The DataWeave Blog

Category: E Commerce

9 Things to Build a Thriving Fashion eCommerce Brand

According to the Statista Fashion eCommerce report 2021, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for online fashion is predicted to be 10.3% between 2018-2023. The widespread need for trendy fashion presents a challenge for fashion brands to succeed in a highly crowded and competitive space. With eCommerce shopping becoming more prevalent, fashion brands aren’t just competing for brick-and-mortar sales. Instead, they’re also competing for those late-night or impulse purchases from online customers.

Looking to 2022 and beyond, this blog will highlight 9 things to build a thriving fashion eCommerce brand:

1. Allow shopping on multiple channels

Breakdown of Shopping journeys in Apparel

Typically buyers from diverse age groups prefer different sales channels. Some prefer large retailers, and some choose web stores. If you know where your customers like to purchase your products, you can leverage the power of search engines and marketplaces to improve your sales. Multi-channel retailing helps fashion eCommerce brands to sell and promote products on a platform and device of the audience’s choice.

A brand should offer support and access to its products across all platforms, channels, and devices. It helps fashion brands to reach customers where they prefer to shop. If your customers prefer to shop on a computer or an app, your brand can offer a seamless customer experience.

2. Don’t sell on the Homepage

Your online fashion store homepage is more about increasing credibility and trust among potential buyers. Your ideal home page shouldn’t display products or their prices. Instead, it would be best to integrate promotional and marketing strategies on the landing page to encourage visitors to explore your product categories and the rest of the website. You should have an intuitive interface that makes navigating the pages easier. You can also use the homepage to promote seasonal offers and new launches. Fashion brands can also display customer reviews, awards, brand achievements, and web security trust seals to increase the conversion rate.

Don’t sell on the homepage

3. Product Descriptions with Unique Stories

Product descriptions often get overlooked or underutilized even though they are important for eCommerce businesses. Your products won’t sell with spammy and same product descriptions. The modern product description is all about communicating a product’s worth and value with a story that captivates your buyer’s attention. Identify areas where your content & images don’t align with your product or represent it in the best light. Make sure to deliver an enhanced consistent brand experience across all online channels to improve your conversions.

4. Focus on Review and Ratings

Rating & Review of a fashion brand

Customer reviews have a huge influence on a buyer’s purchase decision, especially in the fashion industry. Encourage your consumers to leave reviews on your brand website. Reviews help fashion brands to build trust for their products and convert customers. Legitimate customer reviews help your shoppers to get crucial insights into what previous buyers liked or disliked about a particular product.

However, you should stay away from paid-for or false reviews usually encouraged by unscrupulous sellers as they are easy to spot and hurt your rankings. You must remember that receiving reviews also includes dealing with negative comments. They should be used to improve your upcoming product offerings.

5. Sell Looks

The product can be combined with in the detail page

Successful fashion brands don’t simply sell individual products. Instead, they sell complete looks that inspire shoppers to purchase the entire stylish look. As an online fashion brand, you’re not selling clothes; you’re selling an elegant collection of wearable art. When visitors reach your online store, you should appeal to their fantasies and sentiments through aesthetic look books that are both pleasing and congruent with your brand. Most successful online fashion shops are inspirational and visual. Look books help brands pair their previous season items or dead stock with new stock and increase sales. Brands can also share these look books on social media or in their monthly newsletters to increase reach.

6. Provide Promotions and Offers

Fashion brands can take advantage of plenty of sales throughout the year, from New Year celebrations to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Brands can leverage these high sales periods to sell looks and gift items to boost sales. Just make sure you’re measuring the effectiveness of your online promotions. Holiday and festive sales also offer an excellent opportunity to plan strategic discounts to get rid of old stock. Since trends in the fashion industry have been changing rapidly, you can use discounts to get rid of dead-stock or out-of-trend items each season.

7. Be active on social media

Social media is a way to promote your brand, increase trust among your audience, and entertain your audience with exciting content. You can also engage the audience by providing gift coupons or giveaways. Brands can promote products while keeping their audience engaged with engaging content and promotional offers.

Social media is a great way to get influencer support, either organically or through a paid partnership. Brands have to focus on every element of social media marketing strategy, right from choosing a platform, creating Instagram/Facebook shops, jumping on trends/events, and tracking customer sentiment.

8. High-quality product photography

Capture every detail of your product

Nothing is worse than ordering a piece of clothing online and not getting what you saw on the website. Not being able to accurately convey fashion products will hurt your bottom line. Fashion brands must use top-notch product photography that includes high-quality visuals, such as multiple angle views, 360-degree images of each product, accurate depictions of all color options, and the option to zoom in on product attributes.

High-quality product photography

A recent game-changer in the fashion industry has been including different sets of models to accurately feature clothes of various shapes, heights, and weights. Instead of displaying a dress in only one size, fashion brands can have multiple models wearing various sizes for the same article of clothing.

9. Stay up to date with new trends

Fashion eCommerce brands have to be particularly careful of continuously updating their product offering with the latest fashion trends for each season. They can boost sales with an in-demand product assortment. Continuously updated fashion inventory signifies that the brand is up-to-date with the latest fashion trends in the market and has unique products to offer. You can always get creative with new styling, better looks, and personalized product recommendations.

Conclusion

Fashion eCommerce is rapidly growing and transforming at a staggering rate as technologies continue to advance. Traditional fashion brands can now expand their reach from brick-and-mortar shops to digital and eCommerce platforms to reach shoppers across the globe. The new digital selling opportunities also come with considerable challenges – from staying up to date with ever-evolving trends to managing dead stock.
Are you a fashion brand that needs help monitoring your product content? Or measuring the effectiveness of your online promotions? Or decoding customer sentiment from reviews they’ve left for your products? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help!

March 31, 2022
Fake Reviews: A Real Pain Point for Brands
Online reviews have revolutionized how customers purchase products and services. In fact, eCommerce success for certain products hinges on the ratings and reviews. With this, have come the pitfalls of corruption in eCommerce.

New brands trying to establish a presence and capture critical mass have been known to resort to soliciting fake and paid reviews to uplift their brand in search rankings. Similarly, these brands can also encourage fake negative reviews on competitor’s listings to bring down their value. Bots and paid manual reviews are usually employed to rake up the review count. Review sites like TrustPilot, Google Reviews, and marketplaces like Amazon are littered with fraudulent reviews. In fact, Guardian calculated that 3.6% of all reviews on TripAdvisor were fraudulent. According to a 2021 report by Statista, 46% of the 2.7 million online fake reviews that were removed were five-star reviews!

Fake online reviews are misleading since customers shopping both online and offline rely on reviews to make purchase decisions. Fake reviews also pose further problems because they deceive consumers into spending money on a product or with a company they may not have otherwise chosen.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made a recent announcement to send penalties to over 700 brands and retailers for fake endorsements and reviews. While this notice references influencer content and testimonials, it also applies to customer reviews.

In this blog, we will discuss the importance of reviews for brands and retailers, spotting fake reviews on Amazon, and steps that eCommerce companies can take to tackle fake reviews.

Importance of reviews for Brands and Retailers

Customers do not make blind purchases. Consumers read reviews before buying products. Statistics show that irrespective of the industry, having a positive online presence is essential and has become an integral part of branding. It also indicates that customers have a high confidence level in fellow consumers’ opinions. Overall, positive online ratings & reviews can help skyrocket eCommerce sales.

Customers are more likely to purchase if other customers, even strangers, agree that it was a great purchase. Reviews also make brands more visible.

Why are fake online reviews so resilient?

A significant reason is that the ROI of getting fake reviews increases profitability & sales multifold. For example, an extra star on Yelp can increase a restaurant’s revenue by 5% to 9%. FTC has said that the expenditure on fake reviews can provide a 20x return. However, fake and incentivized reviews are a huge problem. Amazon, one of the largest eCommerce marketplaces, banned incentivized reviews in 2016. It took down suspicious reviews and has taken legal action against sellers who violate its policies.

Online Reviews

How to Spot a Fake Review on Amazon

Marketplaces, Google, and review sites like Yelp can get hundreds of thousands of reviews daily. In a survey by PCMag that interviewed 1,000 US shoppers who looked forward to shopping on Prime Day 2020, only 16% were very confident about detecting fake Amazon product reviews, and 24% were confident they could do it. The rest of the survey respondents were somewhat or not confident they could pick out the fakes on Amazon. Here are our best tips for spotting fake reviews on marketplaces like Amazon:
- Duplicate Content: If you notice dozens of reviews with the same description and title as if they were copied and pasted multiple times, they’re most likely fake reviews.
- Multiple Reviews on the Same Day: Another identification of fake reviews is when there are dozens or multiple reviews on a single day. There can be a bunch of both positive and negative reviews for products.
- Unverified or Anonymous Reviewers: You can see if the review is from a verified buyer on Amazon. Brands can also check if they have any record of the reviewer’s purchase to weed out fake reviews.
- Incorrect Language: Fake reviews can come from people outside your country. If you notice multiple reviews with similar incorrect words and common errors, there is a good chance those reviews are fake, and someone paid the reviewer to write them.
What can eCommerce brands do to protect themselves against fake reviews?
- Follow a zero-tolerance policy for fake reviews.
The major step is to ensure that fake reviews are never posted on your site. Allowing fake reviews negatively affects your business and your bottom line. You can hire a third-party UGC moderator that uses data-driven, anti-fraud methods to evaluate reviews. It will be a much more successful and quicker step in protecting your brand’s reputation.
- Don’t screen out negative reviews.
While receiving a negative review might be the worst nightmare, they’re necessary for a successful UGC program. Customers are more likely to purchase from a business that responds to all reviews, including negative reviews. Customers said that negative reviews have more detailed product information, while 32% of those customers think they’re less likely to be fake. Besides, brands that respond to negative reviews gain customers’ trust and loyalty.
Here are some Tips on how to Respond to Negative reviews online.
- Be transparent about how you collect UGC.
Brands can ensure that their customers trust user-generated content by being honest about how they collected it. Companies should never ask for paid or incentivized positive reviews. Instead, brands should empower their customers to leave honest feedback. If you’re offering free products, a chance to win something, or discount coupons in exchange for an unbiased review, then the review should specify how it was collected. For example, you can add indicators like “this reviewer received a coupon or a free product in exchange for honest feedback.
- Maintain trust
Having fake reviews causes a loss of trust, with many consumers believing that they have seen fake reviews for online and offline businesses. Removing fake reviews doesn’t only help with revenue and brand trust, but it also helps brands to maintain trust among their existing and future customers.

Conclusion

Fake reviews are one of the biggest reputation killers and a huge problem for eCommerce platforms, brands, and customers. Brands must take the necessary steps to minimize the risk of fake reviews and expand businesses among authentic users. Although modern text generation tools are becoming more competent in writing realistic reviews, there are AI- and ML-backed tools that can accurately detect reviews written by other machines.

Need help tracking your online ratings & reviews? Or decoding customer sentiment from reviews they’ve left for your products? DataWeave offers a customizable and scaleable data solution to analyse ratings and reviews for online retailers and brands vis v vis their competitors.
Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help.
March 27, 2022
How VCs and Brand Rollups are using Data for faster Acquisitions
When it comes to brands – the biggest story of 2021 was the astronomical growth of Brand Roll-ups. For the uninitiated, Brand Roll-ups are companies that acquire multiple digital consumer brands and then scale these brands 100x by leveraging their own operational expertise across eCommerce platforms, Supply Chain, Warehousing, Marketing, and so on.

Thrasio is the poster boy for the Brand roll-ups and is valued at over 10 Bn USD.

Brand rollups have raised over $12 billion in 2021 and the trend only seems to be accelerating in 2022. Not only Brand Roll ups, but VCs too have been pouring money into digital brands. In India, 77+ brands have raised more than 2B USD in 2021. In the US this number is estimated to be north of $10 billion.

Cumulative capital raised by Amazon Aggregators

Scaling fast doesn’t come easy. It comes with its own set of challenges. So even with ample experience in running and scaling brands, Brand roll-ups are posed with unique challenges.

Challenge of Scouting the right brand

There are 1000s of online consumer brands and new ones are launching every day. Every Brand roll-up wants to be the first one to scout a brand – but this is not easy.

The challenge here is to identify & pick the right brands without having access to any sales or financial data. Every Brand Rollup has a wishlist with regards to the number of SKUs, price points, reviews, and ratings as well – but don’t have tools in place to scout brands with these criteria in mind. And across multiple platforms and categories, the problem gets more complicated.

This is an ongoing problem since a brand that was not selling well yesterday may start hitting higher sales numbers a week down the line – and that is why Brand scouting has to be a continuous process.

One way these aggregators have solved this challenge is by offering mouth-watering referral fees for referring a brand. But this is not a sustainable long-term solution.

Data Comes to the Rescue

What Brand Roll-ups need is a continuous and automated data first Brand Scouting solution to enable them to scout the right brands.
- What are all the brands in a category of interest?
- Which of these brands is within the filters of Number of SKUs, Price Range, etc.?
- Which brands have shown an exceptional rise in search rankings?
- Which brands have shown the most increase in the number of ratings and reviews?
- Which brands have the highest gain in the customer ratings?
- What are the estimated sales and market share of the brands?
DataWeave’s Brand Scouting solution solves exactly this.

