they also need to have the know-how and tools to gain and act on competitive intelligence. Retail leaders should prioritize automation and strategic thinking and ensure their teams have the tools, processes, and methodologies required to monitor the competition at scale and over the long term.

    Retail leaders who recognize the distinction between standard reporting and competitive intelligence are more likely to gain team buy-in, especially when developing pricing strategies that drive results. You can’t be everywhere at once, but you can optimize pricing strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

    This article has everything you need to know about the differences between standard reporting and competitive intelligence and how to use both to make your teams more effective than ever!

    Understanding the Distinction

    Standard price reporting is much like checking the weather to see if it’s stormy before grabbing a raincoat or sunhat. You need to do it to make essential, everyday choices, but it will not help you predict when the next storm is coming. Standard price reporting deals more with the short-term and immediate actions needed as opposed to long-term strategy.

    Don’t get us wrong, standard price reporting is still an essential responsibility of a pricing team’s function—but there’s more to it. It is also lower-tech than a competitive intelligence strategy and can rely on route heuristics.

    Think of it as data-in, data-out. It deals with pricing operations like:

    • Weekly price movements: Seeing which competitors, product categories, and individual items had pricing shifts in the short-term
    • Basic price indices: Outlining benchmarks to watch how your own, and your competitors’, products are trending in the market
    • Price competitiveness metrics: Setting thresholds that show whether your products are priced below, above, or equal to your competition for general trend reporting

    Standard price reporting is fundamental for operational teams that manage price adjustments in the short term. It can also help teams remain agile and reactive to market condition changes.

    It’s likely that your team already has standard reporting strategies or tools to help them with tactical execution. But are they harnessing competitive intelligence correctly with your help?

    Characteristics of Competitive Intelligence

    While standard price reporting is like checking the weather, competitive intelligence is like being a meteorologist who measures atmospheric changes, predicts storms, and scientifically analyzes weather patterns to keep everyone informed and in the know.

    Competitive intelligence goes well beyond simply tracking price movements and benchmarking them against a single set of standards. Competitive intelligence helps steer teams in a strategic direction based on insights from the market. It can drive long-term business success and is one of your best tools to ‘steer the ship’ as a retail leader.

    Here are some of the essential elements of competitive intelligence:

    • Strategic insights: Including but not limited to understanding your competitors’ pricing strategy, promotions, and product positioning
    • Market-wide patterns: Identifying trends based on geography, product category, or individual SKU across retailers to inform broader strategies
    • Long-term trends: Taking historical market and competitor data and combining it with real-time retail data to predict future price movements as shifts in consumer behavior to inform pricing strategies

    The pricing team serves as a critical strategic partner to senior leadership, delivering the cross-functional insights and market analysis needed to inform C-suite decision-making. By equipping executives with a holistic view of the competitive landscape, pricing gaps, and emerging trends, the team empowers leadership to align pricing strategies with broader business objectives.

    This partnership enables senior leaders to guide day-to-day pricing operations with confidence—ensuring tactical execution aligns with corporate goals, monitoring strategy effectiveness, and maintaining competitive agility. Through ongoing market intelligence and scenario modeling, the pricing function helps leadership proactively position the brand, capitalize on untapped opportunities, and future-proof revenue streams.

    Different Audiences, Different Needs

    As mentioned, there is a place for both standard price reporting and competitive intelligence. They have different roles to play, and different teams find them valuable. Since standard reporting mainly focuses on day-to-day shifts and being able to react to real-time changes, operational teams find it most useful.

    On the other hand, competitive intelligence is a tool that leadership can use to shape overarching pricing strategies. The insights from competitive intelligence drive operational activities over months and quarters, whereas standard reporting drives actions daily.

    To succeed in pricing, you need to rely on a combination of tactical standard reporting and competitive intelligence for long-term planning. With both, you can successfully navigate the ever-fluctuating retail market.

    Price Reporting for Operational Teams

    Your operational team is responsible for making pricing adjustments that directly impact sales volume. Automated data aggregation and AI-powered analytics can make this process faster and more accurate by eliminating the need for manual intervention.

    Instead of spending hours identifying changes, standard reporting tools surface the most critical areas that need attention and recommend adjustments. This helps operational teams react fast to shifting market conditions.

    Key functions of standard price reporting include:

    • Daily/weekly pricing decisions: Frequent price adjustments based on market trends will help your company remain competitive across entire product categories. With automated, real-time dashboards, your pricing team can monitor broad category-level pricing shifts and make necessary adjustments accordingly.
    • Individual SKU management: Not all pricing changes happen at the category level. Standard reporting also allows teams to view price and promotion changes on individual SKUs down to the zip code. It’s important to have targeted, granular insights when a change occurs even on a single SKU, especially because these individual changes are easy to miss. Advanced product matching algorithms can tie together exact products across retailers to monitor items conjointly. By incorporating similar product matching technologies beyond standard reporting, your teams can monitor individual price changes on comparable products.
    • Immediate action items: The best standard reporting tools alert pricing teams when there has been a change in competitor pricing and give them recommendations for what to change. If a competitor launches a flash sale or an aggressive discount program, your team should know as fast as possible which product to adjust. Without this functionality, teams can miss important changes or experience a delay in action that results in lost sales or customer perception.

    Competitive Intelligence for Leadership

    For Senior Retail Executives, Category Directors, and Pricing Strategy Leaders, pricing cannot only be about reacting to individual competitor price changes. Instead, you must proactively think about your market positioning and brand perception. Doing this without a complete competitive intelligence strategy can feel like throwing darts while blindfolded. Sometimes, you’ll hit the target, but mostly, you’ll miss or only come close. Competitive intelligence tools can help you hit that target every time. They leverage big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive modeling to help you derive holistic insights to understand your current positioning relative to the current and future pricing landscape.

    Core strategic functions of competitive intelligence include:

    • Strategic planning: Competitive intelligence tools can help you forecast competitor behavior, economic shifts, and category-specific patterns you’d otherwise overlook (ex, price drops before new releases, subscription or bundling trends, or seasonable price cycles). Instead of reacting to a change, your team can already have made changes or at least know what playbook to implement.
    • Market positioning: Geographic pricing intelligence built into competitive intelligence tools can help you understand variations across locations and optimize multiple channels simultaneously. This can be the foundation of regional pricing strategies that factor in local economies and consumer perception.
    • Long-term decision-making: You can use competitive intelligence technology to align your pricing strategy with upcoming seasonal trends isolated using historical data, predicted economic shifts, and changes in customer purchasing behavior. This aggregate view of the pricing landscape will help you step out of the weeds and make better company decisions.

    From Data to Strategy – Transforming Basic Price Data

    Shifting your focus from isolated, reactive data to broader market trends is the key to going from basic price reporting to real competitive intelligence. Never forget the importance of real-time data, but know it’s your responsibility as a leader to bring a broader viewpoint to operations.

