On Black Friday this year, Health & Beauty brands saw a significant increase with a 13% jump in foot traffic, according to a report by RetailNext. Despite caution from various sources, higher prices for everyday goods, and high interest rates, consumers chose to spend big this cyber week.
So what kind of deals did top retailers and brands offer in the Health & Beauty category this BFCM? At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of Health & Beauty products across prominent retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts among leading US retailers in the Health & Beauty category during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across leading retailers during the sale.
Subcategories reported on: Shampoo, Toothpaste, Conditioner, Sunscreen, Makeup, Electric Toothbrush, Beard Care, Moisturizer
Timeline of analysis: 24 to 27 November 2023
Our Key Findings
Average Discounts Across Retailers
Amazon leads the pack with a huge margin, offering an average discount of 31.9%, covering 62% of its products analyzed. Target follows an 18.8% average discount across only 5% of its analyzed assortment. The other retailers aren’t even close.
Ulta Beauty was the next in line, providing a 9.2% average discount followed by Walmart with a 6.8% average discount. Sephora, known for its premium beauty offerings, adopted a more conservative approach with a 3.5% average discount, targeting only 9% of its top products
Across retailers, it is clear that Amazon led the charge by far this cyber week, with the other retailers choosing to markdown prices conservatively in the Health & Beauty category.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
Amazon offered high discounts on lower priced subcategories like Toothpaste (49.4%), Sunscreen (46.3%), Moisturizers (38.5%), and Conditioners (37.5%), highlighting its focus on products with high demand that consumers would look to stock up on. Ulta Beauty also focused its discounts on Toothpaste (15.6%), Moisturizers (14.9%), and Conditioners (12.6%), targeting skincare and grooming.
Sephora, meanwhile, offered the most attractive deals on the Makeup subcategory at 5.3% across 12.67% of its analyzed assortment, banking on the demand generated due to the brand’s popularity in this subcategory.
Target prioritized discounts on Toothpaste (22.5%), Shampoo (21.6%), and Moisturizers (18.9%). Walmart too offered significant discounts on Shampoo (21.6%) and Toothpaste (22.5%).
Retailers prioritized staple subcategories like Toothpaste and Moisturizer with substantial discounts during this Black Friday Cyber Monday, ensuring a broad consumer appeal. In contrast, discretionary items like Makeup may be less motivated by discounts alone, and hence saw lower discounts during the sale.
Average Discounts: Brands
Brands offered the most attractive deals on Amazon, with OGX leading the pack at 58.4% average discount. Neutrogena and Colgate followed with an average discount of 50.4% and 44%. This mirror’s Amazon’s subcategory focus on shampoos, conditioners, and toothpastes.
Other instances of brands offering attractive deals across retailers include Belif (27.9%) and Anastasia Beverly Hills (17.6%) on Sephora, Johnson’s (20%) and Philips Sonicare (18.8%) on Target, and Olay (12.2%) and Colgate (10.6%) on Walmart.
Ulta Beauty hosted several attractive deals by specific brands, including Moon (30.7%), Joico (24%), and Clinique (22.3%).
Share of Search For Health & Beauty Brands Across Subcategories
Our Share of Search analysis illuminates the strategic moves made by brands to enhance their visibility, playing a crucial role in influencing consumer choices during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Among some of the leading brands, Head & Shoulders and Oral-B increased their Share of Search by 2.3% and 1% respectively, reflecting a successful strategy to boost brand visibility during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events. On the other hand, L’Oreal Paris, Colgate, and Neutrogena faced marginal decreases in Share of Search.
Overall, since the difference in Share of Search values did not change dramatically, the visibility levels of leading brands across key subcategories remained consistent during the Thanksgiving weekend.
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For deeper insights on pricing and discounting trends across a diverse range of shopping categories during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, check out our blog!
To learn more about our AI-powered Pricing Intelligence and Digital Shelf Analytics platform, contact us today!
Insider Intelligence‘s forecast of a 4.5% growth in US Holiday Sales this year has been validated by the sustained robust spending observed during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Despite multiple challenges impacting consumer spending, such as escalating prices of everyday products and elevated interest rates, shoppers continued to spend significantly, aligning with these earlier predictions.
However, in response to these projections, retailers strategically adjusted their approach. Our analysis indicates substantial discounts prevalent in the Consumer Electronics and Home & Furniture segments during Cyber Week. Prominent retailers specializing in Home & Furniture, such as Wayfair, Overstock, and Home Depot, notably led the charge in offering attractive discounts.
At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of home & furniture products across prominent retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
We’ve also recently published our analysis of the Consumer Electronics and Apparel categories this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the discounts offered by leading US retailers in the Home & Furniture category during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across leading retailers during the sale.
Sample size: 44,716 SKUs
Retailers tracked: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Overstock, Wayfair, Home Depot
Subcategories reported on: Dishwasher, Washer/Dryer, Mattresses, Beds, Dining Tables, Entertainment Units, Rugs, Luggage, Bookcases, Cabinets, Sofas, Coffee Tables
Timeline of analysis: 24 to 27 November 2023
Our Key Findings
Discounts Across Retailers
Wayfair led the pack with the highest average discount of 27.5%, covering an impressive 88% of its Home & Furniture inventory. This bold strategy positions Wayfair as a go-to destination for consumers seeking substantial savings on high-quality Home & Furniture items during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Home Depot offered an average discount of 17.5%, covering a substantial 69% of the products analyzed, choosing to cash in on the Cyber Week madness. Overstock followed next with an average discount of 16.6%.
Interestingly, Home & Furniture happens to be one of the few categories in which Amazon did not offer the highest discount among the analyzed retailers, choosing a moderate average discount of 13.8%.
Best Buy also maintained a competitive stance in the category, providing an average discount of 12.8% across 58% of their assortment. Target adopted a conservative markdown strategy, offering a relatively low average discount of 6.5%.
In summary, the Home & Furniture category exhibited a diverse range of discounting strategies among retailers, reflecting a balance between competitiveness and profit margins. Consumers could have chosen from a spectrum of discounts based on their preferences and budget considerations during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
Among subcategories, Amazon offered a moderate 8.3% average discount on 32.9% of its products in this Dishwasher category, while Best Buy took a more aggressive stance with a 14.7% average discount covering 55.9% of its products.
Home Depot emerged as a standout player in the Washer/Dryer category, providing a substantial 21.3% discount on 78.4% of its analyzed inventory. Best Buy closely followed with a 15.1% average discount targeting 67.6% of its products.
Wayfair grabbed attention with a generous 36.9% average discount on Mattresses, covering almost all (99%) of its analyzed products. In addition, Wafair led the discount war in Beds, Dining Tables, Cabinets, Sofas, Coffee Tables, and Entertainment Units. Overstock took an aggressive pricing stance on Rugs, offering a substantial 52.3% average discount, covering 100% of its Rugs inventory.
Average Discounts: Brands
Among brands, Signature Design by Ashley maintained a consistent presence with substantial discounts on both Best Buy (25.24%) and Overstock (16.19%). This could be indicative of the brand’s commitment to appealing to a diverse customer base through varied retail channels. Costway emerges as a standout brand offering exceptionally high discounts at both Target (61.6%) and Walmart (51.7%).
Home Decorators Collection, Home Depot’s in-house brand, offered a significant 30.9% discount at Home Depot. High-margin private label brands like these afford retailers the opportunity to offer markdowns while retaining significant margins.
Strategic positioning on specific platforms, as seen with Alwyn Home on Wayfair and Noble House at Home Depot, suggests brands tailor their approach to the strengths and customer demographics of each retailer. The data suggests a nuanced interplay between brand positioning, discount strategies, and the perceived value offered.
Share of Search For Home & Furniture Brands
The Share of Search data for the Home & Furniture category unveils intriguing insights into brand visibility and performance during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. In this competitive landscape, where consumer decisions are influenced not only by discounts but also by brand visibility, the dynamics of Share of Search become pivotal.
Samsung strategically increased its Share of Search during the sale, showcasing a 1.2% improvement. This suggests a deliberate effort to reinforce brand visibility and capture the attention of potential buyers actively searching for Home & Furniture products, in this case, Washer/Dryers and Dishwashers.
Bosch too experienced a notable surge in Share of Search by 1.1%. LG, meanwhile, maintained a consistent Share of Search, with a marginal decrease of 0.1%. American Tourister experienced a modest increase in Share of Search by 0.4%.
Like in the other categories analyzed, the dynamics of Share of Search in the Home & Furniture category reflect brand strategies aimed at not only offering discounts but also ensuring heightened visibility during the critical Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events. Positive shifts indicate effective marketing efforts, while stable performers demonstrate a resilient brand presence in a competitive online marketplace.
To explore how our insights can help retailers and brands boost their pricing strategies during sale events, reach out to us today!
For more in-depth analyses and trends across various shopping categories, stay tuned to our blog.
As the highly anticipated shopping season approached, industry analysts, including Deloitte, had forewarned consumer spending caution owing to persistent inflationary pressures tightening budgets. Despite these concerns, the holiday spirit was buoyed by sensational deals that delighted bargain-hunting shoppers.
According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), over 200 million consumers participated in both in-store and online shopping activities over the Thanksgiving weekend. This marked an almost 2% uptick from the previous year, surpassing the NRF’s initial estimates of 182 million and showcasing a robust start to the holiday shopping season.
So what was all the hype about this Black Friday and Cyber Monday? How did top retailers react to reports of possibly decreased consumer spending? At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of products across prominent retailers and categories to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
In this article, we focus on the pricing and discounting strategies of Amazon, Walmart, and Target in the Apparel category.
Stay tuned to our blog for insights on other shopping categories like Home & Furniture, and Health & Beauty!
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts of apparel products among leading US retailers during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across during the sale.
Amazon offered the most attractive deals, showcasing an average discount of 19.5%, applying to a substantial 61% of their apparel inventory.
Trailing closely behind was Target, offering an average discount of 14.8% across 52% of the products analyzed. Walmart, however, took a more conservative approach, providing an average discount of 8.5%, applicable to 29% of its products.
The contrast in discounting strategies highlights the diverse tactics employed by retailers to entice Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers within the Apparel category. Amazon remains the forerunner, balancing competitive discounts with a significant coverage of discounted items.
Target follows suit with a competitive stance, while Walmart opts for a more reserved markdown approach, given that the retailer tends to carry a large number of products in the affordable price ranges.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
Examining the Black Friday and Cyber Monday discount landscape within the Apparel category reveals intriguing patterns among major retailers. Amazon led the charge, boasting an impressive 24.9% average discount on Women’s Tops, covering a substantial 76.5% of its products. In the same subcategory, Target competed fiercely with a 25.1% average discount, covering 87.5% of its products. Walmart, taking a measured approach, presented a 14.6% average discount across 45.1% of its Women’s Tops inventory.
Notably, Men’s Swimwear at Target has no discounts. Meanwhile, Amazon remained aggressive across various subcategories, particularly in Women’s Shoes and Women’s Tops, aiming to capture a significant market share through both competitive pricing and a broad coverage of discounted items.
Average Discounts: Brands
Across brands, Tommy Hilfiger and Jockey took the lead on Amazon with an enticing average discount of 28.3% and 24.6% respectively, appealing to savvy shoppers. Calvin Klein followed closely with a 17.3% discount, offering a balance of style and affordability.
In Walmart, Crocs stood out with a 39.9% average discount, followed by Reebok (15.7%) and Hanes (14.9%) Xhilaration, Target’s in-house brand, stole the spotlight on the retailer platform with an impressive 50% average discount. Reebok (32.3%) and Levi’s (22.9%) maintained competitive discounts, appealing to diverse tastes.
Our analysis sheds light on the dynamic landscape of apparel discounts, showcasing how brands adopt varying pricing strategies to position themselves competitively for Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers.
Share of Search For Apparel Brands Across Subcategories
The dynamics of Black Friday and Cyber Monday extend beyond price reductions, with brands strategically vying for increased visibility through Share of Search metrics. This metric signifies a brand’s prominence among the top 20 ranked products in a given subcategory, offering valuable insights into their online marketplace visibility.
Among the standout performers in the Apparel category, Jockey experienced a significant surge in Share of Search, leaping from 1.70% before the event to an impressive 13.30% during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Speedo, in the Women’s Swimwear subcategory, demonstrated a substantial increase from 4.40% to 13.30%, solidifying its presence and gaining an 8.90% boost in Share of Search.
Tommy Hilfiger and Adidas also exhibited notable gains in Share of Search, increasing by 5.30% and 5.60%, respectively. However, some brands experienced a slight dip, with Speedo in the Men’s Swimwear subcategory seeing a 2.50% dip in their search visibility, and Reebok in Men’s Shoes witnessing a 3.3% decrease.
These fluctuations highlight the dynamic nature of brand strategies during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the Apparel category, where gaining visibility also proves to be crucial alongside offering competitive discounts.
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For a deeper dive into the world of competitive pricing intelligence and to explore how our solutions can benefit apparel retailers and brands, reach out to us today!
Stay tuned to our blog for forthcoming analyses on pricing and discounting trends across a spectrum of shopping categories, as we continue to unravel the intricacies of consumer behavior and market dynamics.
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday unfolded across the globe, there was a noticeable subdued atmosphere compared to previous years. TD Cowen brokerage adjusted its forecast for US holiday spending, revising it down from an initial 4-5% growth to a more conservative estimate of 2-3%.
Compounded by persistent inflation and elevated interest rates, many consumers find themselves financially strained, leading to the projection of the slowest growth in US holiday spending in five years.
In this context, it would be relevant to investigate whether this restrained reaction from consumers had an influence on the extent of attractive deals and discounts provided by top retailers and brands during the sale event.
At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices and deals of consumer electronics products across prominent retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness this BFCM, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories and brands.
Keep an eye on our blog for insights on other shopping categories like Apparel, Home & Furniture, and Health & Beauty!
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the average discounts among leading US electronics retailers during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We noticed prices and discounts didn’t change significantly over the course of the weekend, and hence the average prices of products between the 24th and 27th of November are being reported. Our sample was chosen to encompass the top 500 ranked products in each product subcategory across leading retailers during the sale.
Sample size: 23,505 SKUs
Retailers tracked: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy
The observed Black Friday and Cyber Monday discount strategies reveal a distinct competitive landscape among major retailers. Amazon emerged as the frontrunner, offering the highest average discounts at 23.30%, spanning a significant 74% of their consumer electronics inventory. Best Buy closely followed, with an average discount of 19.40% across 76% of their products.