DataWeave’s Brand Scouting Solution

DataWeave’s Brand Scouting Solution is a comprehensive solution to help Brand Rollups and VCs scout for the ideal brand that fits their acquisition profile. We leverage public data collected from multiple eCommerce platforms to get them the desired information on brands they’re looking for.

For all the focused categories (Typically 30-40) – we collect data of all the SKUs (Typically 15,000-20,000) and aggregate that at a Brand level:
- Ranking – Usually Brand Rollups are not interested in the Brands which are on the first page. But, they are interested in the brands which might be b/w 500 to 10,000 ranks but are showing an exceptional gain in ranking week on week.
Brand Discoverability & Ranking on Amazon
- Ratings – It’s important to look at brands that are showing high improvement in ratings or have consistently shown high ratings. The proportion of 5 stars vs. 1 star is an important metric here.
- Number of Reviews and Ratings – We enable you to find brands that have both high ratings as well as a high number of reviews. This is a very good metric to find the brands in a category that are getting exceptional customer love.
Brand Popularity Tracker
- Filters – We enable filtering in terms of – No. of SKUs, Price Range, Rating and Reviews and even can eliminate established brands so that you only see the brands which qualify your criteria. We also enable you to separately analyze brands that are buying sponsored ads in a category, so you have a clear distinction between organic and sponsored growth of these brands.
- Trends – What is important is not just the static performance on the day of analysis – but a trend analysis over a period of time to find the brands which are growing exceptionally.
Brand Score Trend, Average Rating trend & No of Reviews Trend

… but, wait there’s more.

We compliment Brand Scouting with three more solutions to provide the right context and further analysis needed to provide comprehensive insights into the category and platforms where you are scouting for brands:

Category Analytics: When you are looking at a category and the brands in that category, it is often important to understand how dynamic that category is. We can help analyze:
- If the category is crowded with more brands per product.
- Does it have space for new brands?
- What is the number of new brands entering that category?
- What is the number of new SKUs entering that category?
Category & Subcategory Evaluation

We can also help with benchmarking the category – to help understand how the brand that you are scouting is doing when compared to its category peers.

Rank Group versus Price, Rating & No of Reviews

Sales & Share: We can also provide a good directional estimate of the sales and market share of all the SKUs in the category wherein you are scouting for brands. These are estimates powered by our proprietary machine learning algorithms and can help you solidify your hypothesis around a blog or a category.

Revenue by Price Points

Sentiment Analysis of Reviews: Customer reviews tell more about the qualitative aspects of the SKU and the brand itself. Our algorithms can help understand what features of a brand or a product do customers really care about. We can answer questions such as:
- Which features are mentioned most commonly?
- Which features are mentioned positively or negatively?
- What adjective is used to describe that particular feature?
Customer Sentiment Analysis

The suite of Brand Scouting and complementary solutions is evolving rapidly as the space is evolving rapidly. We are supporting several VCs and Brand Roll-ups globally to scout for brands.

The best aspect about DataWeave is our ability to scout brands across 2,000+ eCommerce platforms globally across geographies. We are super stoked to be playing an enabler in the Brand Rollup revolution.

Beyond Brand Scouting – Digital Shelf Analytics

The challenge for Brand roll-ups is not over by just scouting and acquiring a brand. The journey is just about starting – the next challenge that the Brand Rollup faces now is to scale up these brands.

The challenge the Brand Rollup face is unique and very different from a single brand operator or even traditional CPG conglomerates.

DataWeave’s flexible product philosophy enables Brand Roll-ups to diagnose and measure the performance of multiple brands across multiple platforms in one dashboard.
March 3, 2022
How Restaurants can use QSR Intelligence to Drive Sales

Quick service restaurants (QSR) are not only about delivering great food. They also have to overcome challenges like delivery, logistics, and affordable pricing, especially since covid-19 has staggered the entire industry. QSR intelligence helps restaurants get real-time insight into their performance across food delivery apps. With QSR intelligence, restaurants can identify the highest paying buyers across customer segments, demographics, and locations. Data-driven insights will help QSRs improve performance, decrease delivery time, optimize ad budget, and increase food quality – all with the goal to scale revenue and increase orders through food apps.

The global fast food and quick service restaurant market are expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.1% from 2020 to 2027. The QSR industry is rapidly growing to encompass the changing needs of customers. 60% of U.S. consumers order delivery or takeout once a week and online ordering is growing 300% faster than in-house dining. With QSR intelligence, restaurants can get insights into metrics that will drive their profitability by helping them to fine-tune menus, enhance customer interaction, improve advertisements, and adjust inventory.

Benefits of QSR Intelligence

Continuous in-depth analysis of restaurant statistical data will help companies spot trends and devise strategies to improve sales via food apps. Here are a few benefits of QSR intelligence:

a. Improve estimates & minimize wait times

QSR intelligence can help with accurate sales forecasting. With big data, restaurants can track their popular dishes or combos for various meal times to minimize wait times and increase delivery speed. It can also inform restaurants about upcoming trends, especially during holidays and festivals. Keeping an eye for trends will play a significant role in maximizing efficiency during food preparation and ensuring accurate food delivery ETAs.

b. Location-based promotions

QSR intelligence allows restaurants to target customers based on their proximity to the restaurant. The food must be delivered at a particular time to the customers to enjoy the dish at the right temperature. QSRs can apply demographic intelligence to determine cancellation rates, delivery charges, and the proportion of demand and supply. These metrics will help QSRs to improve location-based promotions.

c. Increase ROI on deliveries

To increase return on investment through food deliveries, QSRs can track metrics like location-based promotions, various payment options, ratings, etc. Tracking these metrics will help QSRs offer accurate ETAs, improve operational efficiency, and personalize services, which will increase revenue. Restaurants will also be able to understand where they can adjust their profit margins to increase revenue while maintaining a cumulative level of success.

How to use QSR Intelligence

a. Assortment and availability

The more restaurants can understand what and how their customers eat, the better they will be prepared to service those demands throughout the day. For example, QSRs can calibrate the menu, ingredients availability, and kitchen preparation time depending on their customers’ orders for lunch and dinner. This also helps optimize daily workflow, such as reorganizing staff to lower labor costs, optimizing the supply chain for ingredient delivery, and revamping the menu to offer better dishes. Another way to ensure your availability is to analyze your busiest hours and adjust the staff and delivery workforce accordingly. For example, if your customers tend to order more during breakfast, it’s worth considering opening your restaurant a bit earlier.

Availability across 4 QSR Food Delivery apps

Availability trend during peak hours – Lunch & Dinner

b. Delivery time

One of the most driving factors for the success of QSR is delivery time. Restaurants have to ensure the food is delivered as quickly as possible so customers can consume it at the right temperature. Data-driven insights can help restaurants track repeat addresses, find shortcuts or time-saving routes, and avoid unfamiliar or low delivery locations.

QSRs have to analyze the entire delivery process from time taken to order on the app, how quickly kitchens can prepare orders, hand over to delivery partners, and get them to the customers. An essential part of QSRs is throughput, the speed at which they can process and deliver orders. During peak hours like lunch and dinner, faster service and quick ETAs ensure that customers do not choose other restaurants. If you have different menus for breakfast and other meals, ensure that your foodservice app can remove such menus when they are not available.

Delivery Time Analysis

Delivery Fee Analysis

c. Pricing and Promotions

QSRs have to understand customers’ price sensitivity while determining delivery costs and ensuring profitability for the business and delivery partners. Customers might look for free deliveries but not adding delivery charges might lead to loss. A deep dive into common transaction data across the locations will allow restaurants to understand the price sensitivity of all customer segments, helping them make intelligent pricing decisions.

QSR intelligence can also help restaurants determine which delivery locations are most profitable. This helps to adjust the delivery radius, fee, and promotions. Restaurants can offer promo codes, coupons, referral codes, etc., to attract customers and encourage repeat purchases.

d. Discoverability

Restaurants have to ensure that their dishes are on the first-page listing. With QSR intelligence on category analysis, keyword optimization, and competition analysis, restaurants can help their customers discover dishes. This also includes optimizing listings for pricing and rating and delivery fees and availability during peak times such as breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

e. Advertisement Optimizer

QSRs can use data to optimize the advertisement budget and adequately improve return on investment. They can track the visibility of advertisement banners across locations and optimize them for different times of the day. Data analysis can also help restaurants understand which customer segments are more likely to convert to long-term loyalists. This data will help QSRs design personalized campaigns and align advertisement budgets while converting them to long-term customers, further improving the bottom line.

Ad spends by identifying carousels with the highest visibility

Track QSRs performance across Carousels across multiple zip codes

f. Growth & Expansion

Upselling and cross-selling are two popular tactics that improve growth for quick-service restaurants. However, that requires a rich understanding of customers’ price sensitivity, preferences, and behavior. QSR intelligence can provide information about which upsell and cross-selling offers a customer segment is likely to value and which optimal channels for distributing the offer.

Conclusion

Quick service restaurants can track critical data points and use them to increase revenue and improve customer experience. Learning how to price, promote, and deliver food to customers during a pandemic can be challenging. QSR intelligence will help brands attract the right clientele, adjust inventory, reduce overall marketing costs, and increase order rates. This will also help increase customer loyalty across segments which can, in turn, increase the number of returning customers and profitability.

March 3, 2022
UK’s Biggest Sale Days: What we saw in 2021 and trends for 2022
Customers love discounts, and promotions are the most effective tool to attract shoppers and increase sales during the holiday season and clearance sales. According to a survey, 76% of UK customers look for discounts before purchasing a product. Promotional discounts encourage customers to try new brands. And this is why brands often have a special coupon for first-time users.

According to Software Advice, discounting tops the pricing strategy for retailers across all industries. It is preferred by 97% of survey respondents over other promotional strategies.

Share of Respondents

Retail Trends in the UK for 2022

The arrival of the Omicron variant in December 2021 slashed the shopping mood of UK customers and led to a 3.7% monthly drop in retail sales, but sales were still higher than February 2020 levels when Covid-19 first hit worldwide. Sales during the holiday season in 2021 took a hit due to a consistent decline in product availability and an increase in prices. Inflation too started to rise in 2021 and is expected to increase by 7% by spring 2022. However, despite inflation, retail sales jumped back in January 2022. In fact, it is predicted that inflation will be a key driver of sales growth, with underlying demand across categories being uneven. Keeping that in mind, let’s look at sales growth across categories in 2021 and projected growth in 2022.

Category Breakdown: Sales growth 2021/22

Discounting Trends we saw in the UK in 2021

Methodology
- We tracked prices on the three biggest Sales Days in the UK
  – Amazon Prime Day, June 21^st & 22^nd 2021
  – Black Friday, Nov 26^th, 2021
  – Cyber Monday, Nov 29^th, 2021
- Categories tracked: Beauty, Fashion, Electronics, Home Improvement, Furniture
- Websites tracked: Amazon UK, OnBuy, eBay UK, Etsy, Wayfair, Selfridges, John Lewis
Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are three of the biggest sales days with comparable discounts. However, according to new research, in 54% of cases, it depends on the category of product you’re after that determines the volume of discount you get. For example, tech items such as smartphones, laptops, games consoles, smartwatches, and wireless speakers were cheaper on Black Friday but may not necessarily have been cheaper on the other sale days.

We wanted to see which sale period had the most number of products on discount during the three big sale events. We also wanted to see which of those three sales would’ve been the best for consumers to get a higher section of products at a discount.

How Big were the Discounts?

Discount across 3 key Sale Days

32% of products went on discount during Black Friday, 35% on Cyber Monday, and only 6.6% on Prime Day. One factor contributing to the low Prime Day percentage is the fact that not all retailers participate in discounting wars during Prime Day since it’s an exclusive Amazon-only sale. Customers looking for the best deals would’ve gotten them during the holiday season with a combination of the Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales.

Another interesting thing to note is the percentage discount – on Prime Day, only 0.2% of products had a discount of over 50% of all the discounted products. While on Black Friday & Cyber Monday that number was 1.7% & 1.3% respectively.

In conclusion, more products were offered at a discount on Black Friday & Cyber Monday; and the total percentage discount on those products was also higher.

Which Categories had the Maximum Discount?

Discounts by category

On Black Friday, an estimated 47% of consumers in the UK planned to shop for electronics, whereas 40% of customers planned to shop for clothing and footwear during Black Friday to Cyber Monday. The top-selling categories across the 48 hours of Amazon UK’s Black Friday 2021 sale included Home, Toys, Beauty, Books, and Health & Personal Care.

Our data shows that Categories with the highest discounts were Beauty and Electronics with the highest discount on all 3 sale events. These 2 categories had discounts on over 40% products on Black Friday & Cyber Monday while categories like Home Improvement were in the 30 – 35% range, Furniture in the 27 – 32% range and Fashion has the least products on discounts at a little over 15%

In the fashion category in the UK, Amazon UK offered the highest percentage of items with a price decrease (31.6%), whereas eBay offered the most significant magnitude of price decrease (14.3%).

Which UK Retailers gave the most discounts?