    Transforming from basic price data to competitive intelligence involves:

    1. Harnessing the data
      • Pattern recognition: Your solution should help you identify repeat pricing behaviors and competitor strategies
    2. Figuring out what to do with the data
      • Strategic implications: It should help you understand how your pricing changes will affect customer perception of your brand
    3. Doing something with the insights from your data
      • Action planning: The solution should help you create proactive strategies that position you as a market leader, leaving your competition to try to keep up with you instead of vice versa

    Leveraging Technology for Competitive Intelligence

    Technology is at the heart of leveling up your standard price reporting game. If you want industry-leading competitive intelligence, you can leverage DataWeave’s comprehensive pricing intelligence solution with built-in competitive intelligence capabilities and features for your operational teams.

    You can also uncover gaps and stay competitive in the dynamic world of eCommerce. It provides brands with the competitive intelligence they need to promptly adapt to market demand and competitors’ pricing. Stay ahead of market shifts by configuring your own alerts for price fluctuations on important SKUs, categories, or brands, all time-stamped and down to the zip.

    And since our platform relies on human-backed AI technology, you can have complete confidence in your data’s accuracy at any scale. If you want to bring a new strategic mindset to your pricing team, consider adding competitive intelligence to your tech stack. If you want to learn more, connect with our team at DataWeave today.

  • Preparing for Tariff Impact: A Retailer’s Guide to Price Intelligence

    Preparing for Tariff Impact: A Retailer’s Guide to Price Intelligence

    The power to impose tariffs on foreign countries is one of the most impactful measures a government has at their disposal. The government can use this power for various reasons: to punish rivals, equalize trade, give domestic products a comparative advantage, or collect more funds for the federal government.

    Whatever the reason, tariffs have real-world impacts on brands and retailers selling in a global economy. They effectively make products more expensive for some and comparatively cheaper for others. Since tariffs can be added or removed at the drop of a hat, retail executives, category managers, and pricing teams trying to keep up have their work cut out for them.

    You’ve come to the right place if you’re wondering how to prepare for and respond to potential tariffs. The answer lies in technology that will make you flexible when you need to react to policy changes. Establishing workflows and processes embedded with pricing intelligence can help you stay competitive even when global politics intercepts your business.

    Understanding Tariff Impact

    Before diving into tariffs’ implications on pricing strategies, we need to understand how tariffs work and the current economic environment. Tariffs are a government’s tax on products a foreign country sells to domestic buyers. You might remember President Trump’s expanded tariff policy in September 2018. It placed a 10% tax on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports for three months before raising to a rate of 25% in January 2019. At that time, an American buyer would pay the original price of the goods plus the tax to the American government. Many additional tariffs and counter-tariffs by other countries were enacted during Trump’s first term in office, including the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, resulting in a trade war.

    Announcements of when, where, and on what new tariffs will be imposed are unpredictable. The only predictable thing is that this type of market volatility is here to stay. Pricing teams should adjust their mindsets to assume that volatility may always be on the horizon. This is because tariffs have many cost implications. Besides the flat rate imposed by the government on a certain product, tariffs have historically raised the price of all goods.

    In economic terms, tariffs create a multiplier effect. Consider a tariff placed on gasoline imported from Canada. This measure may encourage American drilling but will have immediate ripple effects throughout the economy. Everything that relies on ground transportation will increase in price, at least in the short term.

    This means that a fashion brand that sources and manufactures its entire line domestically will incur more costs since transportation will be more expensive. If fashion companies act like most companies, they will pass that added tax burden on to the consumer through higher prices. The company will make this decision based on how sensitive its consumers are to price increases, i.e., the elasticity of demand. These interwoven relationships extend across industries and products, affecting most retailers somehow.

    Of course, category exposure varies by industry and sector. Tariffs are known to impact specific industries more than others. For example, steel, electronics, and agriculture products are at risk of price fluctuations based on their reliance on imported components. These have high category exposure. Some industries reliant on domestic production with stable input costs are less prone to category exposure. These include domestic power grids, natural gas, real estate, and handmade goods. No matter which industry you’re in, however, expect some spill over.

    Preparation Strategies

    Strategies to battle disruption in retail

    Forward-thinking leaders can help position their teams for success in the face of pricing volatility brought on by tariffs. The key is to enable teams to sense disruptions quickly and provide a way to take corrective action that doesn’t diminish sales. Here are three strategies you can implement ahead of time that will help keep you competitive during tariff disruption.

    Cost Monitoring

    Start by getting a firm handle on internal and external costs. Understand and analyze fluctuations in the cost of raw materials, production, and supply chain for your business to operate. Make sure that your products are priced with pre-defined logic so changes in price on one SKU don’t create confusion with another. For example, faux leather costs rise while genuine leather stays the same. In that case, a leather version of a product should be raised to reflect the price increase in the pleather variation, not to devalue the perception of luxury.

    Next, you will want to understand historical pricing trends as well as pricing indexes across your categories. These insights can help your teams anticipate cost fluctuations before they even arise and mitigate the risk that economic shifts create, even unexpected tariffs.

    Competition Tracking

    Tracking your competition is likely already a strategy you have in mind. But how well are your teams executing this important task? If they’re trying to watch for market shifts and adjust pricing in real time without the help of technology, things are likely slipping through the cracks.

    Competitive intelligence solutions help retailers discover all competitive SKUs across the e-commerce market, monitor for real-time pricing shifts, and take action to mitigate risk. You need an “always-on” competitive pricing strategy now so that the second a tariff is announced, you can see how it’s affecting your market. This way, you can maintain price competitiveness and avoid margin erosion when competitors’ pricing changes in response to a tariff or other market shift.

    Consumer Impact Assessment

    The multiplier effect is felt throughout the supply chain when tariffs are implemented. The effect can affect consumers in a number of ways and cause them to become spending averse in certain areas. Often, during times of economic hardship, grocery items remain relatively inelastic. This is because consumers continue to purchase essentials regardless of price changes. Conversely, the price of eating out or home delivery becomes more elastic since consumers cut back on dining expenses when costs rise across their shopping basket.

    You need to establish clear visibility into the results of your pricing changes. The goal should be to monitor progress and measure the ROI on specific and broad pricing changes across your assortment. Conducting market share impact analysis will also help you determine if you are losing out on potential customers or whether a decline in sales is being felt across your competition. Impact analysis tools can help your company check actual deployed price changes in real time.

    Response Framework

    Tariff response action plan for retailers

    Once you’ve prepared your team with strategies and technologies to set them up for success, it’s time to think about what to do once a tariff is announced or implemented. Here are three real-time decision-making strategies you should consider before your feet are to the fire. Having these in your back pocket will help you avoid financial disruption.