On the other hand, Target and Walmart adopted a more conservative stance, providing lower average discounts at 14.8% and 12%, respectively, with Target discounting 51% of its products and Walmart discounting 41%. This variation in discounting strategies highlights the diverse approaches retailers take to attract and retain Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers, balancing competitiveness with profit margins.
Average Discounts: Subcategories
In the Headphones subcategory, Amazon stands out with a substantial 31.40% average discount, targeting 84.69% of SKUs, showcasing an aggressive discounting strategy. Best Buy follows closely, demonstrating competitive pricing with a 21.80% average discount on 67.03% of products.
Meanwhile, in TVs, Best Buy offered a significant 17.9% average discount across 89% of its products, signaling a targeted effort to capture a broad market share in this subcategory.
In the Laptop subcategory, Target was highly conservative, with only a 4.1% average discount covering 14.3% of its products, while Walmart positioned itself with a moderate 9.5% average discount, targeting 39.8% of its inventory.
Among Smartphones, Amazon (14.7%) was third to Best Buy and Target, which offered average discounts of 20.5% and 18.1%, respectively. Walmart, with an average discount of only 9.9% in the subcategory opted for a relatively muted approach.
Average Discounts: Brands
The discount strategies across top electronics brands during Black Friday unveil distinct approaches. Samsung emerges as a focal point across Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target. The brand was most attractively priced on Best Buy, with an average discount of 25.3%, followed by Target (18.3%) and Amazon (17.9%).
Apple’s discounts were quite consistent across Amazon (17.6%), Best Buy (16.1%), and Target (17.8%), with the exception of Walmart (8.1%). JBL, interestingly, opted to discount very heavily on Best Buy, at an average of 38.8%, resulting in several attractive deals for shoppers on the website. Sony, too, offered impressive discounts at over 23% on Amazon and Best Buy, followed by 16% on Walmart. On Amazon, Amazon Renewed (13.9%) was among the most aggressively discounted products, highlighting an effort to further appeal to cost-conscious consumers.
Overall, our analysis throws light on the nuanced strategies employed by leading brands on Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target, reflecting a delicate interplay between brand positioning, pricing competitiveness, and customer appeal.
Share of Search For Consumer Electronics Brands Across Subcategories
The Share of Search data reflects intriguing shifts in brand strategies during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. During sale events, brands looking to entice shoppers don’t rely only on price but also on search visibility to help drive awareness and conversion. Share of Search is defined as the share of a brand’s products among the top 20 ranked products in a subcategory, thereby providing insight into a brand’s visibility on online marketplaces.
Some of the brands that improved their Share of Search the most include LG, Skullcandy, Asus, JBL, and Samsung. On the other hand, prominent brands like Sony and Apple actually lost ground on this metric by 0.4% and 2% respectively.
At DataWeave, our commitment to empowering retailers and brands with actionable competitive and digital shelf insights remains unwavering. Our AI-powered platform provides a comprehensive view of market dynamics for our customers, enabling informed decision-making. As a partner in your journey, we offer tailored solutions to enhance your competitive edge, drive sales, and elevate your brand presence. To find out more about our solution, reach out to us today!
To learn more about pricing and discounting trends during Black Friday and Cyber Monday across various other shopping categories, stay tuned to our blog!
Competitive pricing intelligence is pivotal for retailers seeking to analyze their product pricing in relation to competitors. This practice is essential for ensuring that their product range maintains a competitive edge, meeting both customer expectations and market demands consistently.
Product matching serves as a foundational element within any competitive pricing intelligence solution. Products are frequently presented in varying formats across different websites, featuring distinct titles, images, and descriptions. Undertaking this process at a significant scale is highly intricate due to numerous factors. One such complication arises from the fact that products are often displayed with differing units of measurement on various websites.
The Challenge of Varying Units
In certain product categories, retailers often offer the same item in varying volumes, quantities, or weights. For instance, a clothing item might be available as a single piece or in packs of 2 or 3, while grocery brands commonly sell eggs in counts of 6, 12, or 24.
Consider this example: a quick glance might suggest that an 850g pack of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes priced at $5 is a better deal than a 980g pack of Nestle Cornflakes priced at $5.2. However, this assumption can be deceptive. In reality, the latter offers better value for your money, a fact that only becomes evident through price comparisons after standardizing the units.
This issue is particularly relevant due to the prevalence of “shrinkflation,” where brands adjust packaging sizes or quantities to offset inflation while keeping prices seemingly low. When quantities, pack sizes, weight, etc. reduce instead of prices increasing, it’s important that this change is considered while analyzing competitive pricing.
Normalizing Units of Measure
In order to effectively compare prices among different competitors, retailers must standardize the diverse units of measurement they encounter. This standardization (or normalization) is crucial because price comparisons should extend beyond individual product SKUs to accommodate variations in package sizes and quantities. It’s essential to normalize units, ranging from “each” (ea) for individual items to “dozen” (dz) for sets, and from “pounds” (lb), “kilograms” (kg), “liters” (ltr), to “gallons” (gal) for various product types.
For example, a predetermined base unit of measure, such as 100 grams for a specific product like cornflakes, serves as the reference point. The unit-normalized price for any cornflake product would then be the price per 100 grams. In the example provided, this reveals that Kellogg’s is priced at $0.59 per 100 grams, while Nestle is priced at $0.53 per 100 grams.
Various Categories of Unit Normalization
1. Weight Normalization
Retailers frequently feature products with weight measurements expressed in grams (g), kilograms (kg), pounds (lbs), or ounces (oz).
2. Quantity or Pack Size Normalization
Products are also often featured with varying pick sizes or quantities in each SKU.
3. Volume or Capacity Normalization
Products can also vary in volumes or capacities with units like liters (L) or fluid ounces (fl oz).
DataWeave’s Unit Normalized Pricing Intelligence Solution
DataWeave’s highly sophisticated product matching engine can match the same or similar products and normalize their units of measurement, leading to highly accurate and actionable competitive pricing insights. It standardizes different units of measurement, like weight, quantity, and volume, ensuring fair comparisons across similar and exact matched products.
Retailers have the flexibility to view pricing insights either with retailer units or normalized units. This capability empowers retailers and analysts to perform accurate, in-depth analyses of pricing information at a product level.
In some scenarios, analyzing unit normalized pricing reflects pricing trends and competitiveness more accurately than retail price alone. This is particularly true for categories like CPG, where products are sold in diverse units of measure. For instance, in the example shown here, we can view a comparison of price position trends for the category of Fruits and Vegetables based on both retail price and unit price.
The difference is striking: the original retail price based analysis shows a stagnation in price position, whereas unit normalized pricing analysis reflects a more dynamic pricing scenario.
With DataWeave, retailers can specify which units to compare, ensuring that comparisons are made accurately. For example, a retailer can specify that unit price comparisons apply only to 8, 12, or 16-ounce packs, as well as 1 or 3-pound packs, but not to 10 and 25-pound bags. This precision ensures that products are matched correctly, and prices are represented for appropriately normalized units, leading to more accurate pricing insights.
For consumer brands, the digital marketplace presents an unparalleled landscape of opportunities for engaging with consumers and expanding their market presence. Within this dynamic environment, Digital Shelf Analytics has emerged as a crucial pillar in a brand’s eCommerce strategy. This technology provides valuable insights into a brand’s organic and paid visibility on marketplaces, content quality, pricing strategies, promotional efforts, and product availability. These insights help brands gain a comprehensive understanding of their competitive positioning and overall market performance.
Nevertheless, many brands often grapple with the question of whether this understanding translates into tangible actions that drive real business impact and return on investment (ROI). This uncertainty stems from a lack of clarity about the direct correlation between digital shelf insights and key metrics such as enhanced sales conversions.
Nonetheless, there is compelling evidence that when these insights are effectively harnessed and strategic actions are taken, brands can realize significant, measurable benefits.
So, the question arises: does Digital Shelf Analytics genuinely deliver on its promises?
At DataWeave, we’ve partnered with numerous brands to fuel their eCommerce growth through the application of digital shelf analytics. In this article, we will delve into these insights, uncovering the concrete and quantifiable results that brands can achieve through their investments in digital shelf analytics.
Digital Shelf KPIs and Their Impact
Digital Shelf Analytics is a robust system that analyzes specific key performance indicators (KPIs) about the digital shelf, furnishing brands with precise recommendations to not only bolster these KPIs but also to monitor the enhancements over time. The following is a brief explanation of digital shelf KPis and their expected impact areas:
Product Availability: Ensuring Shoppers Never Hear “Out of Stock” Again
Timely insights on the availability of products ensures brands reduce replenishment times at scale, which can significantly impact sales, creating an unbreakable link between product availability and revenue. With Digital Shelf Analytics, procurement and replenishment teams can set up notifications to promptly identify low or out-of-stock items and take swift action. This can also be done for specific ZIP codes or individual stores. In addition, availability plays a crucial role in a brand’s Share of Search and search rankings, as online marketplaces often ensure only in-stock products are shown among the top ranks.
If a product isn’t visible, does it even exist? In fact, 70% of consumers never go beyond the first page of search results on major online marketplaces. Therefore, as a brand, the visibility of your products for relevant search keywords and their appearance on the first page can heavily determine your awareness metrics. This is where the concept of Share of Search comes into play. Think of it as securing prime shelf space in a physical store. Digital shelf insights and benchmarking with category leaders for Share of Search help ensure your products command relevant attention on the digital shelf.
Content Quality: Crafting the Perfect Product Story
Creating engaging product descriptions and visuals is akin to giving your products a megaphone in a crowded marketplace. By enhancing content quality, including product names, titles, descriptions, and images, brands can climb the search result rankings, leading to increased visibility and subsequently, more sales.
Ratings and Reviews: The Power of Social Proof
Public opinion holds immense sway. Research indicates that a single positive review can trigger a 10% surge in sales, while a multitude of favorable reviews can propel your product to a 44% higher trajectory. The correlation between ratings and sales is not surprising—each step up the rating ladder can translate to substantial revenue growth.
While it’s reasonable to anticipate a connection between these KPIs and downstream impact metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions, we were driven to explore this correlation through the lens of real-world data. To do so, we meticulously monitored the digital shelf KPIs for one of our clients and analyzed the improvements in these metrics.
It’s essential to acknowledge that not all observed impact areas can be solely attributed to enhancements in digital shelf KPIs. Still, it’s evident that a robust correlation exists. The following section presents an in-depth case study, shedding light on the results of this analysis.
A Success Story: Real-World Impact of Digital Shelf Analytics
Let’s dive into the journey of one of our clients – a prominent CPG brand specializing in the sale of baked goods and desserts. Through their experience, we will illustrate the transformative impact of our DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics product suite.
Over a period of one year, from August 2022 to July 2023, the brand leveraged several key modules of Digital Shelf Analytics for Amazon, including Share of Search, Share of Category, Availability, Ratings and Reviews, and Content Audit. Each of these digital shelf KPIs played a vital role in shaping the brand’s performance across various stages of the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is typically delineated into three key stages:
Awareness: At this stage, shoppers peruse multiple product options presented on search and category listing pages, gaining an initial understanding of the available choices.
Consideration: Here, shoppers narrow down their selections and evaluate a handful of products, moving closer to a purchase decision.
Conversion: In this final stage, shoppers make their ultimate product choice and proceed to complete the purchase.
Let’s now examine the data to understand how digital shelf KPIs helped drive tangible ROI on Amazon for the brand across the stages of the buyer journey.
Stage 1: Raising Awareness
Enhancing Share of Search and Share of Category can help brands boost product visibility and raise brand awareness. The following chart demonstrates the steady, incremental improvements in our client’s Share of Search and Share of Category (in the top 20 ranks of each listing page) throughout the analyzed period. These enhancements were achieved through various measures, including product sponsorship, content enhancement, price optimization, promotional initiatives, and more.
This amplified Share of Search and Share of Category directly translates into improved product discoverability, as evident from the surge in impressions depicted in the chart below.
Stage 2: All Things Considered
In the consideration stage, shoppers make their product selections by clicking on items that meet their criteria, which may include factors like average rating, number of ratings, price, product title, and images. For brands, this underscores the importance of crafting meticulously detailed product content and accumulating a substantial number of ratings.
The subsequent chart illustrates the year-long trend in both average ratings and the number of ratings, both of which have displayed steady improvement over time.
The enhancements in the number of ratings and the average rating have a direct and positive impact on product consideration. This, in turn, has led to a noticeable year-over-year increase in page views, as indicated in the chart below.
These improvements are likely to have also been influenced by the overall enhancement of content quality, which is detailed separately in the section below.
Stage 3: Driving Decisions
As buyers progress to the next stage, they reach the pivotal point of making a purchase decision. This decision is influenced by multiple factors, including product availability, content quality, and the quality of reviews, reflecting customer sentiment.
Our client effectively harnessed our Availability insights, significantly reducing the likelihood of potential out-of-stock scenarios and enhancing replenishment rates, as highlighted in the chart below. The same chart also indicates improvements in content quality, measured by the degree to which the content on Amazon aligns with the brand’s ideal content standards.
Below, you’ll find the year-over-year growth in conversion rates for the brand on Amazon. This metric stands as the ultimate measure of business impact, directly translating into increased revenue for brands.
As the data uncovers, growth in key digital shelf KPIs cumulatively had a strong correlation with impressions, page views, and conversion rates.
It is also important to note that the effect of each KPI cannot be viewed in isolation, since they are often interdependent. For example, improvement in content and availability could boost Share of Search. Accurate content could also influence more positive customer feedback. Brands need to consider optimizing digital shelf KPIs holistically to create sustained business impact.
Impact on eCommerce Sales
After the implementation of digital shelf analytics, the results spoke for themselves. Sales consistently outperformed the previous year’s records month after month. As shown in the chart below, the diligent application of DataWeave’s recommendations paved the way for an impressive 8.5% year-over-year increase in sales, leaving an indelible mark on the brand’s eCommerce success.
From boosting product visibility to catapulting conversion rates, Digital Shelf Analytics serves as the key to unlocking unparalleled online success.
While the success story detailed above does not establish a direct causation between Digital Shelf Analytics and sales revenue, there is undoubtedly a strong correlation. It’s evident that digital shelf KPIs play a pivotal role in optimizing a brand’s eCommerce performance across all stages of the buyer journey. Hence, for brands, it is vital that they collaborate with the right partner and harness digital shelf insights to fine-tune their eCommerce strategies and tactics.
That said, the eCommerce landscape is in a constant state of flux, and there is still much to learn about how each digital shelf KPI influences brand performance in the online realm. With more data and an increasing number of brands embracing Digital Shelf Analytics, it’s only a matter of time before a direct causation is firmly established.