OnBuy is an emerging marketplace in the UK that offers impressive discounted prices and is taking on top UK marketplaces like Amazon. It’s ranked Britain’s fastest-growing eCommerce platform in 2020 and also the fastest grower by traffic. The low listing fees starting at 5% allow sellers to competitively price their products, making them more accessible to a greater number of buyers with huge discounts. The most prominent deals and discounts are highlighted on the landing page and featured across OnBuy’s social pages to grab the audience’s attention.

Discounts by Retailer

This was clearly reflective in the data we gathered from the 3 big sales in 2021. Most retailers in the UK, including Amazon offered at best 20% of their products, in the categories we tracked, at discount. The only outlier was OnBuy – OnBuy offered close to 90% of their products at discount!

OnBuy was able to offer a comparatively high number of discounted products than their competition because the magnitude of the discount was much much lower. The platform offered minimal discounts; out of the 90% of discounted products, 80% of those products had discounts that were less than 10%. As opposed to other retailers who had under 7% of their products on discounts of less than 10%.

OnBuy’s discounting strategy built a perception that they were the biggest discounters, even when the discounts were not as deep.

Black Friday v/s Cyber Monday – which one was better for holiday shoppers?

Discount by category- Black Friday VS Cyber Monday

Black Friday kicks off the holiday shopping season and is synonymous with some of the most significant sales after Thanksgiving. But until recently, Cyber Monday has become a great way for eCommerce retailers to capitalize on holiday discounts and expand their most beneficial sales events of the year.

In 2021, retailers pulled in $8.9 billion in Black Friday online sales and a total sales of $10.7 billion on Cyber Monday. In the YOY review, Black Friday saw a decline of 1.3% from 2020’s record of $9.03 billion, and Cyber Monday saw a drop of 1.4%, only $100 million shy of $10.8 billion in 2020.

Across Beauty, Home Improvement, Electronics & Furniture categories, we saw that more products were on discount on Cyber Monday v/s Black Friday. However, the opposite was true for the Fashion Category. In the Fashion Category, we saw a marginally higher number of products on Discount during Black Friday than Cyber Monday.

Discount percentages across categories

Across both sales, the Electronics category offered the highest discounts at over 40% of products discounted compared to other categories on both Black Friday & Cyber Monday. However, a very small fraction of the products had a discount of over 50%, indicating the lack of ‘BIG blockbuster deals’ in this category. At the same time, the Fashion category offered the least number of deals with less than 20% products on discount, but the highest magnitude of discount across the board! On Black Friday, 3.8% of products had discounts higher than 50%, and 2.6% of products on Cyber Monday. In most other categories, between 1 – 1.5% of products had over 50% discount. However, Fashion brands offered more than 50% discount on 2x the average number of products on both sale days.

Why did the Fashion Category offer such high discounts? Brands are now capitalizing on customers’ need for instant gratification in the age of see-now, buy-now fashion trends by offering their products at high discounts. It also allows them to quickly eliminate overstock. However, this has given rise to fast fashion, a trend that focuses on rapidly producing low-quality clothes in huge volume. Fast fashion focuses on replicating trendy pieces like streetwear and fashion week designs, not four times a year but every week, if not daily. Fast fashion promotes brands to manufacture and sell low-quality merchandise that goes out of trend as soon as buyers wear it once. There is little to no time for quality control, and pieces are thrown away after a few wears. In the UK alone, 300,000 tonnes of used clothes are buried or burned in landfills each year. However, every element of fast fashion from rapid production, competitive pricing, to trend replication has a detrimental impact on the planet.

Conclusion

The effects of COVID-19 can be seen far and wide in the UK retail industry, especially with a steep rise in inflation. Fortunately, even though retail sales in the UK declined during the 2021 holiday season due to the Omicron variant, they increased during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Sales also jumped back in January 2022 and are further projected to grow by 5% in 2022. Additionally, brands can sustain the impact of disruptive factors throughout 2022 by ensuring their Digital Shelf is updated and flexible enough to react swiftly to both threats and opportunities in order to maximize the chances of success.

Reach out to the team at DataWeave if you’d like to make smarter pricing & discounting decisions with up-to-date competitive insights.
February 15, 2022
Valentine’s Day eCommerce Insights

Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis.

February 11, 2022
What Historical Pricing Data can tell you & how to use it

For many brands, pricing strategy boils down to guesswork — shooting in the dark and hoping consumers are willing and happy to pay. However, the ‘throw it at the wall, and see what sticks’ pricing strategy leads to big pricing mistakes. Pinning down an optimal price for products requires a clear picture of ideal customers, understanding each customer segment’s behavior, a solid grasp of your product’s value, and an analysis of competitors. Pricing analytics can help brands track a wide range of pricing metrics with cutting-edge analytical tools and use insights to get ahead of their competition. This analysis uses historical data to understand how previous pricing and promotion activities affect brand, sales, and customer price perception. It often involves identifying opportunities and weaknesses in competitors’ pricing strategies and exploiting them to improve sales and revenue.

Pricing analytics helps brands understand how product pricing and promotions affect profitability and the steps they can take to optimize their pricing structures. Brands can leverage their pricing and consumer data to design appropriate pricing models for achieving their sales goals.

Here is a brief overview of pricing analytics, its benefits, and ways to improve sales with historical pricing analytics.

What is historical pricing data analytics?

Historical Pricing Data Analytics

Pricing analytics uses historical pricing and demand data to understand how pricing activities have affected profitability and overall brand. It also helps to optimize a brands’ pricing strategy for maximum revenue. Manual tracking of pricing for brands with numerous product lines, multiple selling points, different customer tiers, and complex product bundles is a huge challenge. Brands from every sector and industry vertical, manufacturing and distribution to retail and eCommerce, can benefit from pricing analytics.

There are three types of pricing analysis:

Descriptive

Descriptive pricing analytics involves analyzing historical data to evaluate how customers have perceived and reacted to pricing fluctuations in the past. It analyzes metrics such as month-on-month sales growth, average revenue per customer, year-on-year pricing changes, or changes to the number of registrations to a particular service over a specific period.

Predictive

Although brands can’t accurately predict how pricing changes will reflect sales, they can use predictive pricing analytics to get insights into the best possible chance of doing so. Predictive pricing analyzes historical data with statistical algorithms and machine learning to predict the price and trends of products in the future. It also helps brands to optimize their prices with future goals.

Prescriptive

Prescriptive pricing analytics is the opposite of descriptive analytics. Unlike descriptive analytics that helps brands explore their historical data to understand customer response after an event, prescriptive analytics help brands design better and more informed strategies. With prescriptive analytics, brands can shape their growth strategies to achieve more sustainable results over the long term.

Benefits of historical pricing data analytics

Benefits of Historical Pricing Data Analytics

Acquire insights into customers price perception

While analyzing the metrics to understand pricing optimization, brands can also gather valuable insights into their customer’s price perception. Pricing analytics helps brands understand which customer segments are the most (and least) profitable and how each segment responds to specific pricing strategies. With historical pricing data analytics, brands can also intelligently link pricing and promotions by first determining customer price sensitivity then gauging the effectiveness of promotions.

Fully Optimized Pricing

Historical pricing analytics means eliminating guesswork from deciding the optimal pricing for a given product. By analyzing historical pricing data, brands can discover how their past pricing and promotional decisions impact profitability. Based on this historical data, they can also test various pricing strategies like value-based and dynamic pricing. It also allows brands to learn which customer segments are most likely to respond positively to price change. These insights from pricing analytics will drive more effective (and profitable) pricing decisions.

Recognize pricing tiers that work the best

Many brands have gaps in their pricing strategy — underpriced or overpriced tiers, pricing leaks, markup errors, or neglected upsell opportunities. Tiered pricing models are prevalent in subscription-based brands where brands offer tiers to meet the needs of diverse customer segments. With historical pricing analytics, brands can improve their pricing tiers and get insight into the right number of tiers and optimal prices for each. Pricing analytics will comb a brand’s historical data to find tier pricing mistakes to improve sales and revenue.

Planning Pricing Strategies and Promotions

Promotional pricing decisions are critical for any brand, as pricing perception is directly linked to consumer demand and profits. Brands have to carefully plan promotions that include variables such as list prices, special offers, advertisements, and discounts while ensuring profit margins. With predictive analytics, brands can determine optimal discount levels, keep a close eye on the competition, and announce promotional offers when customers are likely to purchase. Historical pricing analysis also helps predict revenue and determine optimal locations and platforms for promotional ads.

Discover profitable channels

Not all sales channels bring equal revenue to your brand. Historical pricing analysis can help you determine the most effective quality, volume, and revenue channels. Brands must understand which marketing and sales channels bring quality leads that convert to paying customers. It also helps to determine which eCommerce channels are most profitable so you can optimize your budget and identify channels you should be investing in as a part of future customer acquisition strategies.

Metrics to track

Metrics to Track

Here are a few pricing analytics metrics that can help brands to understand customer behavior towards pricing:

Willingness to Pay (WTP)

WTP, also known as price sensitivity, is the maximum price your potential customers are willing to pay for your service or product. It is an essential part of pricing strategy since you have no other way of understanding whether your product can yield an augmented product value. Numerous factors are responsible for a customer’s willingness to pay, and it’s not static. Brands must track willingness to pay for all customer segments to ensure that the product is priced competitively and drives maximum profit while staying in line with current market conditions.

Feature Value Analysis

Feature value analysis, also known as relative reference analysis, measures the most important features to customers in relation to other features of a product or service. Analyzing critical features to customer segments will help brands price products based on basic or premium components. It can also help to better bundle your services or products so you can drive the most revenue.

Average Revenue per User (ARPU)

The average revenue per user is the revenue generated from the sum of active users divided by the total number of users in a monthly time frame. Delving deeper into ARPU can help brands compare numbers with rivals and check how all products or customer segments perform.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

Lifetime Value offers a complete picture of a user’s journey and the average revenue that the user will generate throughout their engagement as a customer with your brand. It helps brands determine various economic decisions such as marketing budgets, profitability, forecasting, and resource allocation.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

A successful and profitable brand needs to balance its customer acquisition cost or CAC. It is about spending the right amount of resources and time to drive new customers without jeopardizing their lifetime value and revenue. Correct calculation of CAC helps brands to quantify their sales funnel and determine the efficiency and profitability of their strategies.

Conclusion

Historical pricing analytics is a powerful tool, and it can make a huge difference to a brand’s potential by increasing sales and unlocking incredible profitability in a relatively short time. Historical analysis of pricing and promotions data will help brands get better marketing returns than relying on traditional pricing approaches.

Leveraging pricing analytics will prevent brands from blindly reacting to competitor price changes and support solutions for scaling up price transformation efforts. By using historical pricing data, brands can more effectively segment their customers for marketing and promotion strategies. Properly utilizing predictive analytics and past sales data can help cut costs and keep profit margins high by adjusting production and prices according to market trends.
Need help tracking your competitor prices? Or want historic pricing insights for your own brand? Or need to track the efficacy of your online promotions?
Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help!

February 11, 2022
How to respond to Negative Online Reviews

Most brand & marketing professionals fear negative feedback and reviews. Negative reviews and ratings can not only hurt your organic product visibility online, but they also impact real business outcomes and purchase decisions potential customers will make about your product.

… but getting negative reviews is not always a bad thing. These unflattering reviews help give consumers real insights into your product and help them understand their features, attributes, benefits, and downsides better as described by other customers to give them a more realistic picture. Shoppers trust user generated reviews more than content brands share with them, which is why it’s really important for brands to interject in these conversations, address negative reviews and nudge customers towards building trust in their products.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when responding to negative reviews.

Be actionable and solution-oriented with your responses!

Even the strongest brands can’t avoid negative reviews, but what sets one apart from the other is how they tackle these reviews. A prompt and solution-oriented response can actually help salvage a negative situation in a lot of cases.

Build Brand Trust

Let’s take a look at Clinique & the unique approach they took towards responding to negative reviews. Shown above is one of its bestselling products Moisture Surge™ 100H Auto-Replenishing Hydrator. This product got an average of 4.7 stars since its launch in early 2021. 99% of customers even said they would recommend this product. And, in comparison to the over 370 positive reviews, there were just 5 negative reviews! Instead of basking in the glory of the numerous positive reviews, Clinique chose to promptly reply instead & not dismiss negative reviews even if there were just a tiny number. This goes a long way for any brand.

Negative feedback

Clinique not only addressed the customer’s concerns but also offered a ‘no questions asked’ refund and insisted that the customer take the conversation offline through a customer care agent. This action will help Clinique build long-term trust with not only the customers who had given them a low rating but the new ones too, who may stumble upon these negative reviews and see first-hand how customer-centric the brand is.

Respond promptly to keep things under control

A quick response to a negative review is supercritical. Even if you’re unable to resolve the customer’s problem immediately, acknowledging the review promptly lets them know their concern is a priority. On the plus side, it may also help them calm down and hold them back from posting even nastier comments. Aim to respond within 24 – 48 hours from the time a negative review is posted.

The quicker a customer hears from you, the more sincere your words will feel to them.

Prompt Response

Here’s an example of how Chobani yoghurts tackled a negative review. You’ll notice, they responded almost immediately when a customer complained about the “RANCID” tasting yoghurt. Responding minutes after the review came in shows their seriousness towards dealing with the situation and that they value customer feedback. Apart from prompt response, they even offered to investigate and work towards a solution.