    Price Adjustment Strategies

    Think about how you strategically adjust prices. These could include percentage increases, flat rate increases, or absorbed via other strategies like bundling. You should also determine a cost increase threshold that you’re willing to absorb before raising prices. Think about the importance of remaining price attractive to consumers and weigh the risk of increasing prices past consumers’ ability or willingness to pay.

    Promotion Planning

    Folding increased costs into value-added offerings for consumers can be a good way to retain customer sentiment and sales volume without negatively affecting profit margins. You can leverage discounts, promotions, or bundling options to sell more of an item to a customer at a lower per-unit cost.

    What you don’t want to do is panic-adjust prices in response to tariffs of competitor moves. Instead, you can use a tool competitor intelligence solutions to watch if your competition is holding prices steady or adjusting. With full information about pricing at your disposal, you can make better decisions on your promotional strategy and not undercut yourself or lose customer loyalty.

    Alternative Sourcing

    Let’s face it: putting all your eggs in one basket is bad for business. Instead of relying solely on a single supplier for production, you should have a diverse set of suppliers ready and able to shift production when tariffs are announced. If a tariff impacts Chinese exports, having a backup supplier in Vietnam can prevent added costs entirely. You can also consider strategies like bulk pricing, set pricing, or shifting entirely to domestic suppliers.

    Forward Buying

    Proactively stockpile inventory by purchasing large quantities of at-risk products before tariffs take effect. This strategy locks in lower costs and ensures supply continuity during disruptions. However, balance this with careful demand forecasting to avoid overstocking, which ties up cash flow and incurs storage costs. Use historical sales data and tariff implementation timelines to optimize order volumes—this is especially effective for products with stable demand or long shelf lives.

    Market Intelligence Requirements

    Preparing your pricing teams and giving them a framework upon which to act when tariffs are announced doesn’t have to be complicated. You can get access to the right data on costs, competitors, and consumer behavior with DataWeave’s pricing intelligence capability.

    We provide retailers with insights on pricing trends, category exposure, and competitor adjustments. Our AI-powered competitor intelligence solutions allow you to get timely alerts whenever a significant change happens. This can include changes to competitor pricing and category-level shifts that you’d otherwise react to when it’s too late.

    These automated insights can also help you track historical pricing trends, elasticity, and margin impact to construct a clear response framework in an emergency. Additionally, our analytics capabilities can help you identify patterns to power pre-emptive pricing and promotional strategies.

    Getting the right pricing intelligence strategy in place now can prevent disaster later. Think through your preparedness strategy and how you want your teams to respond in the event of a new tariff, and consider how much easier reacting accurately would be with all the data needed at your fingertips. Reach out to us to know more.

  • Black Friday 2024: Home & Furniture Pricing Trends Analyzed

    Black Friday 2024: Home & Furniture Pricing Trends Analyzed

    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.

    Black Friday - Cyber Monday Trends Across Leading Home & Furniture Retailers

    Subcategories in Focus

    Breaking down the discounts by subcategory provides deeper insights into consumer priorities and retailer strategies:

    Black Friday - Cyber Monday Trends Across Leading Home & Furniture Subcategories
    • 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.

    Black Friday - Cyber Monday Trends Across Leading Home & Furniture Brands

    Search Visibility: The Winners and Losers

    Share of search dynamics revealed significant shifts in brand visibility during Black Friday:

    Black Friday - Cyber Monday Trends Across Leading Home & Furniture Brands - Share of Search and Visbility
    • 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

    Retailers Offering Most Value - Lowest Priced - Home & Furniture - Black Friday 2024
    • 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

    Lowest Priced Retailer Across Major Subcategories- Home & Furniture - Black Friday 2024
    • 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.

  • 10 SEO Tactics to Help Retail Brands Win More Search Visibility on Amazon

    10 SEO Tactics to Help Retail Brands Win More Search Visibility on Amazon

    Today, the first name that comes to anybody’s mind when they hear about online shopping is Amazon. In the US alone, Amazon accounted for over 37.6 percent of total online retail sales in 2023 with the second place Walmart not even managing to win double-digit numbers on the same scale.

    Amazon leads retail eCommerce in the USA

    With such a phenomenal market share, it is not surprising that any retail brand would want to have their products listed on Amazon for sale. However, as enticing as the potential exposure could be, the overwhelming presence of brands selling similar products on Amazon is so huge that getting fair visibility for your products may require some heavy-lifting support.

    Will the Same SEO You Use for Google Work with Amazon?

    Unfortunately, no, as Google and Amazon have different objectives when it comes to search rankings on their respective customer platforms. Google makes the lion’s share of its revenue from search advertising, whereas Amazon makes money when customers buy products listed on its platform by sellers.

    Relying on traditional search engine optimization (SEO) techniques may not get the desired results as they are more optimized for search engines like Google. Amazon embraces its unique DNA when it comes to product display rankings on its search option.

    How Does SEO Work in Amazon?

    Over the years, Amazon amassed data about shopping experiences that billions of customers globally had on its platform. With this data, they developed their custom search algorithm named A9. Contrary to the gazillion objectives that Google has for its intelligent search algorithms, Amazon has tasked A9 with just a simple straightforward target—when a customer keys in a search query, provide the best choice of products that they will most probably purchase, as search results.

    A9 works to fulfill the mission of guiding shoppers to the right product without worrying about semantics, context, intent, mind mapping, etc. of the search query in contrast to what Google does. As with Google search, Amazon does have paid advertising and sponsored results options such as Amazon PPC, Headline ads, etc. but their SEO algorithms are aware of how to support and boost search rankings of genuine products and brands that have taken an effort to follow best practices in Amazon SEO as well as have a great offering with attractive prices.

    As additional knowledge, Amazon also has clear guidelines on what it prioritizes for search rankings. Known in the SEO world as Amazon ranking signals, these are core factors that influence how a product is ranked for search queries. Some of the top Amazon ranking signals that carry heavy influence on search rankings include on-page signals, off-page signals, sales rank, best sellers rank, etc.

    What Brands Need to Strategize to Master the Amazon SEO Algorithms

    From a broad perspective, we can classify the actions brands need to take in this regard in 3 core stages:

    Pre-Optimization

    This deals with getting first-hand knowledge about both customers who are likely to purchase your product and the competitors who are vying for sales from these very same customers. Filtering your target customer or audience is essential to ensure that you get the most ROI from marketing initiatives and that sales cycles are accelerated. For example, if your product is a premium scented candle, there is no point in wasting advertising dollars trying to win attention from customers who are not likely to ever spend on luxury home décor items.

    Knowing how your competitors are performing on Amazon search, the keywords, and SEO strategies they have adapted is critical to ensure that you stay one step ahead.

    Product Listing Page Optimization

    This includes strategies that a brand can adopt so that its product description page gets the much-needed content optimizations to sync with Amazon’s A9 algorithm. It has a mix of keyword-integrated content, relevant images, descriptions in easy-to-understand language, localized content flavors to resonate with target buyers, etc. For example, a kitchen tool like a grater might be used for different kinds of food preparation techniques in different regions of the same country.