Reach out to us today to know more about how your brand can leverage Digital Shelf Analytics to drive higher sales and market share in eCommerce.
In the evolving retail landscape, success often hinges on a singular focal point: pricing. A recent Statista survey revealed that 70% of US online users prioritize competitive pricing in their digital shopping choices. In this cutthroat arena, where surpassing rivals is paramount, a deep comprehension of pricing nuances is no longer just an edge, but a necessity.
Retailers are increasingly adopting pricing intelligence solutions that meticulously dissect competitor pricing data in comparison to their own, down to the SKU level. This analysis empowers their pricing teams with the insights they need to price their products competitively on a day-to-day basis.
However, in a landscape where a staggering 50 million price changes occur daily, reliance on a reactive pricing intelligence solution, though effective in many ways, often falls short. To develop a strategic and predictive pricing engine, retailers also need the ability to track historical pricing relative to market conditions, competitor actions, seasonality, promptness of competitor pricing actions, and more. This would be particularly useful for senior retail pricing and business unit leaders as they look to gain a strategic perspective on their competitive pricing health. However, even today’s leading providers of retail pricing intelligence solutions lack in this area. This results in a relatively myopic view of competitive pricing even in large retail organizations.
Introducing DataWeave’s PricingPulse
DataWeave’s PricingPulse helps retail leaders better understand their competitive pricing strategies in comparison to relevant market dynamics over time. The capability bridges the gap between day-to-day competitive pricing operations and long-term strategic pricing analysis and actions, enabling senior retail pricing leaders to untangle the complexities of their pricing strategies. Delivered as a dashboard, the view offers an elevated vantage point for industry-wide pricing dynamics, empowering retailers with the foresight needed to navigate market shifts, predict vulnerabilities, and capitalize on new opportunities.
PricingPulse is provided to all DataWeave retail customers as an add-on to our Pricing Intelligence solution.
The insights offered by PricingPulse enable retailers to answer pivotal questions about competitor pricing behaviors, price leadership across categories, timing of price changes, and the effectiveness of capitalizing on price improvement opportunities. Some of the questions that PricingPulse offers answers to include:
How frequently are my competitors changing prices and for which products?
How does my price leadership vary across key product categories?
Which day of the week or month do my competitors change their pricing most and least frequently?
How well do I seize on price improvement opportunities over time?
Strategic Pricing Views Via PricingPulse
In the following section, we share a few views available to retail leaders via our PricingPulse dashboard. For a complete list of insights available on the dashboard, request a demo today.
Competitive Price Leadership Across Retailers and Categories
This view provides retailers with an overview of the price leaders across various product categories and how it changes with time. More often than not, retailers would aim to gain price leadership in certain categories, while maintaining healthy margins in others.
Retailers can also gauge their consistency and effectiveness in maintaining a competitive edge for key categories over time. They can fortify areas of strength and identify opportunity areas to optimize their pricing.
In addition, the dashboard tracks a retailer’s price index across categories, a measure that determines its price competitiveness.
The price index is determined by dividing the retailer’s price by the lowest price offered by any of its competitors. A ratio lesser than 1 indicates that the retailer is the lowest priced in the market. This measure is also presented for competitors, providing insights into competitors that are most attractively priced in the market. A timeline trend of this metric helps track how price leadership among retailers changes over time.
Price Change Trends
This view provides a summary of the level of price changes by a retailer and its competitors over a period of time, which includes the average magnitude of price changes as well as the proportion of the retailer’s assortment that underwent these price changes.
In addition, the number of price changes each month are provided for each retailer. This is further broken down into the total number of price changes during each day of the week.
These insights help retailers determine which competitors are most and least active in their pricing activities, how aggressive the pricing actions are, and if there are any specific price change patterns followed in terms of the days of the week or month.
Price Improvement Opportunities and Actions
The dashboard actively reports on price improvement opportunities, which could include either a price increase opportunity or a price decrease opportunity, for a retailer and its competitors across categories over time. A price increase opportunity occurs when a product is significantly under priced (by more than 2%) and a price decrease opportunity occurs when a product is significantly overpriced (by more than 2%).
Further, the retailer gains insight into how many price improvement opportunities were actually acted on within 15 days of the opportunity presenting itself. This “action rate” helps retailers quantify how well they seize on price improvement opportunities, which eventually result in higher sales and margins. The dashboard also reports on the average number of days it took for a retailer to act on a price improvement opportunity, thereby quantifying the responsiveness and agility of pricing teams.
This is especially useful for pricing leaders to “audit” or evaluate the performance of their pricing teams. When similar insights are viewed for a set of competitors as well, retailers can better understand the level of sophistication of their competitors’ pricing operations.
Ready to Elevate Your Pricing Game?
The launch of DataWeave’s PricingPulse marks a significant advancement in the realm of pricing solutions for retail leaders. As the retail landscape undergoes continuous transformation, the significance of precise pricing strategies cannot be overstated. PricingPulse is the first and only pricing view in the industry to bridge the gap between tactical pricing decisions and comprehensive strategic analysis.
In a world where agility and foresight are crucial, PricingPulse equips retail leaders with the ability to predict competitor actions, optimize pricing strategies, and stay ahead of the competition.
If you are a senior pricing leader or retail business unit head, reach out to us today to either sign up or learn more!
Amazon’s Prime Day this year proved to be a record-breaking success, becoming the largest Prime Day event in the company’s history. Over the two-day extravaganza, shoppers in the US spent a staggering $12.7 billion, a 6.1% increase from the previous year. Amid inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions, Amazon adopted a bold discounting strategy, offering steeper discounts compared to Prime Day 2022.
An interesting aspect of Amazon’s approach is their loyalty based offerings. In the weeks leading to Prime Day on July 11-12, members of the loyalty program were given access to “invite-only deals” where shoppers could request invites to specific products that they were looking to purchase on deals. Overall, Amazon’s pricing and discount strategies during Prime Day were carefully designed to create a buzz among shoppers, generate increased sales, and maintain a competitive advantage in the market.
While Prime Day is Amazon’s showstopper, it’s interesting to also see how other leading retailers respond to such a massive sale by their biggest competitor. Do they also lower their prices during the event, or are they happy to take a backseat? To answer these questions, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to analyze the prices and discounts of Amazon and its leading competitors across key product categories – Apparel, Home & Furniture, Consumer Electronics, and Health & Beauty – during Prime Day.
Since products on Amazon and other eCommerce websites are often sold at discounts even on normal days not linked to a sale event, we delved into the real value that Prime Day offers to shoppers by focusing on price reductions or additional discounts during the sale compared to the week before. As a result, our approach highlights the genuine benefits of the event for shoppers who count on lower prices during the sale.
Research & Methodology
For our analysis, we tracked the prices of a large number of products across several leading retailers during Prime Day as well as the week prior to the event. The details of our sample are mentioned below:
Number of SKUs: 110,000+
Websites: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Overstock, The Home Depot, Wayfair, Ulta Beauty, Sephora
Categories: Apparel, Home & Furniture, Electronics, Health & Beauty
Pre-event Analysis: 4-10 July 2023
Prime Day Analysis: 11-12 July 2023
Our Key Findings
Our data reveals that Amazon’s price reductions were most aggressive in the Consumer Electronics category, with an average price reduction of 10.4% on Prime Day, due to the category’s popularity and high demand.
The Health & Beauty (6.7%), Apparel (5.9%), and Home & Furniture (4.8%) categories offered relatively modest deals during the sale event.
Below, we delve deeper into our analysis of each category to better understand how price reductions were distributed across key subcategories on Amazon as well as the discounting strategies of Amazon’s leading competitors.
Apparel
As Amazon grappled with surplus inventory, heightened storage costs, and reduced profit margins in apparel (like most other retailers), its average discount before Prime Day was already as high as 13.3%. Then, on Prime Day, Amazon’s apparel deals were tempered at around 5.9% across an impressive 33.1% of its assortment, while Target and Walmart chose not to compete in a meaningful way.
Unlike Prime Day 2022, when Target competed with Amazon with high discounts, the retailer offered only 0.8% additional discount across 4.4% of its assortment in this category. Walmart, too, reduced its prices by only 1.4% on 8.5% of its assortment during Prime Day.
Across all the apparel subcategories we analyzed, Women’s Athleisure (8.7%), Men’s Swimwear (8%), and Women’s Tops (7.6%) were among the ones with the highest price reductions. On the other hand, Men’s Athleisure (2.5%), Women’s Shoes (3.5%), and Men’s Innerwear (4.1%) had conservative markdowns.
Pricing decisions across the various subcategories are likely to have been influenced by several factors like inventory levels, demand patterns, and the need to balance competitive offers with maintaining reasonable profit margins, as Amazon tried to cater to a more price-sensitive consumer.
Across all apparel subcategories, leading brands that offered the highest markdowns were Tommy Hilfiger (11.5%), Amazon Essentials (9.4%), Adidas (8.6%), and Calvin Klein (8.6%).
For brands, however, lowering prices is only one lever to attract and convert shoppers. They also need to ensure they’re highly visible and discoverable on Amazon’s search listings. This exponentially improves their chances of driving more clicks and conversions. In our analysis, we tracked the Share of Search of brands across several popular search keywords. Share of Search for a brand is defined as the proportion of the brand’s products in the top 20 search results for a search query.
Our data indicates that several brands gained impressive ground in their discoverability during Prime Day, while others fell behind. Gildan in Men’s Innerwear, Adidas in Men’s and Women’s Shoes, Anrabess in Women’s Athleisure, and Lululemon in Men’s Athleisure, among others, improved their Share of Search by significant levels during Prime Day.
On the other hand, brands like Hanes in Men’s and Women’s Innerwear, Kanu Surf in Men’s Swimwear, Cupshe in Women’s Swimwear, and others lost around 10% in their Share of Search during the event. This is likely to have impacted their sales volumes adversely.
Home & Furniture
The Home & Furniture industry has been challenged with reduced demand due to inflationary pressures over the past year or so. Leading retailers in the category overestimated the demand, leading to overstocking of inventory. As a result, Home & Furniture is one of the few categories that saw Amazon’s competitors participate at a significant level on Prime Day in order to ensure they don’t fall behind on liquidating their stock.
Amazon’s additional discounts averaged 4.8% across 30.2% of its assortment. Wayfair and Overstock too reduced their prices by 4.8% and 4.3% on around 44% of their respective assortments. Wayfair’s move is likely a part of their strategy to attract new customers and expand their market share, in response to a decline in their consumer base. Last year, Wayfair experienced a loss of 5 million out of its 1.3 billion consumers due to weakening demand.
Target and Walmart did offer additional discounts, but they were not at a competitive level. The Home Depot effectively opted not to compete at all during the sale event. Overall, the pricing actions of these retailers are in stark contrast to the highly conservative pricing strategies observed on Prime Day last year.
Our recent pricing analysis of the Home & Furniture category revealed more interesting insights and pricing dynamics over the past year.
Across all the subcategories we analyzed, Bookcases (8.2%), Rugs (7.8%), Mattresses (6.5%), and Luggage (6.2%) were among the ones with high price reductions.
Meanwhile, Sofas (2.4%), Washer / Dryers (2.4%), and Entertainment Units (2.7%) had lower markdowns. These are large and substantial purchases, making retailers more cautious about deeply discounting them while still ensuring profitability.
The brands that stepped up and offered the highest markdowns in this category include Zinus (20.2%), Comfee (10.8%), Sauder (9.9%), and Best Choice Products (8.7%).
In terms of Share of Search, Rockland in Luggage gained the highest (21%), followed by Farberware in Dishwasher, Olee Sleep in Mattresses, and Homeguave in Mattresses gained significant ground in their respective categories as shown in the image below.
Brands like Best Choice Products in Coffee Tables, Molblly in Mattresses, and Black+Decker in Washer/Dryers and Dishwashers lost a good portion of their Share of Search during the event. Due to high competition for visibility during sale events, brands that fail to keep an eye on their Share of Search stand to take a hit in their sales, especially in categories like Home & Furniture that tend to have low brand loyalty.
Consumer Electronics
2023 was the year of consumer electronics on Amazon Prime Day. Amazon’s price reduction during the sale averaged 10.4% across 54.5% of its assortment in the category. Target and Walmart, on the other hand, offered significantly lower additional discounts of 1.9% and 2.7% on 10.4% and 19.1% of their assortment, respectively.
The consumer electronics category often witnesses aggressive price reductions during Prime Day and other sale events due to its popularity and high demand. In addition, since retailer margins are usually low in this category, shoppers often have to wait for sale events like Prime Day (when brands markdown their wholesale rates) to have several attractive deals to choose from.
Across all the subcategories we analyzed, Smartwatches (15.4%), Wireless Headphones (15.4%), Earbuds (14.9%), Headphones (12.5%), and Tablets (12.0%), were among the ones with the highest price reductions. All of these subcategories are quite popular that tend to sell in large volumes during sale events.
Meanwhile, Laptops (2.1%), TVs (3.1%), and Smartphones (7.6%) had lower markdowns. A lower markdown on smartphones may reflect steady demand throughout the year, reducing the urgency to offer significant discounts during the short Prime Day window.
Amazon (22%), Tozo (12.5%), Lenovo (10.8%), JBL (8.3%), and Apple (5%) offered the highest price reductions in Consumer Electronics as a whole. Clearly, Amazon didn’t hold back on offering attractive deals on its own private label products in this category.
Consumer Electronics as a category tends to have a brand loyal shopper base. However, Share of Search generic search keywords are still very important for keywords like earbuds, headphones, and tablets that result in relatively lower priced products. HP in Laptops, Samsung in Tablets and TVs, and Oneplus in Smartphones all made strong strides in building their discoverability on Amazon during Prime Day. Beyond just driving more sales, this also has the intended effect of boosting brand awareness among high-intent shoppers.
Sony in Headphones, Asus in Laptops, and Insignia in TVs lost out to other brands in terms of their discoverability during the sale. Sony and Asus, especially would be hurting as they are prominent brands in their respective categories.
Health & Beauty
The Health & Beauty category is a favorite among consumers during Prime Day, as it encompasses a wide range of products like skincare, cosmetics, and grooming items. As shoppers often tend to stock up during the sale, brands and retailers are willing to offer competitive discounts and gain an edge over their competitors.
Our data reveals that the average additional discount on Amazon was 6.7%, offered on a little over a third of its assortment. Walmart reduced its prices sizably as well, by an average of 3.1% on 13.4% of its assortment.
Interestingly, Sephora and Ulta Beauty, leading retailers in the Health & Beauty category did not compete on price at all this Prime Day. It is likely they are confident their loyal customer base will not be influenced by Amazon’s Prime Day deals and be driven away merely by lower prices. In addition, keeping their prices steady during Prime Day might have been a strategic choice to protect their brand reputation and premium positioning.