Look for a chance to take the discussion offline

Negative Feedback System

Take the conversation offline by giving a phone number or email where customers can connect with a real person or brand representative. The goal is to move the conversation from a public forum to a private channel where a personal touch can be added. It could be a customer care number, a DM on a social platform, or a direct call back to the customer to listen to the details of their complaint. Additionally, connecting offline helps resolve issues faster without letting the problem escalate.

Do NOT get defensive

When it comes to responding to negative reviews, as a thumb rule pushing back or getting defensive is an absolute no-no. Being humble and accepting of negative feedback is important, and responding with grace, is even more important.

Let’s look at this example of a negative review left by an irate customer about the terrible IKEA customer service. Instead of getting defensive, IKEA politely acknowledges the feedback, apologies for the inconvenience, and offered a solution to help the customer sort out the issue with the order immediately!

Customer Feedback

A brand’s response to a negative review not only helps the individual who left the review in the first place but actually impacts other customers who will read it months down the line.

Remember to follow-up

Many times brands jump in promptly when a customer posts a negative review. They’re solution-oriented and some help resolve customer issues immediately too. The hard part’s done! However, where a lot of brands fall short, is when it comes to following up with customers once their concern has been addressed and they’re back to being brand advocates again.

Keeping that thought in mind, if it’s possible to get a customer who left a negative review to update or change it after their concern has been resolved could be a very impactful way to build brand trust. According to the Retail Consumer Report, 33% of customers turned around and posted a positive review, and 34% deleted the original negative review after having received a response from the brand or retailer in question.

Conclusion

Even though brands have limited to almost no control over how customers perceive their products online, they can still participate and interact with customers to improve their online reputation. They can listen in on the online conversations and adapt to customer feedback promptly based on what shoppers are discussing via reviews. Also, don’t filter the types of reviews when responding to your customers, and aside from the positive and neutral reviews, treat your negative reviews with extra care. Resolve them responsibly to win a customer for life!

If you need help tracking your online product reviews or analyzing the pulse of your customer sentiments to discover a wealth of insights, reach out to our Digital Shelf experts to learn more about our Review & Sentiment Analysis solution.

January 29, 2022
Best Practices to avoid MAP Violations

Competition is a fundamental and healthy part of commerce that protects customers by keeping prices low and the quality of services (and choice of goods) high.

Healthy competition drives prices down, but it can harm brands and their reputation without a pricing policy. The manufacturer or brand designs MAP or Minimum Advertised Pricing policies to stipulate retailers’ lowest price point to advertise the product. It is an agreement between distributors and manufacturers about the minimum price that retailers and resellers can advertise the product for sale.

Most legitimate brands have a MAP policy, especially brands that rely heavily on brand identity. It becomes critical that they maintain price parity across retailers. When a retailer violates MAP policies, brands can penalize them under the agreed-upon terms or terminate contracts.

In this blog, you will learn about MAP policy, its benefits, and tips on tackling MAP violations.

1. What is a MAP policy?

MAP Violations

MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price, and brands create MAP policies to ensure that retailers don’t advertise their products below the specified price. However, it only controls advertised prices, ensuring the retailers don’t display a lower price in online listings or advertisements. Since it doesn’t cover the checkout price, retailers can sell products at a lower price through promotional offers like discounts and cashback during checkout.

MAP policies ensure a price war between eCommerce platforms does not devalue products and that an even playing field is set among retailers that allow everyone to drive margins. Brands have a legal right to withdraw products if a retailer advertises products below the minimum advertised price. Brands can also restrict future sales or refuse to replenish products after the current stock has sold out if an eCommerce platform, reseller, or distributor violates MAP policies.

In the U.S., MAP policies fall under federal antitrust law since they restrict advertisement pricing rather than the last sales price. However, in the UK and the EU, violation of minimum advertised pricing is an infringement of current competition laws.

2. Why Does Having a MAP Policy Matter?

Having a MAP policy protects both brands and retailers while ensuring consumers get the best-priced items. Following are the benefits of having a MAP policy:

a. Prevent margin erosion

Although online retailers are willing to take a margin cut to attract traffic, selling products below MAP can significantly hurt a brand’s bottom line. Setting a minimum advertised price benefits both parties. It allows shoppers to purchase products at the best-valued price & also creates a balanced economy and prevents hyper-competition of products between retailers. However, manufacturers must set a realistic pricing policy that matches current market demand, ensuring eCommerce platforms implement MAP while taking care of the margins.

b. Retain brand identity

Brand Protection

Price is one of the essential indicators consumers use to determine the authenticity and value of a product. Constant price fluctuations can negatively impact a brand’s reputation. Brands need to safeguard their pricing to create a consistent price perception. Price changes often make the buying decision complex since consumers no longer have a clear reference of prices. It also shifts purchasers’ attention from the brand and product features to its price. With price fluctuations, brands that were used to be differentiated for their features can be seen as commodities.

Low prices & MAP violations on an online platform can even be a sign of counterfeit products or unauthorized sellers. However, customers might hold the brand responsible if they purchase counterfeit products from a retailer at lower prices. A negative product experience with a retailer will also reflect the brand’s reputation. An effective MAP policy that enforces consistent pricing will ensure that customers hunting for the best deals will stick with the most legitimate retailers.

Read how DataWeave helped Classic Accessories, a leading manufacturer of high-quality accessories detect counterfeits and identify unauthorized sellers.

c. Ensure price parity across retailers

Comparing prices has become an essential and common milestone in every consumer’s purchasing journey. It’s imperative that a brand ensures price parity across platforms and stores because substantial pricing variations on different platforms can make customers suspicious of a brand. Consistent pricing across eCommerce platforms ensures brands maintain their identity. MAP policies also allow retailers to maintain profit margins while avoiding price wars.

d. Combat revenue loss from illegitimate sales

While most authorized sellers or distributors comply with pricing policies, unauthorized sellers or grey market sellers have no obligation to follow a brand’s MAP pricing infrastructure. Brands can reduce risk with an authorized seller badge on retailer websites. This will help customers to verify authorized retailers and resellers of your products & help safeguard your brand equity online.

3. Tips on Implementing MAP policy and Tackling violations

Enforcing and tackling MAPs comes down to two things: monitoring the market for infringements and then acting on those violations. Here are a few tips for tackling MAP violations:

Implementation of MAP Policy & Tracking Violations

a. Communicate actively with retailers

To maintain a positive relationship with retailers and avoid confusion, brands should create proper communication strategies and channels to accompany the launch of the MAP policy. The policy should be easy to understand, but legal advisors are necessary to understand the jargon of the document. Brands can use checklists, videos, and well-briefed brand reps to communicate their policy clearly with retailers.

b. Reward retailers for compliance

Retailers who follow MAP guidelines can lose out to platforms that do not follow these pricing guidelines. Non-MAP following platforms undercut the price of products to drive sales and secure higher traffic. In such instances, brands can incentivize MAP following retailers to encourage them to comply with MAP guidelines while not affecting the competitive edge. It can be in the form of laxity of rules during promotion seasons like New Year, Christmas, and Black Friday sales. The laxity of rules for promotional seasons should be used as an exception to the general rule, and outlined in the guidelines.

c. Implement an AI-driven MAP monitoring

When product distribution is spread across the globe through a network of resellers and retailers, keeping a close watch on all platforms for multiple products can become difficult. With the expansion of online marketplaces, manually tracking the pricing of numerous products on multiple platforms is time-consuming and unsustainable. An automated AI-driven monitoring platform can track the pricing of all products sold across hundreds of online platforms and identify violations around the clock. Such platforms can alert brands of violations, price inconsistencies, or suspicious activities in real-time.

d. Send cease and desist to MAP violators and unauthorized dealers

Brands must enforce a MAP policy to ensure price parity among retailers and resellers. Brands must systematically monitor prices across retailers, social media, marketplaces, and price comparison websites. Whenever brands encounter a MAP violation, they should take action by sending a cease and desist letter to unauthorized sellers. For legitimate sellers, brands can notify them and outline the steps that will be taken if they don’t comply. Brands must be consistent in enforcing MAP policy violations, signaling retailers and unauthorized sellers that there will be repercussions for MAP violations.

MAP Policy

4. Conclusion

The trend towards online shopping helps businesses to cut overheads, allowing their products to be sold at a significantly reduced price. Although price appears to be the most effective consumer attraction strategy, significantly lowering product prices can devalue products and hurt brand reputation in the long term. However, including and enforcing MAP policies helps brands to manage their reputation and allows retailers to manage their margins.

Want to see first-hand how DataWeave can help brands track MAP Violations, Counterfeit products, and identify unauthorized sellers? Sign up for a demo with our Digital Shelf experts to know more.

January 29, 2022
Quick Commerce in 2022: An Era of Hyperlocal Delivery

Busy lifestyles, urbanization, aging populations, and smaller households led to the preference for convenience and efficiency in eCommerce deliveries. However, the Covid-19 pandemic caused a massive shift in customer demand and buying decisions. The modern consumer journey moved from takeaway food to online shopping to quick or same-day deliveries. With evolving digital touchpoints, customers now favor fast deliveries and convenience.

According to a 2020 survey by KPMG in the UK, 43% of consumers chose next-day delivery, a 4% increase from last year. Interestingly, 17% of consumers abandoned a brand if they faced a longer delivery. Standard delivery time has shortened from 3 to 4 days and two-day shipping to next-day or same-day delivery. This increasing trend of quick delivery has led to the boom of quick commerce or Q-Commerce. Quick commerce or on-demand delivery refers to retailers that deliver goods in under an hour or as quickly as 10 minutes. The rise of Q-commerce is caused by changing consumer behavior and rising expectations since the pandemic.

In this blog, you’ll learn about quick commerce or Q-Commerce and its benefits. You’ll also read about factors to consider for quick commerce and tips to implement this business model.

1. What is Quick Commerce?

On-Demand Delivery

Quick commerce or on-demand delivery is a set of sales and logistics processes that empowers eCommerce businesses, restaurants, grocery chains, and manufacturers to deliver products in less than 24-hours. A study shows that 41% of consumers are willing to pay for same-day delivery while 24% of customers will pay more to deliver their items within a one- or two-hour window.

Changing lifestyles and customer behavior directly impacted the rise of Q-Commerce. The takeaway food industry had used quick commerce for many years. But with Q-Commerce businesses consistently cutting delivery time, quick commerce for instant grocery delivery has become a new trend. For instance, India-based online grocery delivery firm Grofers rebranded to BlinkIt amid rising competition, promising 10-minute instant delivery.

2. How quick is Quick Commerce?

The post-pandemic lifestyle & the rise in the number of small and single-person households has led to an increase in demand for products in small quantities that need to be delivered sooner than later. Sometimes in as little as 10 minutes! This trend is oriented towards specific products such as packed or fresh foods, Groceries, Food delivery, Gifts, Flowers, Medicines to name a few.

Quick Commerce Categories

Local shops that can reach more customers with less friction have swapped traditional brick-and-mortar warehouses to cater to an urban population. These online Q-Commerce stores can deliver goods from favorite stores and offer a vast choice of products that are available 24/7. However, it requires real-time inventory management, data-driven pricing management, innovative logistics technology, a fantastic rider community, and a proper assortment.

3. Factors to consider for Quick Commerce

Competitive Assortment & Pricing

a. Assortment

With growing competition, getting product assortment right isn’t easy for quick commerce businesses, yet it’s critical to their success. To optimize assortment for quick commerce stores, they need to understand how demand differs between demographics and various stores. Since quick delivery involves packed and fresh products, it is even more essential to carry a unique assortment for each store.

Data analytics will help Q-Commerce businesses understand which products are repeatedly purchased in every store. It also helps identify high-demand gaps in your competitors’ platforms. Assortment analytics can help distinguish shifts in customer behavior across short- and long-term demands. The key to increasing sales is shaping inventory to match the overlap between market opportunity and consumer interest. With assortment analytics, they can determine the optimal mix of products for their daily inventory.

b. Pricing

Pricing information is readily available on quick commerce businesses, allowing customers to compare prices before making purchase decisions. Before deciding on a product, shoppers actively track the best deals on platforms across various Q-Commerce delivery platforms. According to a survey, 31% of consumers rated price comparisons as the essential aspect of their shopping experience. Understanding price perception can help quick commerce companies to optimize their pricing strategy while remaining competitive.

A competitive pricing strategy does not imply that Q-Commerce businesses have to cut prices. Instead, it’s about adjusting prices relative to your competitors but not significantly impacting the bottom line. Competitive pricing provides real-time pricing updates, allowing quick commerce platforms to drive sales by nailing their pricing strategy.

c. Delivery Time

Grocery Delivery Race In India

Delivery time has become the game-changer in quick commerce, with platforms fighting over shorter delivery times. Unpredictable factors such as specific delivery windows, last-minute customer requests, and traffic congestion can wreak havoc in your planning. Optimizing your delivery time can improve operational efficiency through faster delivery, quick route planning, and driver monitoring.