    Product Listing Optimization For Amazon SEO

    The brand must ensure that the description adequately localizes the linguistic or usage preference representation of the target audience. If the grater is used for grating coconut shells to extract the fibrous pulp in the Midlands and for grating ginger skin in the Far East, both use cases should be part of the product description if the target customers are from both regions.

    Sales Optimization

    This deals with options that have more sales strategies integrated into their core. For example, blogs on popular websites with the Amazon purchase link embedded in the content, collaboration with social media influencers, paid advertising on Amazon itself as well as on search engines, video ads, banner and display ads, etc.

    The key intent here is to drive organic and inorganic traffic to the Amazon product listing page and ultimately win sales.

    How Can Your Products Rank High in Amazon Search Results? Top 10 Tactics

    Now that you have a clear understanding of the strategies that help in mastering Amazon’s ranking algorithms, here are some great tips to help achieve higher search rankings for your products on Amazon search:

    1. Target Relevant Keywords

    You need to figure out the best keywords that match what customers put as queries into the Amazon search bar. Your brand needs to clearly understand customer behavior when they arrive on Amazon to search for a product or category of products. The best place to begin looking for the same would be on competitor pages on Amazon. The keywords that helped them rank well on Amazon can help you as well. Manually investigating such a large pool of competitors is nearly impossible but with the right tools, you can easily embrace capabilities to know which keywords can help you in mimicking the success of your competitors.

    2. Focus on Product Titles

    Every single part of the content in your brand’s Amazon storefront or product page needs dedicated focus. Beginning with the product titles, effort needs to be made to ensure that they include the brand name, key product category or features, and other relevant keyword information.

    Product Title Optimized for Amazon SEO

    In other words, product titles must be optimized for searchability. This searchability for product titles needs to be optimized for both mobile and desktop screens.

    3. Create Product Descriptions that Resonate with the Audience

    For product descriptions on your Amazon webpage, you need to figure out the optimal quality levels needed for the intended audience. Effective content can help achieve better search ranking visibility and convince the incoming traffic of shoppers to make a purchase. It is important to periodically review and modify your page content to suit the interests of visitors from both web and mobile devices.

    Product Description Optimized for Amazon SEO

    Leveraging solutions like DataWeave can help with regular content audits to ensure you are putting out the best product content that will delight shoppers and deliver on sales conversion targets.

    4. Use High-Quality Media Assets like Images and Videos

    Promoting your product doesn’t have to be restricted to just textual content in Amazon product description sections. You can use other multimedia assets of high quality. These include images, videos, brochure images, etc. Every content asset must aim to educate shoppers on why your product should be their number one choice. For example, look at this detailed product description for the viral K-Beauty product COSRX Mucin Essence.

    Product Description with Images Optimized for Amazon SEO

    Moreover, images can help attract more attention span from visitors, thereby increasing the probability of purchases.

    5. Strengthen the Backend Keywords As Well

    Amazon also supports hidden backend keywords that sellers add to their product listings. They help add more relevance to products similar to meta descriptions and titles in traditional SEO for search engines like Google. A typical backend keyword may comprise synonyms, misspelled keywords, textual variations, etc. However, knowing how to pick the right ones is crucial. By analyzing your keyword rankings against competitors and higher-ranking product results in search, the platform can help you consistently optimize your content backend to help grow visibility.

    6. Focus on Reviews and Ratings

    Reviews and ratings on product pages are key insights that help customers with their purchasing decisions. So, it is natural for brands to keep a close eye on how their products are faring in this regard. Reviews and ratings are a direct indication of the trustworthiness of your product. When previous buyers rate you high and leave favorable reviews on your product, it will directly promote trust and help you secure a better rapport with new customers.

    Reviews with Videos and Images Optimized for Amazon SEO
    Requesting reviews or leveraging user generated reviews and ratings to optimize Amazon SEO

    This upfront advantage can help boost sales conversions better. Leveraging solutions like DataWeave can help you understand the sentiments that customers have for your products by intelligently analyzing reviews and ratings.

    7. Implement Competitive Pricing Strategies

    The goal of most customers when shopping online is to get their desired product at the most affordable prices. The eCommerce price wars every year are growing in scale today and getting your product pricing right is crucial for sales. However, there is a need to gain comprehensive insights into how your competitors are pricing their offerings and how the market responds to specific price ranges. Solutions like DataWeave help your brand access specific insights into pricing. By analyzing competitor pricing, you can create a winning price model that is sustainable for your brand and favorable for target customers.

    8. Track Share of Search

    Content and other SEO activities will help improve your search rankings on Amazon. However, it is equally important to know how well your products are performing periodically against your competitors for the same set of specific keyword searches. You need to understand the share of search that your products are achieving to formulate improvement strategies. DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution provides share of search insights helping you uncover deep knowledge on your discoverability on Amazon (and other marketplaces) for your vital search keywords.

    9. Ensure Stock Availability

    To achieve better ranking results, brands need to ensure that the relevant products matching the search keywords are available for quick delivery at the desired ZIP codes where users are more likely to search and order them. Out-of-stock items seldom show up high on search results. Certain products, especially if they’re popular, can get stocked out frequently in certain locations. Keeping a close eye on your stock availability across the map can help minimize these scenarios.

    10. Optimize Your Brand Presence

    While optimizing content and other key areas within the Amazon webpage for your product is critical, there are other avenues to help boost search rankings. One such option includes registering in the Amazon Brand Registry, which provides more beneficial features like protection against counterfeits and ensuring that your brand page is optimized according to Amazon storefront standards.

    The Bottom Line

    Winning the top spot in Amazon search ranking is crucial for brands that aim to capitalize on online sales revenue to grow their business. Knowing your workaround for Amazon’s proprietary SEO frameworks and algorithms is the first step to succeeding. The key element of success is your ability to gain granular insights into the areas we covered in this blog post such as competitor prices, sentiments of customers, market preferences, and content optimization requirements.

    This is where DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution becomes the biggest asset for your eCommerce business. Contact us to explore how we can empower your business to build the most visible and discoverable Amazon storefront that guarantees higher search rankings and ultimately increased sales. Talk to us for a demo today.

  • Mastering Retail Media Metrics: A Deep Dive into Share of Media

    Mastering Retail Media Metrics: A Deep Dive into Share of Media

    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.

    Banner Advertising on Amazon_Share of Media Analytics to win the digital shelf

    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.

    Sponsored Product Listings on Amazon_Share of Media Analytics to win the digital shelf

    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 keyword_Share of Media Analytics to win the digital shelf

    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.

  • The Complete Guide to Competitive Pricing Strategies in Retail and E-commerce

    The Complete Guide to Competitive Pricing Strategies in Retail and E-commerce

    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!