Relatively premium subcategories like Electric Toothbrushes (10%), Moisturizer (8.3%), Beardcare (7.3%), and Make Up (6.7%) saw the highest price reductions on Amazon.
In contrast, staple items like Toothpaste (3.7%), Shampoos (5.4%), and Conditioners (5.7%) had lower markdowns.
Among the leading brands in this category, Oral-B (10.3%), Philips Sonicare (8.7%), Neutrogena (8.4%), and Colgate (5.6%) offered the most attractive deals during the sale event.
In terms of significant gains in Share of Search for brands, Oral-B in Electric Toothbrushes led the pack again. Neutrogena in Sunscreens and Somall in Toothpastes also gained more than 10% in their Share of Search during the sale event, followed by Tresemme in Shampoos and Airspun in Make-Up products.
Other popular brands like Crest in Toothpastes, e.l.f in Make-Up, Philips Sonicare in Electric Toothbrushes, and Sheamoisture in Beradcare surprisingly had reduced visibility among the top search results for relevant subcategories.
Staying Ahead of the Curve During Sale Events
This Prime Day, Amazon leveraged its scale to offer aggressive discounts across key product categories, while several competing retailers chose to sit back and let the sale play out. Others chose a selective discounting strategy that focused their modest price reductions on a small set of items.
At DataWeave, we understand the pivotal role competitive pricing insights play in empowering retailers and brands to gain a competitive edge, especially during crucial events like Prime Day. For retailers, the ability to track competitor prices accurately, at scale, in a timely manner is essential to plotting and acting on impactful pricing strategies and staying ahead of the curve.
The home and furniture retail industry is going through a turbulent time. As inflation reared its head mid-2022, leading retailers in the category have been grappling with the higher costs associated with producing and distributing their products, as well as reduced shopper demand. The rising costs of raw materials, transportation, and labor have had a direct impact on the pricing dynamics within the industry. For example, reports indicate container rates soared to nearly 10 times pre-pandemic levels towards the end of 2021.
Furthermore, shoppers’ spending power has been constrained, while higher interest rates have suppressed demand. Retailers have had to adapt their assortment and pricing strategies to cater to a wider range of shopper preferences driven by changing lifestyles and a growing emphasis on sustainability. Post-pandemic, demand has been primarily driven by affluent shoppers.
Towards the end of 2021, due to supply delays and disruptions, retailers heavily stocked up on available products. However, when demand subsequently decreased in 2022, they were left with a significant amount of unsold stock that was purchased at high rates. This put them in a difficult situation, as they had an excess of products but were unable to sell them even at reduced prices without impacting their profit margins. Additionally, staying competitive in a rapidly changing market environment was equally important.
Given this context, it is crucial for home and furniture retailers to adopt a data-driven approach that utilizes competitive and market insights to consistently maintain or increase their online sell-through rates. DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence solution offers exactly that, empowering retailers across various industry segments to stay updated on evolving consumer trends and competitor actions.
To gain a better understanding of the pricing strategies employed by leading home and furniture retailers throughout the past year, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the pricing of a wide range of products across multiple retailers and subcategories within the industry.
Our Research Methodology
Number of SKUs: 400,000+
Key retailers tracked: Amazon, Wayfair, Home Depot, Overstock, Target, Walmart
Key categories reported: Home and Office, Bed and Bath, Bathroom, Bedroom, Decorative, Dining Room, Kitchen, Garden & Patio, Hardware
Timeline of analysis: April 2022 to April 2023
Our Findings
Interestingly, our analysis indicates that average prices in the home and furniture category rose by around 5% between March 2022 and April 2023. However, there have been seasonal fluctuations in the prices over the course of the year.
Among the various subcategories, the most substantial price surge was observed in home office equipment, with an uptick of 9.3% in January 2023 when compared to March 2022. The surge in demand for home office furniture, fueled by the widespread adoption of work from home arrangements, played a pivotal role in depleting inventories and consequently driving up prices. Additionally, the shift towards collaborative workspaces and the gradual expansion of office environments have contributed to the sustained demand for office furniture.
Avg. price changes MoM across home and furniture subcategories from April 2022-23.
While prices for several subcategories rose significantly, others experienced subdued growth, such as bed and bath. The subcategory experienced the lowest price increment, registering a modest 2.8% increase annually. This can be attributed to the impact of a subdued housing market and a decrease in first-time buyers, which may partly be due to the global recession and inflationary pressures.
Moreover, retailers overestimated the demand for home furniture during the holiday season, leading to an overstocking of inventory. Consequently, prices experienced a dip from October to December 2022. In fact, this was a common trend across all home and furniture subcategories. As retailers emerged from the holiday season, prices rose to their highest level in January 2023, and have stayed relatively stable since.
Some of these trends vary among retailers as each faces different challenges and responds in distinct ways.
Wayfair, for example, shows a significant dip in pricing after October 2022, with prices stabilizing in 2023. This could be in response to the retailer’s shrinking consumer count, losing 5 million of its 1.3 billion consumers in 2022 due to declining demand.
Avg. price change MoM within the home and furniture sector across retailers from April 2022-23.
In fact, online furniture retailers like Wayfair and Overstock reported declines in annual revenue in 2022, as the furniture sector continued to normalize from the high spending seen during COVID-era lockdowns. Wayfair reported that its 2022 net revenue was $12.2 billion, down almost 11% from the year prior. The company also laid off 10% of its workforce in August 2022. Overstock’s reported annual net revenue in 2022 was $1.9 billion, a 30% decrease year-over-year.
Interestingly, both companies took contrasting approaches in response to this situation. Wayfair opted for aggressive cost-cutting measures, including layoffs and a reduced marketing budget. On the other hand, Overstock focused on attracting new customers through influencer marketing and improving their app, aiming to expand their customer base. With a strategy geared towards younger buyers, Overstock allocated a larger marketing budget than ever before. Our data supports the fact that Overstock did not rely on price reductions to entice shoppers.
Target has consistently maintained lower price increases compared to Walmart, defying the common perception of Walmart being more conservative in its pricing. Notably, Amazon also stood out minimal price increases throughout the year, being surpassed only by Wayfair since November 2022.
As price sensitive shoppers increasingly compare prices before making a purchase decision, retailers need to ensure they are priced competitively in the market on a consistent basis to liquidate stock and gain market share without compromising significantly on margins.
A Sophisticated and Versatile Product Matching Solution is Essential to Achieving Price Leadership
Product matching plays a vital role in monitoring competitive prices and analyzing price leadership. Within the home and furniture category, there is often a multitude of representations for the same product across various online platforms. Furthermore, eCommerce websites offer a wide array of options, including variations in size, color, material, and similar products. Without an accurate and comprehensive method of matching these products, it becomes impossible to track and compare prices effectively, especially on a large scale. Thus, a versatile product matching engine tailored to the unique requirements of the home and furniture sector becomes essential.
DataWeave offers an industry-leading product matching platform that harnesses advanced AI models specifically trained to identify and leverage multiple product attributes extracted from titles, descriptions, and images to accurately match products across websites. Additionally, our platform intelligently matches similar products based on a diverse range of extracted attributes. This empowers our retail partners to gain competitive pricing intelligence not only on exact product matches but also on similar and substitute products, as well as their respective variants.
With our competitive pricing intelligence solution, retailers in the home and furniture industry can confidently analyze and track prices, ensuring they stay at the forefront of price leadership in their market.
The fashion industry is currently undergoing a period of stabilization after facing significant disruptions in recent years. Fashion retailers find themselves navigating not only changing consumer preferences but also the challenges brought about by inflation and supply chain issues that are remnants of the COVID-19 era.
The effects of inflation have raised concerns regarding overabundance, rise of sustainable and pre-used fashion and declining sales, creating a mismatch between supply and demand within the market. As consumers scale back on spending due to rising prices, fashion retailers are left grappling with surplus inventory, heightened storage costs, and reduced profit margins.
Consequently, these market dynamics have significantly impacted the pricing strategies employed by fashion retailers, resulting in dynamic shifts in pricing and competitiveness across different time periods, subcategories, and individual retailers.
Counteracting this impact requires fashion retailers to adopt a data-driven approach that leverages competitive and market insights. They must adopt agile and versatile pricing strategies that enable advanced pricing and assortment management. By understanding their market position and the competitive landscape, retailers can effectively react to reduced demand and inflationary pressures without compromising heavily on their top line and profitability.
At DataWeave, we harnessed the power of our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the prices of prominent fashion retailers to uncover unique insights into their price competitiveness over the past year, as well as understand how pricing strategies varied across diverse subcategories.
Our Methodology
For this analysis, we tracked the average price changes among leading US fashion retailers over 12 months to understand how their pricing across several fashion subcategories altered in response to supply chain inefficiencies, inflationary pressures, seasonal effects, and changing consumer preferences.
Sample: 88,000+ SKUs matched across 5 leading retailers
While prices have generally been rising in several industry segments, such as groceries, due to inflation, the fashion sector has experienced relatively stable prices, with even a few periods of price drops. In fact, average prices in April 2023 are 1.2% lower than those in April 2022. The main reason for this trend is that consumers have become cautious about discretionary spending on fashion in order to prioritize other necessities, resulting in lower demand and overstocking by retailers.
In the first quarter of 2022, clothing accounted for only 3.9% of total expenditure by US consumers, down from 4.3% in 2019 before the pandemic. Additionally, in March 2023, 60% of fashion retailers in the US still had surplus goods, accounting for almost 20% of their entire stock. As demand decreased, fashion retailers started offering freebies with purchases, bundling products, giving away unwanted items, and notably, slashing prices.
Subcategory level analysis of Average Price Change Month-on-Month between April 2022 – April 2023
Our analysis at a subcategory level reveals that in winter 2022, seasonal demand led to the largest price increases of 6-11% in coats, boots, and jackets. However, these prices quickly declined afterward. In 2023, stabilization of raw material costs and a continuing decline in demand for non-essential apparel and fashion accessories are factors contributing to a significant drop in prices.
Some of these trends vary among retailers as each faces different challenges and responds in distinct ways. Our data indicates that some retailers have chosen to increase their prices from Q3 2022 due to mounting pressure on profit margins, while others have further lowered prices due to increasing inventory levels.
Average Price Change Month-on-Month Across Amazon, Macy’s, Walmart, Target, and Zappos between April 2022 – April 2023
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Capability Spotlight
Matching products across competitor websites is an essential part of tracking competitive prices and analyzing price leadership. In fashion, matching exact products is no mean feat. Websites often host a slew of variants in terms of size, color, material, etc. without any form of standardization in the way the products are represented. So fashion retailers often struggle with simply unusable pricing insights resulting from inaccurate and incomplete product matching.
DataWeave’s industry-leading product matching algorithm recognizes and leverages dozens of product attributes extracted from product titles, descriptions, and images to match products at very high levels of accuracy and coverage. What’s more, our platform can also match similar products based on a large variety of parameters, so our customers can benefit from a comprehensive competitive perspective.
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For example, in August, Target reported a 90% plunge in profits during the second quarter of 2022, as shoppers concerned about inflation reduced spending on nonessential items. The company stated that its price cuts did not have the desired impact, resulting in a 1.5% increase in inventory compared to three months prior. As a result, we can see that Target’s average fashion prices spiked in August 2022 and have remained steady since then. Walmart also faced similar challenges and increased its prices in October 2022.
However, during the same period in August 2022, Macy’s announced increased discounts to clear out excess inventory in preparation for the holiday shopping season. In the same announcement, Macy’s highlighted how the rising cost of groceries, which had experienced a double-digit increase, was impacting consumers’ budgets, changing their behaviors, and increasing the need for discounts. Our data reflects this, showing a significant drop in prices from October 2022 to January 2023.
However, in January 2023, Macy’s successfully managed its inventory levels, reducing them from $6.4 billion in October 2022 to $4.3 billion in January 2023. As a result, average prices at Macy’s have started to rise.
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For today’s fashion retailers, achieving a balance between expansion goals and profitability is crucial. It requires a meticulous examination of competitive and market insights on a regular basis to mitigate competitive pressures and navigate through these challenging times successfully.
DataWeave’s platform offers retailers the insights they need to gain a competitive advantage. With access to accurate, timely, and actionable pricing and assortment insights, retailers can make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition. To learn more, reach out to us today!
Inflation, like an invisible force, silently shapes the dynamics of economies, gradually eroding the purchasing power of consumers and leaving its imprint on various industries. High costs, hiring lags, and stagnating earnings pose severe challenges to businesses. One industry segment that intimately feels the impact of inflation is grocery, where price increases can be extremely concerning for the average consumer.
Over the last 12-plus months, the US has experienced a notable rise in inflation, stirring up concerns and influencing the way we shop for everyday essentials. Rising costs of raw materials, transportation, and labor have all played a role in driving up prices. Additionally, disruptions in global supply chains and fluctuations in currency exchange rates have further exacerbated the situation, creating a complex web of interdependencies.
To understand the magnitude of this phenomenon across leading e-retailers, we delved into an in-depth analysis of four major retail giants: Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Kroger.
Each of these retailers possesses a unique business model and competitive strategy, as well as faces unique challenges. This leads to distinct approaches to managing inflationary pressures. Walmart for instance, expects operating income growth to outpace sales growth in 2023. Given the persistence of high prices and the potential for further macro pressures, the retailer is taking a cautious outlook. In 2022, Amazon’s eCommerce business swung to a net loss of $2.7 billion, compared to a profit of $33.4 billion the previous year.
Amid these challenging circumstances, understanding the grocery pricing trends and strategies becomes imperative for retailers, both online and in stores to adapt and thrive in the current economic landscape. By examining their pricing trends, we can gain valuable insights into how these companies navigate the turbulent waters of the grocery industry against the backdrop of inflation.
Our Research Methodology
The data collected for our analysis encompassed a diverse range of products, from pantry staples like flour and rice to perishable goods like dairy and produce – a basket of around 600 SKUs matched across Amazon, Kroger, Target and Walmart, between January 2022 to February 2023.
Further, we separately focused on the prices of a smaller subset of 30+ high-volume daily staples that are likely to yield higher sales and margins for these retailers.
Average Selling Price of a Broad Set of Grocery Items
Our analysis reveals that Walmart consistently offers the lowest prices, with an average of 8% below its closest competitor, Target, despite an annual price increase of about 5%. Walmart seems to prioritize a “stability and predictability” strategy over margin optimization. The retailer’s 8% growth last quarter indicates that this strategy is bearing fruit. However, it’s important to note that this approach may have its drawbacks as Walmart’s margins come under pressure.