Big eCommerce platforms like Amazon offer same-day or next-day delivery to prime members with no extra fee on minimum order criteria. The only demand of customers who do not worry about discounts or lower wholesale prices is quick delivery. The demand for quick delivery services has led to many global retailers offering same-day delivery to meet those expectations.

d. Demand Forecasting

Since quick commerce is a viable solution for certain products, businesses must determine what customers want and when they want it. Q-Commerce businesses can use historical data to predict future sales patterns with demand forecasting. It ensures that Q-Commerce businesses can limit wastages and their inventory can cater to a targeted market. Demand forecasting also helps to replenish stock based on real-time data. Furthermore, companies can identify bottlenecks and points of wastage in the supply chain with a demand-driven system in place.

4. Benefits of Quick Commerce

Q-Commerce Benefits

a. Competitive USP

Q-Commerce businesses get new value propositions because customers that need immediate delivery are willing to try new brands and order from new stores. It also allows online Q-Commerce businesses to compete with global marketplaces and brick-and-mortar stores.

We at DataWeave have helped quick-service restaurants (QSRs) that are going the Q-Commerce route & selling via food aggregator apps to increase their revenue significantly. Our AI-Powered Food Analytic solutions have helped QSRs diagnose improvement areas, monitor key metrics, and drive 10-15% growth. Our data has helped them understand availability during peak times, monitor product visibility by region, track competitors, and choose suitable banners for promotion. Read more about that here.

b. Increase margins

A study from Deloitte suggests that 50% of online shoppers spend extra money to get convenient delivery of the products they need during the pandemic. These customers also paid extra for on-demand fulfillment and bought online pick-up in-store options.

Since the assortment of products in quick commerce is relatively small, Q-Commerce businesses can drive sales for their most profitable product lines. There is a potential for greater margins because wealthier demographics often require convenience. For instance, time-stranded professionals value convenience over discounts.

c. Customer experience is paramount

With quick commerce, retailers can meet customer expectations and exceed them, fostering brand loyalty. Quick commerce addresses customer pain points such as running out of food before a small party or getting a birthday present for your friends. It can simply help people who cannot make it to the shop or stock up essentials.

5. How to implement Quick Commerce

Implementation of Quick Commerce

a. The need for local hubs

To pack and deliver products in under an hour, businesses must be located close to the customers. Therefore, quick commerce relies on local warehouses that can serve customers in immediate proximity. Since the duration of two-wheelers is less likely to be impacted by heavy traffic or parking spaces, delivery services employ riders to deliver products.

b. Ensure you have the right analytics in place

Another essential part of running a quick commerce business is to have a web or phone application that can facilitate online ordering and offer accurate stock information to customers. Q-Commerce businesses also need a real-time inventory management tool that will provide insights into stock levels and allow for quick reordering and redistribution of products. This will also prevent deadstock and stockouts.

DataWeave’s Food Delivery Analytics product suite helps companies to increase order volumes, understand inventory, and optimize prices. It also provides access to discounts, offers, delivery charges, inventory, and final cart value across all your competitors.

c. It’s all about stock availability & assortment

Q-Commerce in the Grocery Delivery space is excellent for specific product niches like packed or fresh foods and vegetables, drinks, gifts, cosmetics, and other CPG products that customers use every day.

The stock assortment is as important in the Food Delivery space with restaurant chains like McDonald’s or Burger King that generate as much as 75% of their sales from online orders. These businesses have to make sure they’re carrying the most in-demand product assortment there is.

Conclusion

Same Day Delivery

The rise of quick commerce represents the next big change in eCommerce, accompanied by a shift in consumer behavior towards online grocery shopping and food ordering. When positioned with proper assortment and pricing, instant delivery services can allow Q-Commerce businesses to capture the influx of consumers looking for speedy delivery. By tapping into big data from quick commerce markets, Q-Commerce businesses can gain insights into consumer demands.

If you’re a Q-Commerce business in the Food Delivery or Grocery Delivery space, reach out to our experts at DataWeave to learn how our solutions can help you understand the best Pricing Strategy, Delivery Time SLAs, Assortment Mix you need in order to successfully sell on Q-Commerce platforms.

January 25, 2022
Beauty & Grooming Brands that are dominating on Amazon India
Growing awareness of personal hygiene and changing lifestyles has contributed to a significant development of India’s cosmetics, beauty, and personal care products. The Indian cosmetic industry reached a value of USD $26.1 bn in 2020. The major boom in sales is because of rising digitization, social media marketing, and the advent of eCommerce beauty platforms. However, the increase in demand and technological advancements has led to a competitive landscape for Indian and international brands competing for digital and physical channels. As of February 2019, 18.92% of respondents spent between 700 to 1700 rupees, and 43.9% spent up to 700 rupees monthly on cosmetics and personal care products in India.

Monthly spend on Personal Care Products in India

Shattering stereotypes and gender norms, India is also seeing a revolution in the male grooming industry, which is expected to reach INR 319.82 bn by 2024. The D2C market is expanding beyond metropolitan cities, and at present both D2C brands and startups have launched over 177 new products for men. “We realized there is an opportunity to create India’s first experiential brand exclusive for men,” says Hitesh Dhingra, Co-founder, The Man Company. He adds ecommerce business has grown almost by 200 percent. In a similar vein, Shantanu Deshpande, founder, and CEO, Bombay Shaving Company, concurs and adds the pandemic boosted online sales. He says that it has become easier for the company to compete with big brands on marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart.

With the onset of the pandemic, it has become more and more important for these D2C brands to have a strong digital presence and an even stronger Digital Shelf when selling on platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, and the likes. On these marketplaces, brands need to track critical KPIs like product discoverability, stock status & availability, reviews and ratings, pricing & promotions to make sure they’re optimizing product performance across all online channels to amplify their eCommerce growth.

So which beauty and grooming brands and categories have a strong Digital Shelf and are dominating on Amazon? Let’s take a look.

Men’s Grooming Brands and Categories

Methodology
- We tracked the first 250 products on Amazon against certain keyword searches specific to India’s Beauty & Grooming space.
  – Keywords specific to women’s grooming: anti-aging Cream, Face Mask, Paraben-free Shampoo, Onion Hair Oil, Body Wash, Moisturizer
  – Keywords specific to male grooming: Beard Oil, Hair Wax for men, Shaving Cream, After Shave Lotion, Beard Trimmer
- Share of Search (SoS) – The percentage of products that appeared on the search results page on Amazon belonging to a brand against a specific keyword or category.
- Data Scrape time period: From 14^th Oct 2021 to 10^th Nov 2021
THE BEAUTY IS IN THE DATA

On Amazon, brands use sponsored ads to increase visibility and drive more sales. When we looked at the product category with the most aggressive ad spends, products in the men’s grooming category came out on top and had the maximum number of sponsored products. 26% of beard trimmers were sponsored, followed by Beard Wax and Beard Oil at 25%. During the lockdown, more men started searching online for new products and watching instructional videos on how to groom their beards or how to get a salon-like shave at home. Demand for razors and trimmers is up by 50% compared to last year,” said Sidharth S Oberoi, founder and CEO, LetsShave. In contrast, we saw that only 11% of after-shave lotions and 15% shaving creams were discounted.

Percentage of Sponsered Items per Product Category

For women, we saw a similar trend. 24% of products in the Paraben-free Shampoos and Onion Oil category was sponsored. In contrast, only 5% of anti-aging creams were sponsored. Additionally, 21% of products in the face mask category and 23% in body wash were sponsored.

Competition is fierce in these categories, making an artificial boost necessary for increasing discoverability. In fact, we saw that the competition was the fiercest in the face mask category, which had the highest “1^st Page Change Rate.” It is an indicator of how much the results on the 1st page for a particular keyword change from time to time. This reflects higher competition and brands constantly updating their digital shelf KPIs to ensure their products appear on page 1. One of the biggest reasons why brands need to constantly gauge their online visibility is to track their sponsored & organic ranking compared to competitors.

Driving sales using a smart Discounting Strategy

Price can play a big role in the final purchase decision. So we looked at two things wrt price across all these beauty & grooming products.
- Which product Category had the maximum number of products on discount?
- … & how large were these discounts?
Percentage of Products on Discount

We saw that almost 55% of products in the body wash category & 46% of anti-aging creams were available at a discount. Beard Oil & Onion Hair oil had the least number of products discounted at 29% each.

Magnitude of Discount

How high were these discounts? Let’s take a look.

The highest discount was seen in the beard oil and moisturizer category, with an average discount of 17% across all products. The average discount trend across most product categories ranged between 14 to 17%, so we did see some consistency there.

Digital channels provide transparent insights into pricing & promotions, which is why customers are constantly comparing prices across various brands before making a purchase. This is why it is crucial for brands to remain competitive by tracking & comparing promotional strategies with those of their rivals.

To Review or Not to Review?

Consumers worldwide don’t make a purchase decision without reading online reviews. Online reviews and ratings have become a significant milestone in the modern consumer shopping journey, and eCommerce brands can leverage reviews as valuable sales tools. Given a choice between loyalty programs, discounts, reviews, and free shipping, online shoppers say reviews are the most important factor while making a purchase. Consumers trust user-generated content (UGC) more than product information and videos created by brands.

Number of Reviews per Product Category

We looked at product reviews to check consumers of which categories are actively sharing their experience and found that three categories stood out — beard trimmers, moisturizers, and paraben-free shampoo. At the same time, beard oil was the product category with the least number of reviews.

Companies can build consumer trust by identifying and acting on negative feedback. But in order to do that, they first need to de-code and understand the collective sentiment behind these reviews. DataWeave’s AI-Powered solutions can help brands break down & analyze online reviews and give them a wealth of insights to enrich their market research as well as create a seamless customer experience.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPETITION ON AMAZON

When selling on Amazon, brands need to make sure shoppers find their products with ease. Keyword searches are the top ways consumers discover and find products across eCommerce sites. We tracked search visibility for the following keywords to see which brands had the highest share of search and appeared on the 1^st page on Amazon.

Be in any product category – moisturizers, shampoo, anti-aging cream, Mamaearth & WOW featured against most keywords, showing popularity among customers. WOW Skin Science raised $50 million in April 2021, and Mamaearth raised $50 million in July 2021. These two fresh-faced brands have built credibility among health- and environment-conscious users. They are big competitors when it comes to natural and toxin-free products. It’s their high product visibility in multiple categories that is likely leading to better discoverability, higher sales & increased valuation, and brand value.

Rankings of Top Brands in various cosmetic categories- (A)

In the male grooming space, we observed that established brands like Nivea, Old Spice, and Park Avenue had a lower share of search than new D2C brands like Beardo, The Man Company, Bombay Shaving Company, and Ustraa. Here’s clear proof of concept that brands need to evolve and adapt their Digital Shelf to selling online if they want to beat the competition.

Rankings of Top Brands in various cosmetic categories– (B)

Who were the Amazon Bestsellers?

Products on Amazon that have the highest sales in their respective categories are called Amazon Bestsellers. The Amazon Bestsellers rank is based on product sales and sales history where the list undergoes an hourly update. The bestseller ranking or bestseller badge is available in the product information section on the product page. The rankings are determined by comparing sales and historical data with products in the same category or subcategory.

Brands can make it to Amazon’s bestseller list by optimizing their listings, encouraging reviews, and listing products in the relevance of categories. Although Amazon does not consider reviews for product ranking, they help users convince them to buy your product.

Here are the Brands we say that made it to #1 on the Amazon BestSeller List for the following product categories.

Amazon Bestseller List

Gillette made it to the top in the aftershave lotion and shaving cream category, while D2C brands Ustraa made its mark bearing number 1 on Amazon Bestseller list for hair wax for men and beard oil.

Amazon Bestseller List

Products from Nivea and L’Oreal made it to #1 seller in 2 categories each. Interestingly, in the Paraben-Free shampoo category, when D2C brands like WoW, Mamaearth have a stronger value proposition, traditional brand L’Oreal had the best-selling product.

L’Oreal must’ve pulled various levers and built a robust Digital Shelf to get to the top – from optimizing their content, ensuring product availability, tracking ratings and reviews, and proper competitive pricing.

Conclusion

An increase in new D2C brands in popular and trending categories has led to increasing competition. Unless a brand can position itself in front of the target audience and command their attention right away, another brand can step in and grab the sale. Do you know if your brand is prepped and ready to make an impact on marketplaces like Amazon? Or simply just wondering if your Digital Shelf is optimized with the right price, discounts, reviews, and keywords? Our team at DataWeave can help! Reach out to our Digital Shelf experts to learn more!
January 7, 2022
2021 Cost-Push Inflationary Trends Ran Rampant, Impacting Holiday Discounts

Business has been anything but usual this holiday season, especially in the digital retail world. The holiday hustle and bustle historically seen in stores was once again occurring online, but not as anticipated given the current strength of consumer demand and the reemergence of COVID-19 limiting in-store traffic. While ‘Cyber Weekend’, Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, continues to further its importance to retailers and brands, this year’s performance fell short of expectation due to product shortages and earlier promotions that pulled forward holiday demand.

Holiday promotions were seen beginning as early as October in order to compete with 2020 Prime Day sales, but discounting, pricing and availability took an opposite direction from usual. This shift influenced our team to get a jump start on our 2021 digital holiday analysis to assess how drastic the changes were versus 2020 activity, and to understand how much of this change has been influenced by inflationary pressures and product scarcity.