  • A Guide to Digital Shelf Metrics for Consumer Brands

    A Guide to Digital Shelf Metrics for Consumer 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.

    Share of Search exmple_Digital Shelf Metrics

    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:

    Share of Search exmple_Digital Shelf Metrics
    • 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.”

    Sponsored listings on an Amazon webpage

    It’s important to run these types of advertising campaigns on eCommerce platforms to gain customer visibility. In fact, “some 57% of US consumers started their online shopping searches on Amazon as of Q2 2023.” If you aren’t showing up, paying for placement can help.

    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?
    Analytics Dashboard on Dataweave

    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.

    Digital shelf pricing insights via Dataweave

    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.

    Graph showing availability across locations

    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.

    Ready to get started? Schedule a call with a specialist to see how it can work for your brand.

  • How Digital Shelf Analytics Can Fix Common Revenue Growth Management Challenges for Consumer Brands

    How Digital Shelf Analytics Can Fix Common Revenue Growth Management Challenges for Consumer Brands

    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.

    Learn more by requesting a demo today!

  • Competitor Price Monitoring in E-commerce: Everything You Need to Know

    Competitor Price Monitoring in E-commerce: Everything You Need to Know

    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:

    1. Gain a competitive edge: Competitor price tracking allows you to adjust your prices to remain attractive to consumers.
    2. 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.
    3. Retain customers: Consumers are looking for the most value for their dollar, so maintaining consistently competitive pricing is crucial for retaining loyal customers.
    4. 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.
    5. 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
    • Maintain consistent prices across sales channels

    To learn more, check out our article, What is Competitive Pricing Intelligence: The Ultimate Guide here or reach out and talk to us today!

  • Easter Candy Pricing Trends 2024: Winning Strategies for Retailers and Brands Amid Cocoa Price Surge

    Easter Candy Pricing Trends 2024: Winning Strategies for Retailers and Brands Amid Cocoa Price Surge

    Easter egg hunts just got more challenging for families this year as the price of chocolate and other candies has soared. The root of this price surge lies in a cocoa deficit, attributed to diseases affecting crops and the adverse effects of climate change on West African farms, which supplies over 70% of the world’s cocoa. This has resulted in a tripling of cocoa prices over the last year, causing a “cocoa crunch,” and severely impacted confectioners and chocolate makers.

    Reuters recently reported that Iconic brands such as Hershey’s and Cadbury find themselves grappling with the need to adjust to escalating costs for raw materials. Given that Easter is one of the top three candy-purchasing occasions, these manufacturers are contemplating raising their prices to sustain their profit margins.

    Despite the challenges posed by the cocoa shortfall and persistent inflation, the National Confectioners Association anticipates that Easter candy sales in the U.S. will match or even exceed last year’s figures, which amounted to approximately $5.4 billion. This expectation is predicated more on price increases than on a rise in sales volume.

    At DataWeave, our ongoing analysis of pricing trends across various consumer categories among retailers has provided insight into the evolving landscape of chocolate and candy prices in 2023 and 2024.

    Our Analysis of Inflation in Candy and Chocolate Prices

    Our study encompassed a broad array of 3,300 products from leading U.S. retailers, Amazon, Target, Kroger, and Giant Eagle. As illustrated in the following chart, the trajectory of prices over the past 15 months was compared against the average prices in January 2023. Our tracking focused on two key price points: the selling price, which represents the final cost to consumers after applying any discounts or promotions, and the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), as determined by the brands themselves.

    The findings from our analysis indicate that the average selling price, primarily influenced by retailer decisions, has experienced a steady increase throughout 2023, reaching a peak at 16.2% above January 2023’s figures by December. As of March 2024, coinciding with the Easter season, the selling prices are approximately 10% higher than they were at the beginning of the previous year.

    Simultaneously, the MSRP has seen a consistent uptick, driven by the climbing costs of cocoa. Brands have adjusted their suggested prices accordingly, with the current MSRP standing about 7% above its January 2023 level, after having peaked at a 7.6% increase by December 2023. This reflects the direct impact of rising cocoa costs on product pricing strategies.

    Chocolate Candies Are Hit The Hardest

    Across all candies, chocolate-based products have witnessed significantly sharper price increases than their non-chocolate counterparts. In the past 14 months, the selling prices of chocolate items have surged by 14.9%, a stark contrast to the modest 4% rise observed in non-chocolate candies.

    This price escalation was particularly pronounced during the Christmas shopping period, a response to heightened demand, before experiencing a temporary decline in February.

    The diminishing availability of cocoa, coupled with rising costs for packaging and transportation, has compelled brands and retailers alike to transfer these added expenses onto the consumer. This dynamic underpins the distinct pricing trends observed across the candy spectrum, with chocolate items bearing the brunt of these cost pressures.

    Discounts Offered By Retailers and Brands to Entice Easter Shoppers

    In our analysis, we delved deeper to identify the retailers and brands offering the most compelling prices for Easter-centric confections, including Chocolate Eggs, Chocolate Bunnies, and Easter-themed gift packs.

    Kroger emerged as the frontrunner among the retailers we monitored, offering an impressive 19% discount on Easter candies. Giant Eagle followed with a solid 14% average markdown. Meanwhile, Amazon and Target provided more modest promotional discounts at 12% and 10%, respectively.

    Kroger is making significant efforts to ensure consumers have access to attractively priced Easter treats. The retailer planned to keep its doors open throughout the Easter weekend, featuring baskets brimming with discounted items such as Russell Stover chocolate bunnies, Brach’s jelly beans, Reese’s eggs, and assorted bags of popular candies from Snickers, Twix, and Starburst, among others. Additionally, Kroger is enhancing its value proposition through gift card offers and exclusive Easter deals for its loyalty program members.

    On the brand front, Starburst by Mars Wrigley leads with the steepest discount of 25%. Cadbury, under Mondelez, is not far behind, offering 21% off its mini eggs and other Easter treats, marking an increase from last year’s 17% discount. Ferrero Rocher is making a strong pricing move with an average 20% markdown on its Easter selections, including the chocolate bunny and squirrel figures.

    The beloved Peeps marshmallow candies by Just Born are being offered at an 18% discount this year, slightly less than the 23% discount seen in 2023, likely reflecting the impact of rising sugar costs, given their sugar and corn composition.

    Other notable brands, including M&M’s and the premium Swiss chocolatier Lindt, have elevated their average Easter discounts to 17% this year, up from the previous year’s discounts of 12%, and 10% respectively, showcasing a competitive pricing strategy to delight consumers this Easter season.