Average selling price trend across a basket of 500+ SKUs across Target, Walmart, Kroger, Amazon in the grocery category from Jan ’22 to Feb ’23.
In order to weather inflationary pressures, Walmart may adopt a cautious approach to growth while also focusing on securing margins. Reports suggest that the retailer has been pushing back against consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers following a series of price hikes to counter inflationary cost pressures in early 2023. One of the reasons behind Walmart’s growth and increased sales can be attributed to ‘non-traditional’ higher-income households now seeking deals and discounts at Walmart as their spending power declines.
Interestingly, Amazon emerges as the highest-priced retailer, followed by Kroger, which increased its prices by 10% throughout the year. Consumer perception commonly associates Amazon with the lowest prices, but the data tells a different story. In fact, Amazon has been charging 12% to 18% higher prices than Walmart for groceries and is still maintaining its success.
While the company’s online sales declined by 4%, it saw a significant 9% increase in revenue from third-party seller services, such as warehousing, packaging, and delivery, in 2022. Amazon’s strong logistics and same-day delivery services give it a competitive advantage over other retailers, contributing to its revenue growth and margins. Interestingly, this presents an opportunity for Walmart and other retailers to increase prices while maintaining their strong competitive price positions.
Kroger, on the other hand, seems to be aiming for a premium price perception, consistently raising prices almost every month. Kroger’s pricing strategy appears to be closer to Amazon’s.
Average Selling Price for High-Volume Daily Staples
Pricing strategies often change for different categories of products. To better understand this, we focused our analysis further on a small subset of 30+ high-volume staples across retailers. These include baked goods, popular beverages, canned food, frozen meals, dairy, cereals, detergents, and other similar items.
Average selling price trend of 30+ high-volume daily staples across Target, Walmart, Kroger, Amazon in the grocery category from Jan ’22 to Feb ’23.
Walmart, possibly overestimating the impact of inflation, has continued to keep its prices the lowest, potentially aiming to increase margins through volume.
The level of price disparity across retailers is expectedly lower here, with Amazon and Kroger closely tracking Walmart’s average prices.
Target’s pricing strategy stands out as it consistently emerges as the highest-priced retailer for daily staples, despite being one of the lower-priced retailers for a broader basket of grocery items. This suggests that Target’s underlying technology may not be as optimized to address market dynamics compared to other leading retailers. In our opinion, Target may want to strengthen its efforts to track pricing more intensely for this sub-category.
A Data-fuelled Approach is the Need of the Hour
In the challenging economic landscape, retailers and grocery stores are under pressure to maintain their revenues and margins. Adopting a comprehensive and dynamic pricing strategy is crucial. Understanding which product categories are experiencing price increases among competitors can help retailers make informed decisions on pricing at both the category and product level.
Retailers should consider their balancing margin performance with consumers’ willingness to pay, rather than implementing broad price increases that may harm customer trust. Price increases can be challenging for both customers and merchants. Retailers who employ a data-driven and insight-based approach are more likely to succeed.
Keep an eye on the DataWeave blog for analysis on pricing, discounting, stock availability, discoverability, and more, across retailers and brands from other industry segments as well.
Contrary to popular speculation of lukewarm online sales owing to the weak economy, high inflation, and stretched wallets, Black Friday this year recorded a whopping $9 billion in e-commerce sales. Despite the lull in online shopping across many retailers in the months preceding Thanksgiving and weakened consumer sentiment, US online merchants saw a sizable boost in sales during and after Thanksgiving, albeit at a slower growth of 2.3%, as reported by Adobe Analytics.
This article looks closely at the Black Friday data to understand which brands, retailers, and product categories were key players. Through DataWeave’s innovative Digital Shelf Analytics product, we deep dive into the availability, discount, and share-of-search data to deduce why some product categories and retailers fared better than others.
Who: Retailers and Brands that had the Highest Presence
Black Friday sales this year were driven by consumers grabbing the biggest and best deals to make the most of their already stretched wallets. Many shoppers opted for flexible payment schemes, and Buy Now Pay Later (BPNL) payments rose by 78% compared to the week before Thanksgiving. Surprisingly, Amazon, which was the most searched retailer during Black Friday last year, came only fourth this year, as reported by the Search Intelligence company, Captify.
According to Captify, Walmart was the most searched retailer for Black Friday deals, followed by Target, Kohls, and Amazon in that order. Amazon, however, has reported its biggest Thanksgiving sale this year, with independent retailers selling through Amazon seeing a total sales of $1 billion. With the economic slowdown and thin wallets looming large, discount rates greatly influenced consumer spending. Mobile shopping accounted for 55% of digital sales, 8.5% more than the previous year.
As told by Adobe, Electronics were the significant sales driver, reporting 221% higher sales than in October this year, with smart home items and audio equipment playing an important role with 271% and 230% higher sales. Toys ( popular purchases were Fortnite, Roblox, Bluey, Funko Pop!, and Disney Encanto) and exercise equipment also registered a substantial growth of 285% and 218%, respectively.
Other top-selling items included gaming consoles (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 devices, games including FIFA 23, NBA 2k23, and Pokemon Scarlet & Violet), drones, Apple MacBooks, and Dyson products (airwrap and vacuum). Amazon’s most popular items were reported to be Apple Airpods, Nintendo Switches, Echo Dot smart speakers, and Fire TV sticks.
What: Top Selling Product Categories
Electronics, closely followed by home appliances (robotic vacuum cleaners), toys, and exercise equipment, were popular product categories in demand during Black Friday this year. Several retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kohls, BestBuy, and Home Depot, offered lucrative pre-Black Friday discounts to trigger early sales kick-off.
Amazon carried an early discount of 50% on its Echo smart speaker, Target offered 30% off on Dyson vacuum cleaners, Walmart offered 25-35% off on Apple ipads and watches, and Kohls offered 51% off on the iRobot Roomba.
Amazon’s top ten best-selling products ranged from Amazon devices like Echo Dot speakers, Fire TV sticks, and Echo Show to Apple AirPods, Nintendo Switches, New Balance sneakers, Champion Apparel, and Burt’s Bees Lotions. The popular product categories were home, fashion, toys, beauty & health, and Amazon devices. Consumers heavily supported small businesses, contributing to $1 billion in sales. Top sellers from small businesses included card and board games.
Briefly correlating the discounts offered with the best-selling product categories, one can notice that the deals have largely influenced Black Friday sales this year. Popular categories are those that have had deep discounts, reflecting the consumer’s tendency to wait and grab the best deals.
How: Role of Digital Shelf Analytics – Key Performance Indicators
DataWeave’s Analysis Methodology
We have seen a summary of the Black Friday 2022 statistics – sales recorded, top-selling products, product categories, and retailers. Using DataWeave’s e-commerce analytics product, we track and study the variations in digital shelf KPIs across retailers before Thanksgiving and during Thanksgiving to understand how these influence sales.
Availability scores, discount rates, and share of search data are analyzed for top retailers in the US for key product categories. Data is tracked and analyzed across two time periods – before Thanksgiving (Nov 10 – Nov 21) and during Thanksgiving (Nov 21 – Nov 25).
Methodology
Retailers tracked: Amazon, Best Buy, Sephora, Target, Ulta, Walmart
Product Categories tracked: Electronics, Home Improvement, Beauty, Furniture
Digital Shelf KPIs tracked: Availability, Discount rates, Share of Search
Location: USA
Amazon maintained good availability across all product categories – Beauty ranks the highest.
Salient Insights
Amazon maintained good overall availability – an improvement of 3% over Prime day.
Beauty had the highest availability of 95%, with none and Lotion & Brushes reporting 97% and 95% availability, respectively. Shampoo reported the lowest availability at 92%
Home Improvement had the least availability at 87%, with dishwashers (68%) and washers and dryers (78%) having the lowest availability.
Unlike Furniture and Home Improvement, most categories maintained similar availability scores before and during Black Friday.
Furniture improved its availability during Black Friday by 4%, while Home Improvement reported a decrease in availability during Black Friday by 4%.
Electronics, which was a major sales driver, had an availability of > 90% across all sub-categories except for Television, which had a low availability of 70%
Tables and chairs registered 99% availability under Furniture
The above data indicates that Amazon ensured the high availability of utility products that consumers would buy even during a slow economy. Other retailers showed similar availability trends, with scores being similar prior to and during the event.
Discounts Drove Sales – Best Buy offered the Highest Discounts
Highlights
Best Buy offered the highest early Black Friday discount of 30%, followed by an additional 9% discount around Black Friday. Walmart followed next with 21% early discounts and an extra 4.5% discount during the event. Amazon came next with 17% early discounts and a 5% discount during Black Friday. Discount rates seem to strongly correlate with online searches, with Walmart beating Amazon this year as the most searched retailer for Black Friday deals.
Electronics was the most discounted category across Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, with an average discount of 21%. Walmart gave lower deals on electronics (12%). Electronics also had heavy early discounts of 12%, with most retailers giving an additional discount of 7-8% closer to Thanksgiving.
Best Buy offered early discounts of 10% and further upped their discounts by another 12% closer to Thanksgiving. Being the most discounted category, electronics was also a significant sales driver this Black Friday.
Amazon offered the highest discounts for Beauty products (18%), followed by Ulta at 10% and Walmart at 8%. Sephora and Target gave minimal discounts on beauty products (3%)
Best Buy gave the maximum discounts on Home Improvement products (16%), followed by Amazon at 14%. Walmart gave much lower discounts of 7% on Home Improvement products.
Furniture is another category with 12-13% discounts at both Amazon and Walmart.
Best Buy’s strategy this year has been to offer heavily discounted early deals to boost their sales.
Airpods and headphones were the most discounted item under Electronics, with Amazon and Target offering a whopping 27-29% discount. This clearly resulted in heavy sales of AirPods this Thanksgiving.
Best Buy and Target had good discounts on all electronic items, while Amazon gave heavier discounts on AirPods, headphones, and smartwatches.
Walmart did not offer hefty discounts on laptops and headphones, instead focused on Smartwatches, smartphones, and television.
In Home improvement, Best Buy offered the biggest discounts for refrigerators, washers and dryers, and dishwashers, while Amazon focussed more on Tools.
Walmart did not offer many discounts in this category.
Amazon topped the discount charts for maximum combined discounts for makeup and hair brushes on the day of the event.
All retailers offered better discounts for utility products like tables, chairs, and cots (~15-17%), while dressers and couches carried lower discounts (~6-10%).
Highlights
Different companies had different discount strategies based on price buckets.
Amazon gave heavier discounts in the lower price buckets (< 200$) and lower discounts for products priced higher than 200$.
Best Buy offered the heaviest early discounts of >25% on products priced under 20$ but provided a few additional discounts during the event. For products priced higher than 20$, Best Buy uniformly offered substantial early discounts as well as further discounts during the event.
On the other hand, Target focussed on mid and high-priced items, offering heavy early discounts of 16-18% on products priced higher than 100$ and early discounts of ~7% for middle and lower-priced items. For middle-priced products (40-100$), it offered heavier discounts of 10-12% during the event.
Walmart focussed on mid-priced products, offering the highest discounts (both early (~12%) and additional discounts (5%)). It offered the least discounts (~8-9%) on products priced higher than 200$.
Share of Search – Amazon is the only retailer with sponsored searches; Apple AirPods rule the roost.
Salient Insights
Amazon is the only retailer with sponsored searches, with HP, Lenovo laptops, and Apple AirPods occupying the highest share. This correlates with AirPods being one of the most sold products.
HP laptops had the highest share on Amazon pre-Event but gave the spot to Lenovo during Thanksgiving.
Tracphone and Motorola smartphones, Insignia Televisions, and JBL headphones had a good SoS on Amazon.
On Best Buy, HP and Dell laptops featured most in searches, with HP ruling the roost during the event. Lenovo had a small presence.
Samsung smartwatches, televisions, and Apple AirPods have a big chunk of the search at Best Buy.
On Target, pop sockets, smartphones, Apple smartwatches, headphones, and AirPods have the most prominent presence. Apple was the most featured brand in this segment.
Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (makeup, lotion, shampoo, hair dryers and hair brushes) of Beauty.
Salient Insights
Amazon, Target, Sephora, and Ulta sold beauty products, with Amazon being the only retailer with sponsored products.
Ogx, bs-mall, conair, hywestger were popular brands on Amazon, with interest-based ads occupying a substantial part of the search results, especially in Lotions (~40-50%)
Tresemme, Scotch Brite, Revlon and Cerave were popular brands in Target
Dyson products (brushes and hair dryers) are featured at Ulta’s top of the search, followed by Pureology shampoos.
Sephora’s own collection of brushes featured prominently on their website both before and during the event, followed by Dyson and T3 brushes and hair dryers.
Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (refrigerator, washers/dryers, dishwashers, tools and coolers) of Home Improvements.
Salient Insights
In Amazon, Frigidaire and RCA had the highest SoS amongst Refrigerators, and LG occupied the highest share among washers and dryers, Coleman in Coolers, Dewalt in Tools, and Comfee in Dishwashers, both before and during Black Friday.
In contrast, on Best Buy, Samsung had the highest share of SoS amongst Refrigerators, package deals were most prominent in washers and dryers, LG among dishwashers, ifixit in Tools, and Corsair in Coolers.
Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (bed, chair, couch, dresser, and table) of Furniture.
Salient Insights
Interest-based ads occupied the highest SoS on Amazon for Beds.
Urban shop and Amazon basics were popular in Chairs, Lifestyle in Couches, WLive in Dressers both before and during the event.
Vasagle was more popular during the event than Furrion in Tables, though the reverse was true prior to the event.
Summary & Key Takeaways
Black Friday this year was a pleasant surprise to Brands and Retailers, reporting much larger sales than predicted. After experiencing a slump in sales in the months leading up to Thanksgiving, e-commerce vendors have a reason to be optimistic about their holiday season sales forecasts.
A record-breaking $9.2 Billion in online sales was reported by Adobe Analytics, a growth of 2.3 % compared to the previous year.
Mobile shopping accounted for 55% of digital sales, a rise of 8.5% compared to last year.
Retailers wooed customers through deep discounts (~30%) prior to Thanksgiving and around Black Friday. Heavily discounted items like Apple AirPods were the most popular.
Thanks to inflation and stretched wallets, consumers were willing to spend but waited to grab the best and biggest deals. Utility products had better sales.
With tough competition between retailers on who offers the best discounts, Amazon slid down to the fourth position, and Walmart was the most searched retailer.