Scarcity Becomes a Reality

Our initial analysis started by reviewing year-over-year product availability and pricing changes from January through September 2021, leading up to the holiday season, as detailed in our 2021 Cyber Weekend Preliminary Insights blog. We reviewed popular holiday categories like apparel, electronics, and toys, to have a broad sense of notable trends seen consistently throughout various, applicable marketplaces. What we found was a consistent decline in product availability over the last six months compared to last year, alongside an increase in prices.

Although retailers significantly improved stock availability in November and early December 2021, even digital commerce giants like Amazon and Target were challenged to maintain consistent product availability on their website as seen below. While small in magnitude, there is also a declining trend occurring again closer toward the end of our analysis period, post Cyber Weekend, across all websites included in our analysis.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability insights for Home & Garden, Jewelry & Watches, Clothing & Shoes, Bed N Bath, Lighting & Ceiling Fans categories

Greater Discounts, Higher Prices?

With inflation at a thirty-nine year high, retailers and manufacturers have realized they can command higher prices without impacting demand as consumers have shown their willingness to pay the price, especially when threatened by product scarcity. Our assessment is that while some products and categories have responded drastically, manufacturers’ suggested retail prices (MSRPs) have increased nearly seven percent on average from January to December 2021. MSRP adjustments are not taken lightly either, as this is an indication increased prices will be part of a longer-term shift in product strategy.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com & Target.com each month in 2021 comparing price increases from January 2021 base

Our 2021 pre-Cyber Weekend analysis reviewed MSRP changes for select categories (Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion) on Amazon and Target.com, and found around forty-eight percent of products on Amazon and thirty-five percent of products on Target.com have increased their MSRPs year-over-year, but kept pre-holiday discount percentages the same.

Looking more specifically as to what year-over-year changes occurred on Black Friday in 2021, we observed MSRPs increasing across the board for all categories at various magnitudes. This indicates why 2021 discounts appeared to be greater than or equivalent to 2020 for many categories, when in reality consumers paid a higher price than they would have in 2020 for the same items.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – MSRP Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average MSRP pricing for the same SKU count from November 20-26th 2021

On Amazon.com, categories like health & beauty have already increase MSRPs by a much greater percentage and magnitude versus Target.com leading up to and during Black Friday 2021, while other categories like furniture have increased MSRPs evenly on average across both retail websites. The below chart cites a few specific examples of year-over-year SKU-level MSRP, promotional price, and discount changes within found within the electronics, furniture, fashion, and health & beauty categories.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – MSRP Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average MSRP pricing for the same SKUs on Black Friday November 26th, 2020.

Fewer, but Deeper Discounts

From October through early November 2021, fewer products were discounted compared to this same period in 2020, and the few that were saw much deeper discounts apart from the home improvement category. The most extreme example we saw in discounts offered was within furniture where only three percent of SKUs were on discount in 2021 compared to twenty-six percent in 2020. Interestingly, the magnitude of discount was also higher pre-Cyber Weekend 2021 versus 2020, but this trend was not exclusive to furniture and was also seen within electronics, health & beauty, and home improvement.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com & Target.com Pre-Black Friday average selling price during November 20-26th 2021 versus average selling price from November 13-19th 2021 compared to Pre-Black Friday average selling price during November 19-25th 2020 versus average selling price from November 12-18th, 2020.

Within the furniture category, the subcategories offering the greatest number of SKUs with price decreases on Black Friday 2021 were rugs by a wide margin, followed by cabinets, bed and bath, and entertainment units, but the magnitude of discounts offered were all under twenty percent.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020

Accounting for this phenomenon could have been retailers’ attempts to clear inventory for SKUs which hadn’t sold even during the period of severe supply chain shortages. With more products selling at higher prices this year, retailers were also able to use fewer SKUs with greater discounts to attract buyer in hopes of filling their digital baskets with more full-priced goods, helping to protect margins heading in to Cyber Weekend. Scarcity threats also encouraged consumers to buy early, even when not on promotion, to ensure they would have gifts in time for the holidays.

The same trends seen pre-Cyber Weekend 2021 were also seen on Black Friday with a year-over-year decrease in the percentage of SKUs offered on discount versus 2020, and steeper price reductions for the discounted products which can also be attributed to the increase in MSRPs.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020

2021 Black Friday Price Increases?

We all know Black Friday is all about price reductions, discounts and deals and so it’s rare to see actual price increases, yet for Black Friday 2021, trends ran counter to this. We observed price increases across all categories for around thirteen to nineteen percent of SKUs, with an average price increase of around fifteen percent in 2021 versus an average of only two percent in 2020.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020

At an account level, we noticed a few interesting differences happening on Black Friday 2021 versus 2020 regarding category price changes. On Target.com, almost ninety percent of the bed and bath SKUs analyzed had a price change on Black Friday in 2021 versus 2020 with eighty-two percent presenting a higher price year-over-year versus only around seven percent showing a decrease, where on Amazon nearly forty-four percent of bed and bath SKUs showed an increase in price and around thirty-eight percent showed a decrease. Except for the health and beauty category on Target.com, more than half of the SKUs in each category saw a price increase on Black Friday versus a price decrease.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs on Black Friday November 26th, 2020.

The magnitude of year-over-year price changes seen on Black Friday 2021 was significant across all categories, but the magnitude of price increases found on Amazon.com within the health and beauty category outpaced the rest by far. We reviewed three hundred and sixty-five SKUs on Amazon.com within the health & beauty category and saw almost eighty-three percent of them had a price change with around thirty-one percent decreasing prices and around fifty-two percent increasing prices. This means that within the health & beauty category on Amazon.com, more than fifty percent of the SKUs tracked were sold at a one hundred and seventy-six percent higher price on average during Black Friday 2021 versus 2020.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus average pricing for the same SKUs on Black Friday November 26th, 2020.

The subcategories offering the greatest number of SKUs with price increases on Black Friday 2021 were cameras, followed by men’s fragrances, laptops, and desktops & accessories, but the magnitude of discounts offered were all under ten percent.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Insights for Bed & Bath, Electronics, Furniture, Healthy & Beauty, and Fashion categories on Amazon.com and Target.com on Black Friday November 27th, 2021, versus pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 20-26th 2021 and Black Friday November 26th, 2020, versus average pricing for the same SKUs from Pre-Black Friday November 19th-25th 2020

The Aftermath Post-2021 Cyber Weekend

Extending this analysis beyond the holiday weekend, we analyzed price change activity from December third through the ninth across the top US retailers (chart below) and found that price decreases have been very minimal, comparatively speaking. Though there was a spike in number of price decreases from December 8^th to the 9^th, the percentage of SKUs with price decreases was still very low (less than three percent). We anticipate this trend will continue into 2022.

Source: Commerce Intelligence – Pricing insights for Home & Garden, Jewelry & Watches, Clothing & Shoes, Bed N Bath, Lighting & Ceiling Fans categories

A Sign of Things to Come

A confluence of inflationary trends, product shortages and consumer liquidity have driven many marketplace changes to occur simultaneously. Government programs in the form of stimulus checks, have put extra money in consumers’ hands, and so they’ve been more willing to spend. That, coupled with the shock in the supply chain, has motivated people to buy far ahead of the 2021 holiday season. Hence, retailers have needed to rely much less on across-the-board discounts. Promotions have been more strategic – we’ve seen deeper discounts over fewer products, likely used to draw consumers in to buy certain items, and once they’re there, customers are buying everything else at a non-discount level. When these factors once again normalize, we could see a return to the “race to the bottom” that has occurred since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, but for once, retailers may be able to maintain some pricing power as the 2021 holiday shopping season played out.

Even though performance was not as anticipated and holiday sales did not grow as rapidly as they did in 2020, Cyber Monday was still the greatest online shopping day in 2021. Through it all, retailers managed to keep their digital shelves stocked and orders filled in time for the holidays for the most part, running the risk of housing aged inventory if goods didn’t arrive in time. Despite predictions for steep promotions in January 2022, with supply chains still challenged and inflationary pressures still full steam ahead, we don’t anticipate much in the way of enhanced discounts to continue beyond the holidays.

Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions like how and when to address inflationary pressures, while also supporting many other day-to-day operations and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Continue to follow us in the coming weeks for a detailed 2021 year-end review across more retailers and categories. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis.

January 4, 2022
Importance of Image Recognition in the Retail Industry
When it comes to classifying and analyzing images, humans can easily recognize distinct features of objects and associate them with individual definitions. However, visual recognition is a highly complex task for machines because it involves identifying multiple objects and finding object relationships. Image recognition has been a long-standing research problem in the computer vision field. But, the recent development in AI has improved the process of object detection, image identification, and image classification. The image recognition market is assumed to rise globally to a market size of $42.2 billion by 2022. Various industries are adopting image recognition technology to improve augmented reality applications, optimize medical imagery, boost driverless car technology, predict consumer behavior, and much more.

Although image recognition is a relatively new aspect of analysis, it is also making its way into eCommerce. Image recognition is helping retailers to expand consumer reach, offer insights into trends, and improve customers’ online shopping experience for the eCommerce industry. The Global Image Recognition in Retail Market is estimated to be USD 1.8 Bn in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 4.5 Bn by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 20%.

Global Image Recognition in Retail Market

In this blog, you’ll learn about image recognition technology and its importance in the retail industry.

What is Image Recognition?

Image recognition, a subcategory of computer vision, is a technology that can identify objects, entities, or attributes in digital images or videos. However, computer vision is a broader term, including methods for gathering, processing, and analyzing data from the real world. Image recognition can be performed at varying degrees of accuracy, depending on the type of information required.

Image recognition can perform the following tasks:

Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation & Instance Segmentation
- Classification: It identifies the “class,” i.e., the category to which an image belongs. A picture can have only one class.
- Tagging: It’s a classification task but involves a higher degree of accuracy. Tagging can recognize several concepts or objects within an image, and there can be more than one tag assigned to a particular image.
- Detection and localization: This step helps locate object(s) in an image. Once the system locates the object in question, localization helps to place a bounding box around it.
- Segmentation: This is also a detection task but involves a higher degree of precision. Segmentation locates element(s) to the nearest pixel in an image.
- Instance segmentation: It helps differentiate multiple objects belonging to the same class.
Image Recognition in eCommerce and how it works

Nowadays, increasing competition and customer expectations are forcing online retailers to constantly monitor market dynamics wrt their pricing, promotion & product assortment in order to stay competitive. To get these insights, retailers need to match and compare their products against their competitors to see where the gaps are. That’s where product matching comes in.

Product matching refers to finding the same or similar products against a target universe of products from across the web, across multiple competing retailers. Product matching uses AI-based image recognition to determine product attributes, find patterns, and detect text, product price, shipping information, and so on.

Here’s how DataWeave’s AI-powered analytics platform uses image recognition & aggregates insights & data for retailers from across the web to provide a comprehensive view of the online competitive environment.

Image recognition use-cases in the retail industry

a. Attribute tagging

Attribute Tagging

Getting shoppers to your eCommerce platform is one thing and getting them to complete a purchase is a steeper hill to climb. If your platform can’t provide search results that match with customers’ requirements, they’ll get lost, grow frustrated, and drop off. Attribute tagging with image recognition allows eCommerce stores to automatically generate attributes for all products so customers can quickly find products they are looking for.

Tags allow users to filter products based on the categories they want to explore. Product tags include everything the customer might specifically search for — color, type, size, brand, use, design, fabric, discount, etc. For example, a dress could have tags like red, evening, midi, summer, long-sleeve, silk, summer sale, etc. When a user looks for midi dresses or long-sleeve dresses, products with these tags will show up.

b. Search by image

Visual Search

Visual Search allows users to look for similar products using a reference image from their camera roll or downloaded from the internet. The visual search feature also enables eCommerce businesses to implement image-based search into their software applications. It maximizes the searchable potential of their visual data.

Meanwhile, Gartner predicts a 30% increase in digital commerce revenue by 2021 for companies who start supporting visual and voice search on their websites and apps. The benefits of visual search include more personalized, easy product recommendations and enhanced product discovery.

c. Fashion trend analysis

Similarity Matching

Tapping into trending product categories is a goldmine for any eCommerce business. Having insights into trending categories and products means less competition on search engines, fewer ads, and intelligent pricing. All of which can boost any retailer’s margins. Image recognition technology provides information about colors, styling techniques, fabric textures, prints, and more to spark consumer demand. It works by scanning social media images to pinpoint trending attributes and predict fashion trends. For instance, while scanning images, technology understands that it’s seeing a photo of a color-blocked sweatshirt because it recognizes the product has a hooded neck, full sleeves, blocks of different colors, and even the type of fabric. This technology can analyze millions of images, helping retailers analyze the volume of color-blocked sweatshirts.