    Coping With Inflation This Easter Season

    Retailers and brands aiming to remain profitable and competitive in the current challenging environment can adopt a few strategic approaches:

    • Creative Product Bundling: Design innovative combo packs that mix chocolate and non-chocolate items. Such bundles can cater to diverse consumer preferences and budget ranges while preserving profit margins.
    • Encouragement of Bulk Purchases: Offer enticing discounts on larger quantities to promote bulk buying. This strategy can help amplify sales volumes, compensating for increased costs per item and fostering economies of scale.
    • Strategic Competitive Pricing: Keeping a vigilant eye on competitors’ pricing strategies is vital. Aim to capture market share through well-thought-out discount strategies that balance competitiveness with margin preservation. Leveraging advanced pricing intelligence, such as that offered by DataWeave, can provide invaluable insights for making informed pricing decisions.
    • Product Size Adjustments: Consider revising the size or weight of products as a cost management measure, a strategy known as “shrinkflation.” It’s crucial to approach this transparently, ensuring clear communication on packaging to uphold consumer trust.

    Adopting these strategies—focusing on bundle offerings, incentivizing bulk purchases, optimizing pricing strategies based on competitive intelligence, and thoughtfully adjusting product sizes—will be pivotal for confectioners to navigate the challenges posed by the cocoa price surge.

    For more information, reach out to us to speak to a DataWeave expert today!


  • How DataWeave Enhances Transparency in Competitive Pricing Intelligence for Retailers

    How DataWeave Enhances Transparency in Competitive Pricing Intelligence for Retailers

    Retailers heavily depend on pricing intelligence solutions to consistently achieve and uphold their desired competitive pricing positions in the market. The effectiveness of these solutions, however, hinges on the quality of the underlying data, along with the coverage of product matches across websites.

    As a retailer, gaining complete confidence in your pricing intelligence system requires a focus on the trinity of data quality:

    • Accuracy: Accurate product matching ensures that the right set of competitor product(s) are correctly grouped together along with yours. It ensures that decisions taken by pricing managers to drive competitive pricing and the desired price image are based on reliable apples-to-apples product comparisons.
    • Freshness: Timely data is paramount in navigating the dynamic market landscape. Up-to-date SKU data from competitors enables retailers to promptly adjust pricing strategies in response to market shifts, competitor promotions, or changes in customer demand.
    • Product matching coverage: Comprehensive product matching coverage ensures that products are thoroughly matched with similar or identical competitor products. This involves accurately matching variations in size, weight, color, and other attributes. A higher coverage ensures that retailers seize all available opportunities for price improvement at any given time, directly impacting revenues and margins.

    However, the reality is that untimely data and incomplete product matches have been persistent challenges for pricing teams, compromising their pricing actions. Inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to suboptimal decisions, missed opportunities, and reduced competitiveness in the market.

    What’s worse than poor-quality data? Poor-quality data masquerading as accurate data.

    In many instances, retailers face a significant challenge in obtaining comprehensive visibility into crucial data quality parameters. If they suspect the data quality of their provider is not up to the mark, they are often compelled to manually request reports from their provider to investigate further. This lack of transparency not only hampers their pricing operations but also impedes the troubleshooting process and decision-making, slowing down crucial aspects of their business.

    We’ve heard about this problem from dozens of our retail customers for a while. Now, we’ve solved it.

    DataWeave’s Data Statistics and SKU Management Capability Enhances Data Transparency

    DataWeave’s Data Statistics Dashboard, offered as part of our Pricing Intelligence solution, enables pricing teams to gain unparalleled visibility into their product matches, SKU data freshness, and accuracy.

    It enables retailers to autonomously assess and manage SKU data quality and product matches independently—a crucial aspect of ensuring the best outcomes in the dynamic landscape of eCommerce.

    Beyond providing transparency and visibility into data quality and product matches, the dashboard facilitates proactive data quality management. Users can flag incorrect matches and address various data quality issues, ensuring a proactive approach to maintaining the highest standards.

    Retailers can benefit in several ways with this dashboard, as listed below.

    View Product Match Rates Across Websites

    The dashboard helps retailers track match rates to gauge their health. High product match rates signify that pricing teams can move forward in their pricing actions with confidence. Low match rates would be a cause for further investigation, to better understand the underlying challenges, perhaps within a specific category or competitor website.

    Our dashboard presents both summary statistics on matches and data crawls as well as detailed snapshots and trend charts, providing users with a holistic and detailed perspective of their product matches.

    Additionally, the dashboard provides category-wise snapshots of reference products and their matching counterparts across various retailers, allowing users to focus on areas with lower match rates, investigate underlying reasons, and develop strategies for speedy resolution.

    Track Data Freshness Easily

    The dashboard enables pricing teams to monitor the timeliness of pricing data and assess its recency. In the dynamic realm of eCommerce, having up-to-date data is essential for making impactful pricing decisions. The dashboard’s presentation of freshness rates ensures that pricing teams are armed with the latest product details and pricing information across competitors.

    Within the dashboard, users can readily observe the count of products updated with the most recent pricing data. This feature provides insights into any temporary data capture failures that may have led to a decrease in data freshness. Armed with this information, users can adapt their pricing decisions accordingly, taking into consideration these temporary gaps in fresh data. This proactive approach ensures that pricing strategies remain agile and responsive to fluctuations in data quality.

    Proactively Manage Product Matches

    The dashboard provides users with proactive control over managing product matches within their current bundles via the ‘Data Management’ panel. This functionality empowers users to verify, add, flag, or delete product matches, offering a hands-on approach to refining the matching process. Despite the deployment of robust matching algorithms that achieve industry-leading match rates, occasional instances may arise where specific matches are overlooked or misclassified. In such cases, users play a pivotal role in fine-tuning the matching process to ensure accuracy.

    The interface’s flexibility extends to accommodating product variants and enables users to manage product matches based on store location. Additionally, the platform facilitates bulk match uploads, streamlining the process for users to efficiently handle large volumes of matching data. This versatility ensures that users have the tools they need to navigate and customize the matching process according to the nuances of their specific product landscape.

    Gain Unparalleled Visibility into your Data Quality

    With DataWeave’s Pricing Intelligence, users gain the capability to delve deep into their product data, scrutinize match rates, assess data freshness, and independently manage their product matches. This approach is instrumental in fostering informed and effective decisions, optimizing inventory management, and securing a competitive edge in the dynamic world of online retail.

    To learn more, reach out to us today!

  • The Indian E-Commerce Showdown: Unveiling the Price War Between Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival

    The Indian E-Commerce Showdown: Unveiling the Price War Between Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival

    India’s homegrown eCommerce giant Flipkart, now backed by Walmart, reported a record 1.4 Billion customer visits during the early access phase and throughout the seven days of its premier shopping event, the Big Billion Days, launched on 8th October 2023. Competing with Flipkart, Amazon’s Great Indian Festival sale event started on October 8th as well and saw a whopping 95 Million customer visits to the website within the first 48 hours of the event.

    For consumers, the most pressing question was, “Who offered more attractive deals and lower prices during these sale events?”

    To answer this question, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform and analyzed the prices and discounts on Amazon and Flipkart across key product categories..