DataWeave, through its Digital Shelf Analytics and Commerce Intelligence solutions, gleans useful insights from e-commerce data and breaks down trends during global shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. If you are a brand or a retailer who would like to know more about our products and solutions, contact us at contact@dataweave.com.
By 2028, Fortune Business Insights projects that the global bakery products market will reach USD 590 billion. The CAGR (Compounded annual growth rate) for 2021-28 is estimated at 5.12%. Products in this segment include bread, buns, cookies, tortillas, salted snacks, English muffins, bagels, confectionery food, hot dogs, cakes, popcorn, and so on.
Due to disruptions in the global supply chain caused by lockdowns and border closures, the pandemic has had a negative impact on the demand for bakery products and snacks worldwide. However, the market is not only changing, but consumer demand is increasing. Post-pandemic, health, food, and safety have gained renewed attention.
People across the world are making healthier choices with a focus on wellness.
A growing number of people are interested in plant-based foods and beverages, reducing sugar consumption, and understanding the link between lifestyle and health, including obesity and diabetes. As a result of these trends, food producers are reshaping their product strategies to meet new consumer demands.
In this article, we take a look at the ways companies can leverage data to inform their e-commerce strategy.
What’s driving up the demand for bakery products?
More people are choosing easy-to-use bakery products and snacks over other foods due to urbanization, convenience, western diets, and women’s participation in the workforce. Additionally, innovations in baking systems, food technologies, ingredients, formulations, and product ideas are providing customers with a greater level of choice, flexibility, and freedom.
How is e-commerce changing the game for bakery product companies?
To optimize their supply chains, bakery food and snack companies must better understand e-commerce metrics given the wide variety of products available and eventually convert sales. There are several measures that companies need to pay attention to.
Stock availability metrics, discounts across locations, and share of search results – are all critical metrics companies need to track. In addition to providing manufacturers and retailers with an insight into the trends, DataWeave’s tools also allow them to make better business decisions and ultimately improve their bottom line.
Grocery Retailers and Bakery Brands tracked
Methodology
Data Scrape period: February 2022 to September 2022
Category tracked: Bread and Bakery, Chips, Crackers, Deserts, Snacks.
Share of Search Analysis
Which brands feature the most on e-commerce portals?
When listing items on e-commerce platforms, share of search is crucial. The highest share of the top ten or top twenty items available on these platforms is correlated with how many times the item may be viewed. As a result, it would have a greater chance of being selected by the customer.
By Retailer for Category “Desserts”
Share of Search for Brands in each retailer
In Walmart Grocery, Vachon has the highest share of search at 41%, whereas Betty Crocker, Presidents Choice and No Name had the lowest share of search at 0%, in the Desserts Category.
In Loblaws, Presidents Choice had the highest share of search of 34%, whereas Dempsters had the lowest share of search of 2% in the Desserts Category.
The brand Presidents Choice consistently ranks high in the share of search results for Desserts across multiple retailers, including Atlantic Superstore, Fortinos, Instacart, Loblaws, and Zehrs – except at two retailers, Voila and Watlmart Grocery, where its share is zero.
Trend of Share of Search for “Desserts”
Share of Search analysis by Brands over Time in category “Desserts”
Share of search had dropped by around 4% for No Name, whereas for Vachon, it increased by 3% from Jan’-22 to Sep’ 22
By brands, Presidents Choice had the highest share of search at 42%, whereas Betty Crocker had the lowest share of search at 12% between Jan’ 22 and Sep’ 22 in the Desserts Category.
Availability Analysis
Which products are widely available across e-commerce portals?
The availability of the product on the e-commerce portal is one of the key indicators of meeting customer demand. Brands can use insights from DataWeave to strategize how to restock their inventory and ease customer demand. Based on data analysis, brands can also determine which products to prioritize on which platforms.
By Category
Availability analysis by Category over Time
Availability of all five categories was around 52% in Feb’ 22, which steadily increased to 61% until Aug’ 22 and has reduced to reach 55% availability in Sep’ 22
Sliced Bread category has seen the most drop in availability by 12% between Jun’ 22 and Sep’ 22
The tortilla category has the most rise in availability. It has increased by 16% between Feb-22 and May-22. It also showed an overall rise in availability of 5% from Feb-22 to Sep-22
By Location
Availability analysis by Location and Category
Across categories, Snacks & Candy had better availability at 73% than Bread & Bakery, with 56% availability.
By Location, New Brunswick had more than 65% availability across all three categories; the closest Location is Nova Scotia, with 63% availability.
Alberta had the highest availability of 100% in the Snacks & Candy category and the lowest availability of 21% overall in all three categories (weighted aggregate)
Discounts Analysis
Several discount-based insights can be studied on e-commerce platforms. From location-based trends, retailer-based trends, and manufacturer-based insights. These insights can help companies make the most of the revenue opportunity while creating an attractive value proposition for the retail consumer.
By Category
Discount analysis by Category
Discounts of all three categories were around 24% in Feb’ 22, which steadily reduced to reach 15% in Sep’ 22
Snacks, cookies & chips category has contributed the most to the drop in discounting, which dropped by 17% between Apr’ 22 and Sep’ 22
The Tortilla Category does not have any discount in the month of Jul’ 22
By Retailer
Discount on Bread & Bakery category in Walmart Grocery was around 9% in Feb’ 22. It steadily increased to 13% by Jun’ 22 and thereon reduced to reach 11% availability in Sep’ 22.
By Location
Across Retailers, Nova Scotia had the highest availability of discounts at 22%, whereas New Brunswick had the lowest with discounts at 9% in Bread & Bakery category.
Discount analysis by Retailers and Locations – Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia Note: Analysis does not cover all locations
Bakery and snack product manufacturers on e-commerce platforms have access to a rich trove of insights they can leverage to benchmark their strategies. They can better understand customer demands, align their supply chain and critically understand the trends impacting their bottom line. Engaging with a third-party platform like DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics can help brands unlock tremendous value.
Analyzing Search, Promotions and Availability for Chocolates, Biscuits, and Malt Drinks across BigBasket, Blinkit, Dmart, Swiggy etc.
Imagine you log into an e-commerce portal with a list of food items you need for the month. You know what you want, and scroll through the platform to see if there are any discounts. You check competitor products to see if you can get better deals. And within no time, fill your cart with products that you need and proceed to check out.
It all happens quickly. It’s an online shopping experience that we are familiar with. But what exactly is happening in the background?
Brands are tracking and ensuring the highest keyword ranking, optimal availability and competitive discounts to grab your order. And to enable this, Brands rely on Digital Shelf Analytics.
Here, we take a closer look at some of the key factors that Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Brands on e-commerce platforms need to pay attention to – to ensure their products appear on the top of search items, to better understand competitor discounts and to monitor the availability of their products across regions.
FMCG has experienced rapid growth in the last two years, largely attributed to digitalization, changing consumer habits, and increased spending post-pandemic. Macro factors, including government impetus, inflationary pressures, and consumption recovery, indicate a double digital growth for FMCG brands in the country. According to NielsenIQ’s FMCG Snapshot for Q2 2022, the FMCG industry has grown by 10.9% in the quarter ending June 2022, compared to 6% in the previous quarter. In the second half of 2022, consumers are expected to spend even more during the festive season. With these shifts underway, the growth opportunities in this sector can only be exploited by companies that can sense trends early – and take appropriate action.
In addition to providing manufacturers and retailers with actionable insights into e-commerce trends, DataWeave’s tools also allow them to make informed business decisions and ultimately improve their bottom line. Data-driven insights on e-commerce products can help brands optimize their supply chain to maximize sales. A company can determine the key areas that need attention based on an analysis of the availability of products on specific e-commerce channels, associated discounts, as well as zip-code level demand and supply statistics.
Here are a few sample insights and trend analyses for some popular FMCG brands in the Biscuits, Chocolate and Malt drinks categories spotted by DataWeave.
Analytics Methodology: An overview of the data set analyzed
What is the availability of Biscuits, Chocolate and Malt Drinks on e-commerce portals?
The availability of a product on an e-commerce marketplace is a key indicator of whether the product meets consumer demands. DataWeave’s availability analytics can be leveraged by FMCG brands to strategize their inventory and stock planning. Brands can also make data-driven decisions on product visibility, i.e. identify which products to prioritize on which platforms.
Biscuits had a better availability at 63% when compared to chocolates at 56% across all retailers
Dmart and Swiggy had more than 85% availability across all three categories, with Bigbasket coming next at 67% availability
Flipkart Grocery and Blinkit had the lowest availability at 46% and 50%, respectively.
Figure 1: Availability Scores for Biscuits, Chocolates and Malt Drinks across Retailers
Which manufacturers have the highest availability of products on e-commerce platforms?
A study of the availability of products across different manufacturers can reveal brands that have successfully tapped the market opportunity. Here’s a look at brands that have steadily improved their availability on e-commerce platforms.
Figure 2: Availability Trends for Biscuits across Manufacturers
In the biscuits category, all five manufacturers marked approximately 50% availability in Jan 2022. Availability steadily grew to 68% in June 2022, then declined to 63% in Aug 2022.
Unibic experienced the largest drop in availability, dropping 15% between May 22 and Aug 22.
Mondelez saw the largest rise in availability, an increase of 23% between Mar-22 and Aug-22.
Figure 3: Availability Trends for Malt Drinks across Manufacturers
Except for Boost and Nestle, availability for all seven manufacturers of malt drinks was consistently above 50%. The average availability across all manufacturers rose gradually from 55% in Jan to 63% in Jul-22, followed by a small decline to 57% in August.
From 30% availability in January 22 to a mere 7% in August 22, Boost has seen the greatest drop in availability.
The availability of Amul has risen the most over the past year, rising from 51% in January 22 to 78% in August 22, hitting 80% in July 22.
Chocolate: Which manufacturers have the highest availability of products on the e-commerce platforms?
Figure 4: Availability Trends for Chocolates across Manufacturers
Chocolate availability across all manufacturers averaged 47% in Jan-22, reaching a peak of 64% in May-22 and dropping to 51% in Aug-22.
From 46% in Jan-22 to 74% in May, Mondelez saw the biggest increase in availability, followed by a decline to 68% in August.
Ferrero experienced one of the sharpest drops in availability. Although the brand’s availability steadily grew from 77% in Jan 22 to 94% in Jul 22., it registered a steep drop to 49% in August.
The drop in availability hurts the Brand’s eCommerce in two ways. Not only does the Brand lose sales directly. But poor availability also impacts the keyword search ranking, which further hurts the sales.
Check out DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Product for insights on how Availability tracking can help reduce stock-outs and boost sales. Click here to know more.
Discount Analysis
Location-based, retailer-based, and manufacturer-based discount trends can be analyzed. These studies can help companies plan attractive and appropriate promotional and discount strategies to enhance their revenue opportunities.
Which manufacturer has been offering the most discounts?
A study of discounts offered across manufacturers for chocolates, malt drinks and biscuits indicates that some brands have increased their discounts while others have reduced their discount rates. These decisions could be triggered by demand, availability, and production cycle. Parle, for example, has steadily reduced its discount rates.
Figure 5: Discount Rate Trends across Manufacturers
Average discount rates across manufacturers were around 9% in Jan 2022 and rose steadily to reach 14% in Jul 2022. A small decline is observed post-July, with a 12% discount rate registered in Aug 2022.
In the biscuit category, Unibic offered the biggest discount of 28%, followed by ITC at 20%.
In the Chocolate category, Hershey’s offered the largest discount of 14%, followed by ITC at 12%.
In the Malt Drink Category, Amul offered the largest discount of 16%, followed by Boost at about 10%.
Check out DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics Product for insights to respond to Competitor’s pricing and promotions. Click here to know more.
Share of Search Analysis
Which brands feature within the top 5 on the first page of the search?
A product that appears within the top 5 items on the first page of a search, has a higher probability of being purchased. Below is a study of the share of the search for biscuits across manufacturers and retailers.
Figure 6: Share of Search for Biscuits across Manufacturers and Retailers
Britannia dominates the top ten share of search across different online retail platforms.
Mondelez has the highest share of search at 62% in Amazon Fresh, whereas Parle-G has the lowest share of search at 7%.
In Bigbasket, Britannia has the highest search share of 62%, whereas Parle-G has the lowest search share of 7%.
Check out DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics to track the Share of Keyword and Navigation Search. Click here to know more.
Conclusion
FMCG is a rapidly evolving industry sector with a high potential for growth in the coming years. FMCG brands must compete with one another to fully tap this market opportunity on several factors to ensure that their products are visible, available, and attractive to consumers. Digital crawling and big data technologies have enabled manufacturers and retailers to collect publicly available e-commerce data for useful, actionable insights and trend analysis. To stay competitive, it is crucial for manufacturers and retailers to engage with analytics and data experts to seamlessly integrate e-commerce analytics into their short- and long-term business strategies. Whether it’s building keywords to increase the share of search, knowing the right discounts to attract customers in a particular city or increasing the availability of products on specific e-commerce platforms, companies need to invest in the right data intelligence!
DataWeave for FMCG Brands
DataWeave has been working with global CPG/FMCG brands, helping them drive their growth on eCommerce platforms by enabling them to monitor their key metrics, diagnose improvement areas, recommend action, and measure interventions’ impact. DataWeave’s KPIs enable Brands to fill in the blind spots in their funnel data and allows them to respond to competitors on a near-real-time basis.
If you want to know to learn how your brand can leverage DataWeave’s data insights and improve sales, then click here to sign up for a demo
Alcohol eCommerce has been rapidly growing over the years, and like a lot of other industries, the pandemic accelerated its growth. Convenience, safety & home delivery became important criteria for customers in the post pandemic era and so the sale of alcohol via eCommerce went up. Kantar reported that UK booze sales were up £261m & online and convenience stores were the biggest winners. The latest IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Report 2022 reported on another interesting trend – when ordering alcohol online, consumers prefer using websites v/s apps in most parts of the world except China and Brazil. In the UK the largest chunk of online alcohol purchases happens on a retailer website instead of an app.
Platform used for last online alcohol purchase. Source
To get a better understanding of this, we tracked 2 grocery retailers and 3 grocery Q-Commerce apps in the UK to get insights into Alcohol sales, pricing, trends & more!
Which retailer was the Price Leader in the alcohol category?
Before the pandemic Tesco was the only Big 4 retailer to increase their alcohol market share & Waitrose was the biggest loser, with its share of booze sales falling from 5.4% to 4.7%. Maintaining Price Leadership is a critical element and plays a big role in increasing sales & market share because consumers will buy the most competitively priced product. We wanted to track and see which retailer was the Price Leader in the alcohol category – i.e., had the most number of lower-priced items in the alcohol category. We also wanted to see if & how Tesco’s position had changed post pandemic.
Price Leadership
Tesco enjoyed price leadership in the Alcohol category from Feb – June 2022 with 38.9% products priced the lowest. This, followed by Ocado at 33.8%. Gorillas had price leadership for the least amount of products in the alcohol category at 5.6%. Tesco was the clear winner!
Tesco’s Price Leadership kept declining through the months though – at the beginning of the year in Feb, Tesco had 44% products priced the lowest but by June, that number fell to a little over 36%. Ocado showed a reverse trend – in Feb they had price leadership on 32% items and by June that number rose to 35.3%.
One player Tesco could’ve potentially lost price leadership to was Getir. In Feb, Getir had price leadership on only 8.2% products but that increased gradually over the months to land on 14.5% in June.
Which retailers focused on Discounts to perk up alcohol sales?
Discounts are a great way to draw in inflation-hit shoppers. Loyalty card discounts, reward vouchers, and other promotional strategies retailers offer help make their products more competitive & attractive to customers. To stay competitive, retailers need to be aware of the discounts their competition is offering. They also need to understand the risk of deep discounting and the impact on margins. We wanted an insight into alcohol related discounts in the UK so we dug into our data. Here’s what we saw.
Average discounts across months by retailers
A host of European and UK based startups like Jiffy, Dija, Weezy, Zapp, Getir & Gorillas launched with the promise of delivering groceries the fastest & cheapest.
Our data showed that Gorillas offered discounts in line with the competition, however, Getir likely went the deep discounting route.
Getir offered the highest discounts across all months. And in the month of April they offered almost 9% more discount than Ocado – the retailer with the 2nd highest discounts. Like we discussed above, Getir gained price Leadership from Feb to June. Deep discounting could have potentially played a role.
Gorillas on the other hand had the lowest, almost non-existent discounts.
Let’s look at Price Index trends across 5 months
We tracked the Price Index (PI) across these 5 retailers to measure how alcohol prices changed over a 5 month period from Feb – June 2022.
Note: Retailers selling at the 100% mark were selling at an optimal price & did not undercut the market. The pricing sweet spot is 95% – 105%. Anything lower would compromise margins, and higher would mean the retailer was not competitive.
Price Index across months by retailers
Weezy had a Price Index that was the most optimal, sitting in the 100% – 102% range.
Gorillas had the lowest Price Index, between 89% – 91%.
Getir had a low price index in Feb (96.1%) but slowly kept increasing to cross 110% in April, May & June.
What was interesting to see was the competition between the 2 retail giants Ocado & Tesco. Ocado had a lower price index at the start of the year at 105.1%, while Tesco was at 109.8%. In the subsequent months, Ocado kept increasing prices to be competitive with Tesco and Tesco decreased prices to likely match Ocado’s pricing. By June BOTH Tesco & Ocado had the exactly the same price index – 108.7%
Which retailers were the quickest to make price changes?
Competitive pricing is critical to eCommerce success. Competitive pricing involves tracking your competitor’s pricing & strategically tweaking your own prices without hurting margins. We tracked the month-wise average Price change from Feb – June across all 5 retailers to see which retailer was making price changes and at what frequency.
Average price change across months by retailers
Most retailers did not make massive prices changes, they were ballpark competitive with each other from a pricing standpoint.
However, Gorillas made significant changes in the month of March when they dropped prices by 3.8% and in May when they increased prices by 5.5%!
In May, the same month Gorillas made a big price hike, Weezy dropped their prices significantly by 10% widening the gap between the 2 retailers.
Which retailers avoided lost sales by maintaining stock availability?
Our data showed varying availability levels across retailers with Ocado having the highest availability across all 5 months. They had a robust stock at the beginning of the year at 100% but kept dwindling through the months to land at 95.8% by June.
Tesco had a sharp drop in availability in May & June – from 97% at the beginning of the year to the 92-93% range.
Gorillas had the lowest availability across months between 90 & 94%.
Weezy consistently maintained availability at 95% across all 5 months.
Conclusion
For the most part, the UK market has a positive outlook towards buying alcohol online thanks to changes to shopper behavior arising from the pandemic. As per the IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Report 2022 in website-led markets, such as the UK, breadth of product range is important to customers along with price. These 2 play a key factor in purchase decisions. By contrast, consumers in app-driven markets have different preferences. While price matters, it is less important than convenience and speed.
As an alcohol retailer, if you need help tracking your competitor prices, discounts and product assortment, reach out to the team at DataWeave to learn how we can help!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
Consumers are discovering and trialing new eCommerce marketplaces, brands and products at a faster rate than ever before, given the vast amount of choices encountered browsing for products online. A recent analysis shows how events like Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are especially fruitful for new-to-brand customer advertising, encouraging B2C marketers to increase their digital advertising spend to fuel product discovery, sales and market share for their brands.
The majority of eCommerce consumers are discovering products via relevant keywords attributable to their needs, with most clicks happening on page one results for the first few products listed. Simplifying the digital shopping experience is critical for brands to be in the consideration set for the majority of consumers who won’t venture past page one results.
An internal analysis conducted shows getting a product to page one on retailer websites can improve sales by as much as 50 percent, but figuring out the right levers to pull to get there organically—without paid advertising—is a real challenge, especially given fast-changing algorithms. While more than half of all retail related online browsing sessions are “organic”, sometimes brands need to boost their product visibility by investing in sponsored (paid) opportunities to improve a product’s rank.
Data analytics can equip brands with intelligence to help them decide when, where, and how to make digital advertising investments profitably, while simultaneously acting on insights that help drive organic growth. Considering a majority of U.S. consumers begin their product discovery on marketplaces like Amazon, it makes sense for brands to prioritize digital advertising opportunities with Amazon.
Maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads
Brands use Amazon Ads to drive brand awareness, acquire new customers, drive sales and gain market share, with the goal of furthering their marketing return on investment. Top performing advertisers average 40 percent greater year-on-year (YoY) sales growth, 50 percent greater YoY growth in customer product page viewership on Amazon, and 30 percent higher returns on ad spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads, according to a recent analysis. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display are among the types of Amazon Ads options cited that produce maximum return.
Ensuring your product listings appear at the top of page one results on Amazon for the most relevant discovery keywords is therefore the most important determinant for maximizing ROAS. DataWeave has become a vetted partner and measurement provider in the Amazon Advertising Partner Network, with the goal of supporting brands to optimize digital advertising campaigns by providing visibility to Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) key performance indicators (KPIs), like Share of Search, Pricing and Product Availability, Content Audits, Ratings and Reviews, and Sales Performance and Market Share.
Below is a summary of how our Digital Shelf solutions, in partnership with Amazon Ads, can improve the performance of your Amazon Ads campaigns
1. Keyword Recommendations Improve Share of Search
With the DataWeave Share of Search solution, brands can monitor their placement of both organic and paid discovery keywords relative to their competition. Once your keywords are determined, you are also provided a weighted Share of Search score that helps measure how well each keyword performs relative to product discoverability. Below is an example of insights you’d gain.
Share of Keyword Search
Brands can provide their own list of keywords to monitor, or through our Amazon Ads collaborative solution, learn which keywords are the “best” for them to measure in the realm of Amazon. Performance results are based on data that shows which keywords consumers are actually using when browsing online alongside other keywords brands request to measure. Users are able to see exactly which keywords are most popular, competitive (and even unexpected), and relevant at an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) level of granularity.
We can also estimate the degree of relevance and estimated traffic for the recommended keywords. Brands can then use these insights to adjust campaign strategies based on these parameters, which can boost product discoverability and rank visibility. A brand could assume people find its products by brand name, yet traffic insights may reveal a majority of people look for a generic product type before they end up buying that particular brand.
Strong product content is critical to succeeding on Amazon. Thorough, accurate, and descriptive content leads to better click through rates (CTR), conversion rates, more positive reviews, and fewer returns, which results in increased discoverability. DataWeave’s Content Audit solution reviews existing copy and images on a per-attribute basis to highlight any gaps essential to improving visibility, as seen in the example below.
Content Analysis
To further growth, it is equally as important that your product content aligns with your advertising strategy. With Amazon Ads partner add-on, our solution can also audit your content to measure how effectively you are incorporating Amazon Ads keywords into your product content to enhance discovery relevancy.
3. Discover More Opportunities with Pricing and Product Availability Insights
Quality content and keyword updates will only get you so far if your products are not consistently available and priced competitively. With DataWeave’s Pricing and Promotions and Product Availability modules, advertisers can monitor their selling prices and availability trends alongside their competitors to uncover more opportunities to incorporate into advertising campaigns, as seen in the Pricing and Promotions dashboard example below.
Promotion Analysis
Additionally, product targeting recommendations can be utilized to target a competitor’s ASIN that may be overpriced or that is having issues staying in stock. Alternatively, broaden your strategy to target specific brands, complementary products, or category listing pages.
You can also create alerts on your own products to monitor when items are low on inventory or out of stock to ensure key products are consistently available when customers are shopping.
4. Leverage Ratings and Reviews to Increase Conversion
Product ratings and reviews are also a critical component to running a successful Amazon Ads campaign. A large number of reviews and a positive star rating will provide customers with the confidence to purchase, resulting in higher conversion rates. Conversely, negative feedback can have a detrimental impact, resulting in lost sales and wasted ad spend. DataWeave’s Ratings and Reviews module can help you monitor your reviews and extract attribute-level insights on your products. This information can then be utilized to further optimize your advertising strategy.
If you see consistent feedback in your reviews on aspects of a product not meeting customer expectations, address them in your product content to prevent potential misplaced expectations. Alternatively, if customer reviews are raving about certain product features, ensure these are promoted and relevant keywords are populated throughout your descriptions and feature bullets. Below is an example of insights seen within the DSA Ratings & Reviews dashboard.
Ratings and Reviews
5. Correlate Digital Shelf KPIs to Sales Performance and Market Share
The newest DSA module, Sales Performance and Market Share, provides SKU, sub-category, and brand-level sales and market share estimates on Amazon for brands and their competitors, via customer defined taxonomies, to easily benchmark performance results.
This data can also be correlated with other Digital Shelf KPIs, like Content Audit and Product Availability, giving brands an easy way to check the effect of attribute changes and how they impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how search rank, both organic and sponsored, affects sales and market share estimates.
Understanding the correlation between your advertising campaigns and your Digital Shelf brand visibility will help you identify which areas to prioritize to drive sales and win more market share.
Digital Shelf Insights Help Brands Win with Amazon Ads
The need for access to flexible, actionable eCommerce insights is growing exponentially as a way to help brands drive growth, increase their Share of Voice, and to gain a competitive edge. As a result, more global brands are seeking Digital Shelf Analytics for access to near real-time marketplace changes and to develop data-driven growth strategies that leverage pricing, merchandising, and competitive insights at scale.
By monitoring, measuring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) like Sales Performance and Market Share, Share of Search, Content Audits, Product Availability, Pricing and Promotions and Ratings and Reviews alongside competitors, brands will know what actions to take to boost brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and online sales.
DataWeave’s acceptance into the Amazon Advertising Partner Network enables Amazon advertisers to effectively build their Amazon growth strategies and determine systems that enable faster and smarter advertising and marketing decision-making to optimize product discoverability and overall results.
Connect with us now to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs, or for access to more details regarding our Amazon Ads Partnership or Digital Shelf solutions.
Amazon India’s much-awaited annual two-day shopping event, Prime Day, kicked off with a bang on July 23rd & 24th this year & was one of the most successful Prime Day events yet! Amazon reported that more than 32,000 sellers saw their highest ever sales day during the event. Interestingly 70% of these sellers who received orders during Prime Day were based in Tier 2 cities in India, further validating how the post-pandemic eCommerce boom has spread across the country. Also, Indian exporters saw 50% business growth on Amazon on Prime Day as customers across markets like North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan continued to purchase Made In India products. It was a great 2 days for Indian sellers, but what about customers who were waiting in anticipation for the great deals typically offered on Prime Day? We dug into our data to take a look at the deals, discounts, and brands that shone bright on Prime Day in India.
Methodology
In addition to Amazon IN, we also tracked Flipkart on 23 & 24th July 2022, on Prime Day.
We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime Day price.
We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.
Amazon v/s Flipkart – who offered better discounts?
Prime Day discounts are legendary. And across the globe, during Prime Day retailers try and compete to see if they can offer better deals than Amazon. Forbes even published an article on the 36 Prime Day competitor sales that were way more enticing than what Amazon had to offer. In India, we wanted to see if Amazon’s homegrown rival Flipkart might give it a tough fight, so we tracked the volume of discounts across categories on both retailers.
Discounts on Amazon & Flipkart across categories
Out of the 4 categories we tracked, in spite of Prime Day, Amazon offered discounts higher than Flipkart in only 2 categories – Electronics & Beauty.
… while Flipkart offered higher discounts than Amazon in the Grocery & Fashion category. For groceries, Flipkart offered a 3.2% additional discount v/s 2.2% on Amazon. However, in the Fashion category, the difference was marginal – 8.1% on Amazon v/s 8.6% on Flipkart
Post-event, both Amazon & Flipkart went back to the original pre-event prices. This made it clear that Flipkart was tracking and making price changes based on their closest competitor. It’s what smart eCommerce businesses do to stay ahead in the race.
Interestingly, post-event, in the fashion category, not only did Amazon revert to the original pre-event price, they even increased prices by close to 2%.
Let’s take a look at discounts across 4 categories & the Brands that WON in each category.
From Electronics to Fashion, Beauty & Groceries, let’s deep dive into the data to see which products were highly discounted within each category and brands that sprinted ahead to win the race on Amazon on Prime Day 2022.
Amazon India released highlights from Prime Day and reported that Smartphones & Electronics were among the categories that saw the most success in terms of units sold.
From the 6 product categories we tracked within electronics, we saw the highest additional discounts on Smartwatches (13.4%), followed by Bluetooth headphones (10.5%)
TV, Smartphones, cameras, and laptops had an additional discount of between 3 – 5.5%
On Prime Day 2022, Amazon India reported that the top-selling consumer electronics brands were HP, Lenovo, Asus, and Boat to name a few. Our assumption is, these brands must’ve had a high Share of Search (SoS), which played a massive role in increasing sales, so we looked into our data to see which brands had the highest SoS against specific keywords related to electronics.
Brand Visibility against the Keywords
Our data aligned with what Amazon reported. HP had high sales, perhaps because they occupied the premium #1 spot in the laptop category with a 44% SoS! Simply put, this means of the 100 laptops that appeared on a page, against a search for the keyword laptop, 44 products were listed by HP! Consumers always gravitate towards buying products they can find with ease.