    The details of our sample are mentioned below:

    • Number of SKUs Analyzed: 30,000+
    • Websites: Amazon.com and Flipkart.com
    • Categories: Apparel, Home & Furniture, Electronics, Health & Beauty
    • Dates: 7th Oct 2023 to 22nd Oct 2023

    Key Findings

    Based on our analysis, the Big Billion Days by Flipkart showcased relatively higher price reductions across categories compared to the Great Indian Festival sale by Amazon. The Apparel category on Flipkart saw the highest average discount at 50.6%. The Health & Beauty category had the lowest discount across Flipkart at 39.4% and Amazon at 33%.

    Overall, Flipkart offered higher discounts in each product category. It is clear that the retailer invested heavily in leveraging its supplier partnerships with key brands or sellers to enable them to offer higher discounts, thereby attracting more customers.

    Next, let’s take a closer look at each product category.

    Apparel

    While a majority of retailers expected demand for apparel and clothing to dip this festive season in India, eCommerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart are likely to recognize the strong consumer inclination towards apparel during this period.

    In the detailed assessment of Apparel sub-categories, Women’s Dresses, Women’s Tops, Men’s Shirts, Men’s Shoes, and Women’s Innerwear emerged as the segments showcasing the most substantial discounts during the sale events. While Flipkart offered higher average discounts across all sub-categories, Amazon offered competitive discounts as well.

    We observed significant differences in the average discounts across brands between Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival. Reinforcing the significant discounts on the Shoes subcategory, brands like Red Tape, Arrow, Adidas, Reebok, Nike, and more offered extensive discounts on both Flipkart and Amazon. Notably, Adidas and Reebok offered better deals on Amazon’s Great Indian Festival as compared to Flipkart.

    One8 by Virat Kohli had a significantly lower discount on Amazon compared to Flipkart, indicating an exclusive partnership.

    For brands, however, reducing prices is just one approach to entice shoppers. They must also guarantee their prominent presence and easy discoverability within Amazon and Flipkart search results. To gain insight into this, 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 Jockey and Speedo gained in Share of Search on Flipkart, but reduced discoverability on Amazon. Van Heusen fell behind in search results on Flipkart but showed a higher Share of Search on Amazon.

    Home & Furniture

    With demand for home and furniture products picking up in October, right before the festive season, Amazon and Flipkart offered significant discounts in this category.

    Discounts on both Amazon and Flipkart hovered around 50%. Across a few subcategories, Flipkart offered slightly lower discounts compared to Amazon. Only Luggage, Rugs, Sofas, and Entertainment Units saw lower markdowns on Flipkart during the Big Billion Days. 

    Dishwashers and Washer/ Dryers saw higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. The significant discounts on these products on Amazon possibly point to changing consumer preferences, as demand for these products is traditionally low in India, but seems to be growing.

    When it comes to Home & Furniture brands, Nasher Miles, Safari, Aristocrat, VIP, and American Tourister, luggage brands mostly, offered higher discounts on Flipkart, followed closely by Amazon.

    In terms of Share of Search, Skybags had high discoverability on both Flipkart and Amazon. The brand leveraged a strategy of offering big discounts this festive season as well as ensuring prominent placement in search results. Wildcraft lost out on its discoverability on Flipkart in contrast to its prominence on Amazon. Duroflex saw lower searchability on Amazon compared to Flipkart’s Big Billion Days.

    Consumer Electronics

    The Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers Association (CEAMA) expected an uptick in sales of consumer electronics products this festive season in India. With more consumers buying premium products using credit cards and EMIs, demand for expensive, high-end electronics was expected to increase.

    Again, average discounts in this category hovered around 50% on Flipkart and Amazon.

    Across electronics subcategories, Smartwatches, Earbuds, and Drones had the highest markdowns with Flipkart leading the pack during the Big Billion Days. Amazon offered relatively higher discounts at 44.9% on the TV subcategory, compared to Flipkart’s 40.6%.

    Speakers, Laptops, Smartphones, and Tablets also saw lower markdowns on Amazon compared to Flipkart. Amazon was the official partner for the launch of many high-level smartphones and products in September-October, contributing to the higher markdowns in the subcategory.

    Across brands, Lenovo’s discounts were the most differentiated between the two sites, with the brand offering higher discounts on Amazon (45.4%) compared to Flipkart (24.7%). Noise offered the highest discounts at 72.5% on Amazon and 52.8% on Flipkart. Brands like Boat and Zebronics, also saw lower discounts on Flipkart.

    Mi and JBL offered deeper discounts on Flipkart’s Big Billion Days. Apple meanwhile stands out with only 11.83% discounts on Amazon, but the brand offered impressive 31.4% discounts on Flipkart.

    Samsung dominated the Share of Search on Amazon at 15.7%, compared to only 2.6% on Flipkart. Apple and Lenovo also saw higher discoverability on Amazon. On Flipkart, JBL and Skullcandy stand out as brands with high search visibility.

    Health & Beauty

    The Health & Beauty category saw the lowest markdowns with only 39.4% discounts on Flipkart and 33% on Amazon.

    In the subcategories analyzed, Electric Toothbrushes had relatively high markdowns across both sites. Staple and lower priced subcategories like Toothpaste had the lowest markdowns across both sale events, with Amazon offering only 17.4% average discounts.

    Across brands, Beardo, a leading beard care brand, offered significantly higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. Most other well-known brands, including Nivea and Vaseline, saw higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. Only Tresmme and Dove were exceptions with higher discounts on Flipkart.

    In terms of Share of Search, once again, Beardo was the most discoverable brand in this category. Brands like Dove, Pond’s, Swiss Beauty, and Tresemme saw a lower Share of Search on Flipkart compared to Amazon.

    Navigating the Competitive Landscape: How To Thrive During Sale Events

    Amazon and Flipkart’s strategic pricing during the Big Billion Days and the Great Indian Festival Sale reflects a balance of profitability, inventory, and competition. Competitive pricing insights empower retailers to make informed decisions, optimize strategies, and thrive during high-stakes sale events with timely and relevant insights at a massive scale.

    To learn more about how you can leverage competitive pricing insights to stay ahead of the game during sale events, reach out to us today!

  • Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023: Unveiling Health & Beauty Pricing and Discount Trends

    Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023: Unveiling Health & Beauty Pricing and Discount Trends

    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.

    Also check out our insights on discounts and pricing for Consumer Electronics, Apparel, and Home & Furniture categories this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

    Our Methodology

    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.

    • Sample size: 15,253 SKUs
    • Retailers tracked: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Sephora, Ulta Beauty
    • 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!

  • Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023: Insights on Pricing and Discounts in Home & Furniture

    Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023: Insights on Pricing and Discounts in Home & Furniture

    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.

  • Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 Insights: A Report on Pricing and Discounts in Apparel

    Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 Insights: A Report on Pricing and Discounts in Apparel

    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.

    (Read Also: Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023: Insights on Pricing and Discounts in Consumer Electronics)

    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.

    • Sample size: 17,981 SKUs
    • Retailers tracked: Amazon, Walmart, Target
    • Subcategories reported on: Women’s Tops, Men’s Swimwear, Men’s Innerwear, Women’s Innerwear, Women’s Athleisure, Women’s Dresses, Men’s Athleisure, Men’s Shirts, Women’s Shoes, Men’s Shoes, Women’s Swimwear
    • Timeline of analysis: 24 to 27 November 2023

    Our Key Findings

    Average Discounts Across Retailers

    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.

  • Which Amazon Sale Offered Better Deals: Prime Day in July or Big Deal Days in October?

    Which Amazon Sale Offered Better Deals: Prime Day in July or Big Deal Days in October?

    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!

  • From Data to Dollars: How Digital Shelf Analytics Drives Tangible Business Impact and ROI for Brands

    From Data to Dollars: How Digital Shelf Analytics Drives Tangible Business Impact and ROI for Brands

    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.

    Share of Search: Dominating the Digital Aisles

    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.

  • 5 Ways to Manage and Improve Stock Availability

    5 Ways to Manage and Improve Stock Availability

    Stock availability is the degree to which a brand or retailer has inventory of all their listed items to meet customer demand. Product availability becomes even more critical when they have to respond to unforeseen changes in demand and supply. To maintain the ideal stock availability levels for all items, they need robust inventory management tools to ensure real-time updates on current stock and accurate insights into upcoming demand.

    However, managing stock availability is not a clear-cut science. Retailers must balance the change in demand and keep stock availability in check. 

    Why Stock Availability Matters

    One of the challenges of running a retail business is to optimize inventory and associated costs. Maintaining stock availability in stores is critical for offline retail businesses. And when selling online, making sure products are available across different retailers and marketplaces can have a huge impact on sales and conversions. 

    1. Understocking: It’s when a brand’s product fails to meet consumer demand. If this happens often enough, customers may not return to the brand’s website or app because of the initial experience. Understocking is not a brand’s fault entirely since they might not always be able to anticipate a change in demand. However, it’s about a their ability to adapt to a quick change in the market trends through historical analysis and accurate forecasting. 
    2. Overstocking: It’s when a company orders too much inventory. Holding too much stock will lead to higher storage costs, shrinkage, and obsolescence losses. Another loss occurs if the brand can’t quickly sell the items — diminishing the value of the products. 

    We gathered data to see the impact of a short-term stockout on Amazon for one of our customers. Read more about what we uncovered & how deep the damage was, here.

    7 Ways to improve stock availability 

    1. Collect Accurate Data

    Availability across Brands and Categories

    When multiple items are moving through a supply chain, companies can easily run into inventory inaccuracies. Discrepancies between the values of your system and the actual inventory of products can lead to understocking or overstocking. The best way to avoid discrepancies in inventory is to invest in an inventory management tool that gives you real-time updates on your stock. This is applicable for offline retail businesses. 

    2. Managing eCommerce inventory

    Availability at Individual Product Level
    Availability at Individual Product level by regions

    Effective eCommerce inventory management is as important as making sure products are available in stores. Keeping track of your inventory levels and ensuring that you’re always well-stocked can avoid lost sales and keep your company running smoothly. Brands must ensure their stock is available across all the online platforms they sell. Access to real-time inventory data can help to keep a close eye on stock status across all marketplaces & retailers the product is available. Retailers also need to keep track of market trends to ensure they have the right inventory assortment to match customers’ demands. 

    3. Understand Consumer Demand

    The only way to accurately predict future demand is to rely on historical data about your customer purchase trends. What do your customers purchase during holiday seasons? What are the upcoming trends in your category? Having data-backed answers to such questions will help brands and retailers properly stock up their inventory.

    4. Adequate forecasting 

    Anticipating demand will help determine which products should be stocked during which seasons. Tracking past sales and metrics such as economic conditions, seasonality, peak buying months, and promotions will help brands predict demand. Analyzing such statistics will also help you get insights into the target market.

    Availability across regions

    5. Improve supplier relationships

    It’s important to rely on a supply chain that delivers your shipment promptly. In fact, you should foster close relationships with your suppliers to trim costs and improve stock availability. You should be able to share key details such as future demands, so suppliers can ensure timely delivery. 

    Availability Analysis
    Availability Analysis across Retailers and Categories

    Consequences of Inefficient Inventory Management

    What are the effects of overstocking?

    Tied-up cash: Money spent on overstocking is tied-up money that your company could have put to better use. You can use it to pay off debts, wages, and rent. Inventory often has a limited shelf life due to material degradation, changing consumer trends, spoilage, and obsolescence.

    Product expiration: If your brand offers time-sensitive goods or perishable items, overstocking can lead to product obsolescence and expiry. eCommerce platforms that also sell time-sensitive goods or grocery delivery apps are forced to sell products at below-margin prices to free up resources, leading to losses. 

    What are the effects of understocking?

    Poor customer experience: Poor product availability will lead to low customer satisfaction & dropping customer loyalty. 

    Missed sales: Customers could gravitate towards the competition to make their current purchase if a product is unavailable at your online store. The more freequent the stockouts, the more lost sales. 

    Conclusion

    To avoid the knock-on effects of overstocking and understocking, companies need a real-time view of their inventory, both online & offline. At DataWeave, we help companies decrease their latency period between stock replenishment and efficiently plan their supply chain. If you need help tracking your eCommerce product availability, reach out to the experts at DataWeave to know how we can help!

  • 5 Ways DataWeave Helps Brands Drive Growth With Amazon Ads

    5 Ways DataWeave Helps Brands Drive Growth With Amazon Ads

    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.

    Amazon advertisers grow market share and brand loyalty with ecommerce intelligence
    DataWeave joins Amazon Advertising partner network

    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. 

    2. Content Audits Increase Discovery Relevancy Scores

    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.

    UPDATED: Read the full press release here

  • Prime Day Germany 2022 – highlights from the 2 day annual shopping festival!

    Prime Day Germany 2022 – highlights from the 2 day annual shopping festival!

    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.de both before & on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day.
    • Categories Tracked – Electronics, Wine & Spirits, Grocery, Furniture, Fashion, and Beauty. 
    • 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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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!

  • U.S. Prime Day Deals 2022: Promotion Intelligence First Look

    U.S. Prime Day Deals 2022: Promotion Intelligence First Look

    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.

  • The challenges in scaling a ‘House of Brands’

    The challenges in scaling a ‘House of Brands’

    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
    Keyword Analysis
    • Content: Optimize your brand’s product content to drive up conversions
    Content Quality Analysis
    Content Quality Analysis
    Availability Analysis
    Availability Analysis

    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.