Lenovo had a 32% SoS for Laptops. Asus at 14%
The top selling smartphone brands reported by Amazon included OnePlus, Redmi, Samsung, Realme & iQOO – our data showed that 3 out of these 5 brands were in the top 5 listings on Prime Day! Redmi had a whopping 30% SoS against the keyword smartphone, Samsung at 15%, and iQOO at 5% – clear validation that a high SoS can positively impact sales.
BEAUTY & GROOMING
Now let’s look at discounts in the beauty & grooming category.
Discounts on Beauty Products on Prime Day
The highest additional discounts were given on shampoos (9.3%), followed by Lipsticks (6.6%)
Shaving kits for men were at an additional discount of 3.4%. Hair gel at 4.9% & Face Masks at 4.3%
In the beauty category, Amazon India reported that top-selling brands included Head & Shoulders, Dove, Biotique, L’Oreal, Sugar Cosmetics, and Mamaearth to name a few. Once again, we looked into our data to see the sort of brand visibility & SoS each of these brands had.
All the top-selling brand’s Amazon reported on we noticed appeared in the top 5 search results.
Head & Shoulders & Dove were the top 2 listings against the keyword Shampoo at 26% & 16% SoS respectively. Biotique came in at #5 with a 7% SoS
Bombay Shaving Company, Gillette, and Axe were the top grooming brands for men in the Shaving Kit category.
Lakme made a clean sweep with a 19% SoS against the keyword lipstick, which speaks volumes, considering the aggressive competition from D2C beauty brands in India today.
GROCERY
According to the New eCommerce in India report by consulting firm Redseer, grocery has been a major contributor to the growth of ecommerce in India & Amazon Fresh used Prime Day to grab a larger piece of that pie! As part of the Prime Day sale, Amazon Fresh also pushed discounts on groceries, as well as fruits and vegetables. We tracked products that fell into the “snack” category, and here’s what we saw.
Discounts on Snacks on Prime Day
Given changing lifestyles & healthy food fads, it was no surprise that we saw the highest additional discounts were given on Healthy Snacks (3.2%) & Diet Food (2.7%)
Chocolates and chips saw much lower additional discounts at 1.2% each.
Drinks were additionally discounted by 2.5% during Prime Day.
Cadbury had a 69% share of search against the keyword Chocolate, leaving some of its key competitors way behind. Amul had a 20% SoS, while Hershey’s was at just 4%.
According to an article in the Economic times, YogaBar tripled sales in FY22, which is why we were not surprised to see the brand at #1 when users were searching for “Healthy Snacks” during Prime Day. YogaBar products typically enjoy high visibility year-round, which clearly helped with brand awareness on Amazon & sales.
FASHION
Amazon reported that Men’s t-shirts and polos, denims, Kurtis, tops, and dresses for women, designer wear, and clothing for kids were some of the most-loved fashion categories on Prime Day. We looked into our data to see the trends that emerged.
Discounts on Fashion on Prime Day
From the categories we tracked, women’s handbags had the highest additional discount (11.8%), followed by watches (9.1%)
Sneakers & jeans had additional discounts in the ballpark of 7% and sunglasses at 4.4%
Some of the usual suspects made it to the top 5, but what really stood out for us were brands that popped up against the keyword Jeans. While Levi’s came in at #2 with an 11% SoS, 2 Private Label Amazon brands featured in the top 5! Symbol at 27% SoS and Inkast Denim at 9%
Against the keyword Handbag, Lavie had a massive lead at 38% v/s the #2 brand – Caprese, at 13%
Boat found a #2 spot against the keyword watches, racing way ahead of the age-old popular brand Fastrack at #5 with a 4% SoS.
Conclusion
Amazon Prime Day 2022 in India came to a successful close as shoppers across India discovered the joy of the 2 day celebration with the best deals, savings, new launches, and more. Prime members from 95% of pin codes in India made purchases, there were 1000’s of deals and 500+ new product launches from brand partners & sellers. Nearly 18% more sellers grossed sales over INR 1 crore, and close to 38% more sellers grossed sales of over 1 lakh vs Prime Day 2021. Local neighborhood shops that sell on Amazon witnessed 4x sales growth. And start-ups and brands under the Amazon Launchpad program witnessed a growth of 3x. All in all, a successful event for everyone involved!
In 2022, Amazon sold 300 million products during Prime Day – selling roughly 100,000 items per minute. Since Amazon started Prime Day in 2015 to celebrate its 20th birthday, the shopping festival has grown into a holiday and rivals Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. and Singles’ Day in China.
According to RetailDetail, the leading B2B retail community in Benelux, Amazon is planning a 2nd Prime Day shopping festival in the autumn, just a few months after its annual Prime Day event. The retailer has asked its sales partners to prepare for a promotional event in the autumn where they have until the beginning of September to propose attractive discounts, with at least 20% discounts. This year’s second Prime Day may occur in October, with or without the same name.
But before that, let’s examine what happened in Germany this year on Prime Day 2022.
Methodology
We tracked Amazon.deboth before &on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day.
We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price.
We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.
What kind of Discounts did Amazon.de offer?
Amazon Prime Day will be significant, especially for customers hoping to get discounts amid soaring inflation. Both Amazon as well as other sources reported that electrical and electronic items were the most popular purchases, followed by general retail products. Electrical and electronics saw the value of transactions soar 90% on the first day. Mobile phones and accessories were the most popular, with transaction values almost doubling to 96% on day one.
Discounts across Categories on Amazon.de
Based on trends from past events, Amazon likely knew electronic items were going to be best sellers. Keeping this in mind, they made sure to offer high discounts in the electronics category. They offered a 6.5% additional discount on electronics on Prime Day. And once the sale ended, they continued to discount electronics by 1.3%.
The Fashion category also had a fair bit of discounts and came in at a close second at 5.9%
Looks like Amazon discounted everyday use items minimally. Groceries had an additional discount of just 1.8% on Prime Day, and wine and spirits had 2% extra discount.
Discounts on Electronics Category on Amazon.de
Within Electronics, in the four categories we tracked, we saw the highest additional discounts were offered on Bluetooth earphones (10.6%) and Smartwatches (9%)
Discounts on Fashion Category on Amazon.de
Jeans and Sunglasses had the highest discounts at 8.6% & 7.6% respectively.
Sneakers & Watches too had additional discounts of 6.6% on Prime Day.
Post the Prime Day event, Amazon retained an average of 1.5% discount across all products in the fashion category instead of pricing them at the original price.
However, in the case of women’s T-Shirts, they increased the price by 1.7% from the pre-event price.
Discounts across Price Tiers
Retailers must consider several factors when making strategic discounting decisions, including customer buying behavior, the type of discount offered & the volume of discount offered. The best discounting approach will vary depending on the product and other factors like the original selling price of the product.
Now let’s compare the discounting strategy Amazon used in the Electronics v/s Fashion category on Prime Day.
Discounts across Price Ranges
Interestingly, in both the Electronics and Fashion categories, Amazon increased prices for the lowest-end products between the €0-10 range by 3.6% and 13.2%, respectively, during the sale instead of discounting them! Maybe this was a strategy to drive consumers to higher-value products with greater discounts?
Another similarity in strategy was that most of the mid-priced items had maximum discounts. In electronics & fashion both, the maximum discounts were given to products between the € 30-100 range.
Here’s a difference that stood out – for Electronics in the higher price range between €100 – 500, the volume of discounts dropped a bit which meant Amazon gave moderate discounts on high-end electronics. But the trend flipped for Fashion as luxury fashion items were made to look more attractive with higher discounts.
Monitoring stock availability during key sales days is critical
Brands need to have the right stock availability, especially during sale events, because more customers shop online during sales. What’s worse, non-availability of products may drive customers to competitors that are stocking the same product. Out-of-stock situations lead to missed opportunities & lost sales! Let’s take a look at our data and see how Amazon planned product availability across categories on Prime Day.
Availability Analysis across Categories on Prime Day
Amazon was betting big on 2 categories – Electronics & Home. This meant they needed to keep a keen eye on availability in these categories, especially since they forecasted the highest sales to be generated here. … it was no surprise that the Furniture category had almost 100% availability during Prime Day! Electronics too had a high availability at 94% during the event.
Generally, our data showed that availability across multiple categories we tracked seemed robust and above 80% in more cases. Only Beauty & Grocery had 79% availability.
Conclusion
Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!
Prime Day launched in 2015 as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Amazon’s founding & has quickly become the biggest shopping event of the year for Amazon. Prime Day is a great opportunity for customers to snag fantastic deals on products they might not otherwise consider buying. Last year, Amazon Prime Day was a tremendous success, with Prime members spending billions of dollars on discounted items. In 2022 alone, global sales during the event reached a new record high of $12 Bn.
18 countries participated in Prime Day this year, including the US. We did a deep dive into what happened in the UK – the discounts Amazon offered and categories with the highest discounts as well as checked to see if other retailers tweaked their pricing strategy to compete with Amazon on Prime Day.
Methodology
In addition to Amazon UK, we tracked some key retailers on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day. Retailers tracked – eBay UK, OnBuy, Selfridges, ASOS.com, Net-A-Porter
We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price.
We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.
Did other retailers compete with Amazon on Prime Day?
Traditionally, as Amazon’s Prime Day sale approaches, other retailers adjust their prices by offering summer deals or getting creative with offers. However, we did not see aggressive strategies from other retailers this year. In the US, Walmart always has a sale during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart announced there wouldn’t be an annual promotional event on Prime Day 2022 this year.
Another report published by Forrester stated that major retailers scaled back their promotions, and overall offers from other retailers were less than impressive. We took a look at the data we gathered in the UK to see if this trend aligned.
Discounts offered on Prime Day on Amazon v/s other retailers
Our data showed that most retailers we tracked offered negligible discounts (in the range of 0.1 – 1.5%) and did not really try and compete or match the discounts Amazon was offering.
However, ASOS was the one retailer that competed heavily with Amazon in the Fashion & Beauty category. While Amazon offered an average additional discount of 7.7% in the Fashion category, ASOS offered 13.2%. And in the beauty category, Amazon offered 6.7%, while ASOS offered 15.2%.
Which were the popular categories that offered the most discounts?
During Prime Day, shoppers saw tons of deals on essential gadgets. Tech deals were a massive hit and saw big discounts on everything from TVs, laptops, smartwatches, phones, and tablets. We look at the data we collected to see if we saw a similar trend.
Discounts on Amazon UK across categories
Amazon offered discounts across categories and reported that some of the best-selling categories were Consumer Electronics & Home.
Our data too showed that the highest additional discounts were offered in electronics – Bluetooth Earphones at 18.4%, followed by Smartwatches at 14.9% and Laptops as well as Cameras, both at 12%.
Low discounts were offered on Alcohol, with Beer at 0.9% and Wine at 1.3%, respectively.
Relatively attractive discounts were seen in the Fashion & Beauty category – Sunglasses (9.1%), Shampoo (9.7%), & Watches (9.4%)
Discounts on Amazon UK in the Electronics category
Electronics being the hot favorite – we wanted to deep dive into the data and get more insights on Amazon’s pricing & discounting strategy here. Discounts can entice customers to buy more, encourage customer loyalty, or clear out old inventory. However, businesses must be careful since too much discounting can eat into profits. They also have to be mindful of which products should be discounted and by how much.
Our data showed that the highest discounts (between 13 – 18%) were given on electronics priced between the £ 20-100 price range.
Electronics priced higher, between the £ 100 – 500 pound price range, were discounted less than 10%
However, high-value premium electronics over £ 500 were discounted slightly above 10%
How did Amazon manage stock availability during Prime Day?
Keeping track of inventory is especially important during big sales like Prime Day when thousands of customers are actively looking for deals. There’s nothing worse than them finding the item they wanted is out of stock (OOS). OOS leads to lost sales, a situation that must be avoided at all costs. Read about how a small short term stock out on Amazon led to long term negative impacts for one of our customers. And let’s also look at the data and see what product availability looked like on Prime Day.
Overall, Amazon maintained robust availability across categories, and re-stocking was constant both before, during & after the event.
Furniture, Fashion & Electronics had the highest availability. No surprise there since Amazon estimated that Home/ Furniture would be one of the best-selling categories.
Grocery saw average availability – perhaps cause some of these products are perishables, so it’s best to be mindful about overstocking.
Which Brands Won on Prime Day?
If there is one thing to remember about improving your product visibility on Amazon, it’s that it all boils down to the usage of the right keywords. Using relevant keywords makes your product appear higher up in search when customers are running searches on Amazon for those products. And the higher up a product appears in search, the higher the chances of a sale!
Let’s take a look at some popular categories and which brands had the highest Share of Search (SoS) during Prime Day.
Corona, San Miguel, and Becks were the top 3 brands optimized for the keyword Beer. However, what’s really important to note is both Corona & Becks had 20% SoS that was completely organic. San Miguel had a 20% SoS too, but it was sponsored ads that gave them this artificial boost.
While a whole bunch of other brands had a 10% SoS most of them achieved this via Sponsored Ads. Youngever was the only brand that achieved this completely organically. They must have made sure they optimized key KPIs like content, ratings & reviews & product availability to achieve this result.
Asus sponsored 28% of products before Prime Day, hoping to capitalize on the pre-sale frenzy. During the event, they sponsored only 13% of products, bringing down their total SoS from 31% before the event to 13% during the event.
Lenovo followed the opposite strategy; they sponsored just 6% of products before the event and during the event sponsored a whopping 25% which made them “almost” dominate the Laptop category during Prime Day.
Then there was Microsoft, with the highest SoS at 38%, of which all of it was organic!
The Smartphone SoS battle was clearly between Samsung & Xiaomi. Samsung was a consistent #1 at all 3 time periods (Before, During & After Prime Day) with the highest total SoS. Xiaomi came in at a close second.
Samsung had an exciting strategy – they went heavy on sponsorships before and after the event. Their sponsored SoS was 31% & 39% respectively. And SoS of 13% during the event.
Xiaomi’s strategy was just the opposite. Their sponsored SoS was 16% before the event. And 17% after the event, which was moderate compared to their Sponsored SoS during the event at 25%, which was much higher than Samsung’s 13%
Critical to note, Xiaomi’s organic search visibility before, during, and after the event was 0%. It definitely should be a concern area for any brand.
Share of search
Both before & after the event, Cadbury had the highest visibility for the keyword Chocolate. During the event, they were not in the top 5 brands.
During Prime Day, Nestle won the top spot and had a 29% SoS. However, before the event, they were at #3 and after at #2. Artificially boosting visibility might’ve had something to do with this.
Conclusion
Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!