We do this seamlessly at DataWeave. Our similarity matching solution helps retailers gather insights into attributes for products similar to the ones they’re carrying on their site. Similarity matching helps retailers gain visibility into their entire competitive landscape to keep their e-commerce strategy responsive to price & product assortment shifts among consumers and rivals

d. Augmented reality

According to Statista, the AR market is valued at $9.5 billion, with around 810 million active mobile users. Since shoppers want the full sensory product experience before shopping online, augmented reality (AR) can help them understand what they’re buying and how the product will work for them. There are AR applications for trying makeup, clothing, accessories, and even eyeglasses. IKEA was one of the pioneers in using AR for eCommerce retail. In 2017, IKEA launched the Place app, allowing shoppers to see how thousands of items will look in their homes, with 98% accuracy.

Image recognition helps AR applications anchor virtual content with the real world. For instance, Sephora has a Virtual Artist that allows users to try different makeup looks and even take pictures of an outfit they’re planning to wear to match the shade. Users can even check out full-face looks and learn how to do their makeup with virtual tutorials.

e. Counterfeit Detection

Counterfeit Detection

Another application of image recognition that has proven to be very successful is counterfeit product detection. It has become increasingly difficult for brands and retailers to find and eliminate fake items on eCommerce sites. U.S. Customs seized over 13,500 counterfeit goods worth $30 Million in November 2021, indicating how brands and online marketplaces have struggled in the past to find an effective solution.

Essentially, image recognition technology allows eCommerce sites to detect products with fake logos and designs attempting to sell as legitimate brands by capturing discrepancies in images and content. The system flags and delists the products and sellers when a fake is detected.

Here’s how DataWeave helped Classic Accessories, a leading manufacturer of high-quality covers, furnishings, and accessories automate their counterfeit detection process using our super Image Recognition capabilities.

f. User-generated content analysis

Visual content plays a vital role in eCommerce sites, especially when it comes to product photos and videos. Today, branded visual content isn’t as effective as it’s one-dimensional. As a matter of fact, 93% of marketers agree that customers trust user-generated content more than content produced by brands. However, user-generated content that features product images or videos is way more exciting, realistic, and creative. It gives customers an appealing view of products being used in real life.

The most common form of UGC, i.e., reviews and ratings, have been the key for eCommerce brands as they are quantitative and qualitative metrics about a product/service quality, worth, value, reliability, etc. With image recognition, retailers can access insights into strengths and gaps in all product offerings by understanding what consumers are saying about them.

Here’s how DataWeave can help retailers and brands analyze consumer reviews & help them adapt to customer needs.

Conclusion

Because of its massive influence, image recognition technology is becoming widely adopted by eCommerce companies. It benefits both retailers and customers. Image recognition based on deep learning can provide retailers with helpful capacities like customer analytics, counterfeit detection, personalized searches, and more. Retailers can also use the data gathered from image recognition eCommerce technology to design effective marketing campaigns and improve their ROI.

With super sharp image recognition capabilities, DataWeave offers 90% accuracy in matching eCommerce products, allowing us to provide comprehensive and precise insights into pricing and assortments. Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.
December 20, 2021
6 Promotional Strategies for the Holiday Season

For eCommerce companies, holidays are the busiest season of the year. Whether creating brand awareness with your marketing campaigns or freshening up your landing pages or finding new ways to segment & understand your customers, the list of tasks seems endless. It’s the time of the year when most people look forward to shopping for friends and family.

The holiday shopping season begins with Black Friday and Cyber Monday and leads to the December holidays, including Christmas and New Year. Consequently, proper planning and marketing are essential for a successful holiday season.

In fact, holiday sales during November and December are forecasted to be between $843.4B – $859B, up 10.5% over 2020, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). For online stores specifically, sales are predicted to increase between 11% – 15% to a total of between $218.3B and $226.2B driven by online purchases.

This guide will share eight promotional strategies retailers can use during the holiday season. We will also discuss how data analytics can help retailers improve their promotional strategies.

Using data analytics to guide promotional strategies

Promotional Strategies

Data is the foundation of every successful marketing campaign. Data analysis helps companies understand which graphics worked well and campaigns that generated the most revenue. Gathering data and running analysis helps companies improve their next marketing campaign. Retailers can also get deeper insights into campaigns/channels with the highest conversion rate or average order value (AOV).

With data analytics, retailers can prioritize campaigns and channels that resonate the most with their customers this holiday season. But, it would be best to try more than one promotional strategy to ensure you double down on what works without placing all of your eggs in one Christmas-themed basket.

Here are four ways that data analytics can help guide promotional strategies:

a. Customized alerts for listing pages

Data analysis helps retailers determine if certain products are out of stock on their rival’s website and adjust their own pricing accordingly. It allows retailers to grab market share for trending items. For example, if you get an out-of-stock alert for a particular product at competitors’ stores, you can invest more in advertising that product on your online store. In addition, customized alerts keep retailers informed about their inventory status, allowing them to plan promotions and ads. They can see which products are becoming commoditized due to intense competition and which ones offer better revenue opportunities.

Learn how DataWeave can help retailers track their competitor’s stock and inventory status.

b. Maximize conversions by tracking product trends

Assortment Analytics

Customers are always looking for products that are currently trending. With assortment analytics, eCommerce companies can get insights into hot trends, allowing them to stock in-demand categories and products. Integrating assortment analytics with AI-powered image analytics can also provide insights into attributes that are popular among customers. By filling gaps in their current assortments, retailers can improve conversion rates and increase revenue.

Here’s a case study on how DataWeave helped Douglas, a luxury beauty retailer in Germany boost sales by building an in-demand product assortment

c. Monitor competitor promotions

Promotional Insights

With increased competition and consumer demand for deals, it has become important for retailers to monitor their competitor’s promotions. Monitoring promotions helps retailers to optimize their ad spend accordingly. AI-powered image analysis tools can capture important information from competitors’ ad banners and deliver insights into metrics that are working to deliver sales.

Here’s how DataWeave can help retailers make their marketing magnetic with competitive promotional insights!

d. Optimize margins with a data-driven pricing strategy

Pricing Intelligence

It has become challenging to price products in recent years since digital tools enable price transparency across channels. Although this trend is excellent for consumers, it makes competition fierce for retailers. A data-driven pricing strategy incorporates a variety of factors, including industry needs, competitor analysis, consumer demand, production costs, and profit margins.

With data-driven competitive pricing, retailers can keep pace with the changing eCommerce environment with real-time pricing updates. It also helps them optimize margins and quickly respond to changes in prices on rival stores.

Promotional Strategies for the Holiday Season

a. Virtual Webrooms

When customers want to see a product in-person, they go to a store showroom. It helps them make a purchase decision. However, with the Internet, eCommerce companies can bring this tactic online. The only difference between showrooming and webrooming is that the former takes in-person, whereas the latter happens digitally. Webrooming grew in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of spending weekends browsing stores, consumers took to the Internet for most of their product research.

A webroom allows customers to explore products from every angle, providing them with the complete in-person showroom experience online. Webrooming is a powerful holiday marketing strategy, especially regarding expensive purchases. Customers prefer to understand how the product will look. However, building a webroom is extensive and requires retailers to hire developers and professional photographers.

Webrooms allow retailers to share their collections, schedule virtual appointments, share 3D product images, set up virtual fitting rooms for clothing products, and accept purchase orders. For example, in 2015, Tommy Hilfiger launched its first digital showroom in Amsterdam to improve sustainability and minimize its carbon footprint. Through remote wholesale selling and digital product creation, a digital showroom helped Tommy Hilfiger transform the buying journey and retail value chain.

b. Loyalty-rewarding sales and perks

Customer Loyalty

Consider building customer loyalty during your holiday promotions. First, encourage your holiday shoppers to become loyal customers by offering bonus rewards, contests, or giveaways when they sign up for your loyalty program. You can encourage them to purchase right away by providing instant discount coupons or points for a reward to redeem on their next purchase. For maximum impact, you should run this promotion throughout the holiday season.

Second, you should attract your current loyalty program members with discount codes. Offer free shipping or provide a one-day-only discount code to ensure your customers choose you during their last-minute purchases. With these rewards, you’ll attract customers who are window shopping and simultaneously bring your loyal customers back throughout the holiday season.

c. Charitable Tie-Ins

AmazonSmile

Research shows that customers are four times more likely to purchase from brands with a strong sense of purpose. With the festive season being the time of giving, working with a charity and giving back to your community is a great way to reach out to customers.

After a tough one and half years because of the pandemic, people want to give back and help those in need this holiday season. You can partner with a non-profit and run campaigns that allow customers to give back. It’s also great for sharing your brand mission with your customers. For instance, Amazon allows customers to shop from AmazonSmile, which donates 0.5% of their eligible Charity List purchases to a selected charity, at no extra cost to the customers.

Consider partnering with an organization within your industry. For example, you can pair up with a non-profit that collects and gives clothes to the needy if you sell clothes. You can involve customers by asking them to exchange old dresses for coupons or cash discounts.

d. Omni-channel customer experience

Omni-channel marketing provides customers with a seamless, consistent, and cohesive experience over multiple marketing channels. Omnichannel marketing aims to provide a meaningful and cohesive experience that inspires your customers to make a purchase. Unlike multichannel marketing, this strategy puts the customer at the center of marketing campaigns and elevates the cross-channel customer experience.

Omnichannel shoppers spend 10% more money and purchase 15% more items than the original shoppers. eCommerce companies can use historical data to analyze successful channels and create a more transparent marketing strategy for the holiday season. Omnichannel analytics will provide a holistic picture of customer data that will help retailers to better meet the customer’s requirements and predict inventory.

e. Buy now, pay later (BNPL)

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)

Technically, buy now, pay later isn’t a promotional idea since your customers will still be paying the full price. However, BNPL allows them to delay their payments and not pay in full right away at checkout. Buy now, pay later needs to be on every eCommerce company’s holiday promotions plans. Various retailers, including Walmart, offer affordable monthly payments at the pace of 3 to 24 months with Affirm. Target also has a similar scheme with Sezzle and Affirm. Whereas Sephora and Macy’s offer 4 interest-free payments with Klarna.

BNPL is especially popular with millennials and Gen Z shoppers and will factor into their 2021 holiday shopping plans. Research showed 62% growth in the use of buy now, pay later service in consumers aged 18 to 24. Giving customers a means to manage their budgets during holidays while still taking home their purchases will attract more customers. While the customer doesn’t pay the full price right away for their purchase, businesses still get the total worth of the item. In the eCommerce industry—nearly 50% of BNPL users say they use it while shopping online, and among them, 45% use the service frequently.

f. Buy One, Get One

The last promotional idea is a classic buy one, get one offer. Everyone likes a good BOGO promotional offer. In fact, 66% of shoppers from a survey preferred BOGO over other promotions. It’s a win-win promotional strategy for retailers and customers. With this offer, people shop and stock up on gifts for their friends and family, while retailers make a more significant profit than 50% off sales. People prefer to get 100% off on a product over 50% on two items.

BOGO sales are best to move inventory by giving shoppers a deal they can’t pass up. If you have stocked up extra items during Black Friday, you can move those last-minute gifts as end-of-year BOGO sales, making room for new merchandise in January.

Conclusion

In this post, you saw that there’s more to holiday marketing than a few social media posts. eCommerce companies can use these holiday promotional ideas to offer Loyalty-rewarding sales and perks, buy now pay later service, and an omnichannel customer experience. Regardless of which strategies you’re using, remember that historical data analytics and early planning will play a significant role in increasing your sales and revenue.

Proper planning backed by insights into key metrics will help your team develop a one-of-a-kind holiday marketing strategy to drive your holiday sales upward. From sharing gratitude to offering personalized experiences, retailers have various options for promoting business this holiday season.

Learn how DataWeave can help make sense of your and your competitor’s pricing, promotional, and assortment data this holiday season. Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.

December 15, 2021
Are Your Digital Shelves Prepared for Green Monday?

Traditionally, retailers have staged multiple promotions between Black Friday and before Christmas Day to keep consumers excited about holiday shopping, so it’s easy to see why one more promotional day might fall into relative obscurity. As if ‘Early Start’ offers to Black Friday and extended ‘Cyber Weekend’ promotions weren’t enough to plan for, eBay added another day into the mix called ‘Green Monday’, much to the benefit of consumers, as it furthers the window of opportunity to secure a bargain during the holiday season.

Green Monday falls on the second Monday of December and has historically been one of the greatest sales days of the year for eBay, often attracting last-minute shoppers or those searching for last-minute deals. However, because of the 2021 Global Shipping Crisis, there is speculation that Green Monday may be the last chance this year to have items delivered in time for Christmas. For this reason, we believe it could turn into quite a fruitful event for participating retailers if it encourages procrastinating shoppers that traditionally spend closer to December 25^th to buy earlier in the season.

This isn’t the first year retailers outside of eBay have offered Green Monday promotions, however. Our team has been actively monitoring activity on this day from 2017 through present, to not only assess which retailers participate in the event, but also to understand how the discounts may change surrounding the event. The categories monitored include Apparel (Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry), Bed and Bath, and Home and Garden, and we’ve identified products offered on discount by comparing each applicable product’s price on Green Monday versus the most commonly seen price for the product offered throughout the month of December.

Better Promotions Than Boxing Day

Taking a closer look at 2020 Green Monday discounts within the categories and retailers analyzed, apart from Wayfair.com, we see all offered more SKUs on discount on Green Monday versus the days leading up to and out of the event. Kohls.com led the pack with around 93% of SKUs offered on discount, followed by Macys.com with 95%, and Wayfair.com with 83%. Overall, the number of SKUs on discount on Green Monday were greater than the SKUs offered on discount on Boxing Day, which is traditionally known as a great day to bargain shop.

Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Promotional Insights tracking Apparel, Bed & Bath, and Home & Garden category product’s online price on Green Monday 2020 in the US versus regular prices for the same products in the month of December each year.

What’s in Store for Green Monday 2021?

The insights we’ve tracked over the last four years have not indicated any signs to an end for Green Monday any time soon. As we see it, for consumers it is an extremely convenient time to order holiday gifts, and for retailers it is a good time to build brand trust and loyalty by fulfilling last minute orders at a great value, in time for the holidays.

Our prediction for the categories analyzed is to expect to see more retailers participate in Green Monday 2021 to a greater degree (more SKUs on sale and enhanced promotions). For retailers in this analysis, we would anticipate HomeDepot.com to enhance the number of offers to match 2020 competitive activity, and for Wayfair.com to look at increasing the number of offers on Green Monday versus the period leading into the event.

If you are interested in learning more about the details behind this analysis or our Promotional Insights solution, be sure to contact us. We can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your holiday promotional spend with access to near real-time marketplace insights on the brands, categories, and products your rivals promote, including discounts, campaign frequency and duration and more.

December 13, 2021
Manage Your Supply Chain Like a Pro
To make faster, seamless deliveries possible, brands need to tighten their supply chain. The pandemic has put a lot of stress on the global supply chain. The supply shock that began in China in February and the demand shock that followed as the global economy shut down uncovered weaknesses in production strategies and supply chains. Temporary trade restrictions and shortages of pharmaceuticals, critical medical supplies, and other products, further added to the problem.

As a consequence of all this, brands have to reduce or even eliminate their dependence on sources that are perceived as risky and rethink their use of lean manufacturing strategies that involve minimizing the amount of inventory held in their global supply chains. In the post-pandemic world, the supply chain will take center stage, and managing it efficiently with technical support is going to be what gives one brand an upper hand over the others.

1. Micro fulfillment is emerging as the need of the hour

Emerging Micro Fulfillment

Retailers are now faced with unprecedented omnichannel fulfillment complexities. Not only do customers expect faster order fulfillment and delivery, but they’re also opting to ‘buy online and pick up in-store (BOPIS)’ or ‘click-and-collect’. Amazon has spent billions of dollars on building its shipping infrastructure, including its existing operating 175+ fulfillment centers across the world and investing nearly $1.5 Bn to build an air hub in the US. Walmart, on the other hand, is relying on its existing footprint across 5000+ US stores to help deliver online orders faster.

All this is hinting towards micro-fulfillment emerging as a strategy retailers are using to make the fulfillment process more efficient and their supply chain more ready — from receiving an online order to packing it and offering last-mile delivery. This approach will certainly work towards imparting speed to localized, in-store pick-up and combine it with the efficiency of large, automated warehouses. Delivery speed and costs are more important than ever to retain customers and foster brand loyalty. In fact, this will become a big differentiator for grocery e-commerce as the number of people making online grocery purchases has increased drastically the world over and a recent report indicated that in the US, 46% of people use online delivery more now than before the COVID crisis, and 40% use online pickup more.

2. Use big data to tie-in loose nodes

Supply chain management is held at the heart of every successful e-commerce company. Supply Chain efficiency always ensures that the right product reaches the right place at the right time. It ensures cost reduction and enhancement of cash utilization. That is why it is important to stay alert and tie-in all loose ends in the supply chain architecture. Big data can come in handy here and it is that quantitative method and structure that can be used to improve decision-making for all activities across the supply chain. While the role of big data is extremely exhaustive and full-pronged across the entire supply chain design, it is important to understand it in theory in a simplified way so that brands can incorporate it to make their backend operations seamless.

Big data is all about real-time analytics and it primarily does two very important things in making supply chain management easy
- It expands the dataset for analysis beyond the traditional internal data held on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems.
- Big data apply powerful statistical methods to both new and existing data sources. This helps give structure to new insights. This in turn allows forecasting and helps improve supply chain decision-making capabilities for your brand, all the way from the improvement of front-line operations, to strategic choices such as the selection of the right supply chain operating models.
3. Improve ROI by introducing automation to the mix

Introducing Automation to Improve ROI

Introducing automation will help take care of tasks usually done manually, such as placing orders, processing changes, data entry, and much more. This frees up time and cuts down on human errors leading to error-free, faster processes. Adidas for instance has been able to reduce 60% of its operational supply chain costs just by switching to end-to-end automation. The largest sportswear manufacturer used automation across 400 factories by bringing in standardized, reusable processes to deliver the best results in a cost-effective way across the supply chain, marketing, finance, retail, and eCommerce. On the supply chain part, with automation, the brand was able to globally attend to supply chain service desk management, vendor onboarding, PO change management, Contract form approval, product data verification, and other such tasks in real-time. This highly successful initiative helped the brand save a lot of time, it earlier lost in manually attending to internal processes and reduced the time to market for Adidas by two-thirds. Moreover, automating systems helps cut down slacks and in return allows the supply chain to stay agile and alert for any unforeseen situations. This readiness further boosts the framework towards growth.

4. Eye the future and introduce robotics

Robotics is the next big thing in Future

Autonomous technology is not the next big thing of the future but is the most important thing at present defining the face of the supply chain. Autonomous robots are expected to see strong growth over the next five years. In fact, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG),the global robotics market is estimated to reach USD 87 Billion by 2025. It is believed that more than half of this will be allocated for the retail market. In fact, it is not uncommon to find giant beetle-like robots moving around busily with vertical shelves stacked on them inside Amazon’s warehouse in southern New Jersey, US. Tesco for instance uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) robots who are used to scan inventories for entire stores in just an hour (as against seven hours for a store employee) with far fewer errors.

Even though every word of this sounds too futuristic to be believable, this is the reality for now and retailers are beginning to realize that innovation must set in holistically and extend far beyond just the warehouse or supply chain. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are fast becoming commonplace in warehouses, helping warehouse workers to fulfill orders quickly and efficiently. There are a few different types of robots that companies are considering, and each has its own unique set of advantages. AMRs in totality enable workers to be more productive due to constant collaboration and promote agility, cutting down on slacks and errors.

A cohesive and well-defined supply chain where you can leave enough room for tweaks in the future owing to evolving trends will surely help you gain an edge over your competitors through the entire lifecycle of your product. Getting a grip over the supply chain is necessary now as, by 2025, many supply chains may shift from global flows of goods and services to national, regional, and local networks of buyers and suppliers. So, integrating the supply chain keeping an eye on the global and local is the real deal!
December 9, 2021
How Brands Boost Sales & Satisfaction on Walmart.com
The explosive growth of online shopping has forced brands to re-examine their e-commerce processes to stay competitive and profitable. In particular, out-of-stocks are a common, costly retail challenge, as product shortages frustrate online shoppers – and even prompt them to leave brands.

According to McKinsey & Company, forty-eight percent of consumers switched to a different brand in 2020 because those products were in stock. Among these consumers, seventy-three percent plan to keep using the new brands, linking product availability gaps to the erosion of sales and loyalty. Conversely, brands with effective inventory planning and replenishment can keep items in stock, drive sales and improve the customer experience.

Retailers like Walmart, collaborating with these brands to meet customer demand, are still facing inventory challenges but, as noted in 2021 Q3 earnings, inventory was up almost twelve percent year-over-year as they worked to stay ahead of increased holiday demand. They have also adjusted in-store operations to accommodate ever-growing e-commerce demands, especially within grocery-centric categories, as digital grocery buyers now amount to more than half the U.S. population.

Maximizing Conversions with Category Insights

Walmart’s dot-com strategy is paying off in spades, considering they surpassed Amazon as the leading U.S. grocery e-commerce retailer in 2020 and grew another forty-one percent in Q3, 2021. Our team has been actively tracking digital shelf analytic KPIs on Walmart.com to identify inventory and promotional performance improvement opportunities at a category level to support brands in capitalizing on these digital growth opportunities.

The latest analysis is summarized below, reviewing average category availability and discount trends occurring each week of the month, from May to August 2021, at a category level. A recent report found the 29th of each month to be the busiest day for online sales because consumers often get paid at the end of the month, which made DataWeave analysts wonder:
- Which categories are maximizing their growth potential on Walmart.com and where are the greatest opportunities for improvement during periods of increased demand?
- How do increased demand periods (like payday) impact category online availability?
- Are category promotions offered at the right times throughout the month to best support demand?
When Seasonal Demand for Groceries and Payday Merge

Across all Walmart.com food categories tracked, Week 5 – where payday commonly falls for most consumers, had the lowest average product availability, while Week 4 had the highest average product availability for all categories except Deli and Fruits and Vegetables. These findings may inspire Walmart’s brand partners to rethink their inventory and assortment planning, replenishment and even pricing efforts to maintain a healthy stock closer toward the end of the month to match higher demand.

The categories with the greatest difference in average availability during Week 5 versus the rest of the month were Snacks & Candy, Beverages and Alcohol, indicating consumers consistently made these types of purchases closest to payday, when income was highest throughout the month. Seasonality is a secondary factor that influenced demand for these items given events like Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Summer Break, and Back-to-School shopping all took place during our analysis. Additionally, most holidays overlapped payday, which also furthered Week 5 demand.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Coupling availability with discounts allows us to consider whether consumers buy more in Week 5 due to high discounts or increased purchasing power, or both. In reviewing the average category discounts offered within the same grocery-centric categories analyzed above, we found almost every grocery category showed a higher discount in Week 5 compared to the rest of the month, except for Bread & Bakery and Alcohol.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Regarding Alcohol, during Week 4, when average availability was the highest, the average discounts offered were the lowest. This can indicate inventory was primed for payday shoppers (and the holidays of course). Bread & Bakery offers the greatest average discounts when inventory levels are lowest on average, indicating Week 3 is a great time to stock up, while Week 4 might be a great time to buy the freshest inventory.

The greatest average discounts in Week 5 were in Snacks & Candy, Pantry and Fruits & Vegetables. Deeper discounts for Snacks & Candy in Week 5 may have helped brands compete for consumers’ disposable income despite being a discretionary category. Pantry brands’ discounts may have reflected a need to compete for shoppers’ attention. During this period, consumers were out of the house more and less likely to use these grocery staples compared to earlier lockdown periods and cooler months.

Making Specialty Categories and Health a Priority for Online Shoppers

Interestingly, the only two categories where inventory was higher in Week 5 versus all other weeks each month were ‘Special Diets’ foods and ‘Summer Flavors’, although ‘Special Diets’ foods consistently maintained the lowest level of average availability each week across all food categories analyzed. This consistent lack of inventory could indicate a great opportunity for brands to increase inventory for dietary products sold on Walmart.com.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

The average availability for ‘Summer Flavors’ foods verifies brands are maintaining a solid replenishment strategy for these seasonal items, and a high likelihood consumers will happily find what they need to plan their Summer gatherings on Walmart.com. One alarming factor we found was the change in average discounts offered during Week 5 versus Weeks 1 through 4, indicating promotions surrounding payday may be driving sales volume versus organic demand.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Digital Growth Opportunity in Meal Kits and Kids’ Meals

Two categories primed for growth, according to Statista, are meal kits and kids’ food and beverages. Their research indicates retail sales for kids’ food has grown steadily year-over-year since 2013, and a recent report also indicates meal kit sales are expected to more than double 2017 sales in 2022, reaching $11.6 billion in the U.S., spurred by pandemic-induced demand. A concerning find in our research indicates both categories, ‘Easy Meal Solutions’ and ‘Kid Friendly Foods’ on Walmart.com, showed great volatility when it comes to in-stock availability. For example, in Week 1, ‘Easy Meal Solutions’ had an average availability nearly half the average of the rest of the month (around nineteen percent versus nearly thirty-eight percent), and in Week 5, payday week, ‘Kid Friendly Foods’ saw the biggest drop in average availability compared to Weeks 1 through 4 (over sixty-seven percent versus seventy-five percent) indicating supply may not be keeping up with the heightened demand.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

The heightened average discounts offered during Week 5 for ‘Baby’ and ‘Pets’ items indicate two categories consumers will most likely stock up on during payday.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Back to School Stock-Outs

U.S. retail sales unexpectedly increased in August, likely boosted by back-to-school shopping and child tax credit payments. Meanwhile, product shortages and other supply chain issues slowed 2021’s back-to-school sales, possibly affecting school supplies’ and clothing availability on Walmart.com. According to our analysis, the average product availability in Walmart.com’s school supplies category fell from over sixty-two percent during Weeks 1 through 4 to nearly forty-two percent in Week 5.

Warmer weather, seasonal events, reduced lockdowns, and vaccination efforts led more Americans to resume in-person socializing, giving reason to update their spring and summer wardrobes. In July, Forbes shared that three-quarters of shoppers are purchasing apparel, accessories and shoes the most. On average, only around sixty-three percent of clothing items were available on Walmart.com during Weeks 1 through 4. However, in Week 5, that figure plummeted to just over thirty-eight percent, the most significant drop among all categories.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Demand for new fashion remained high throughout this period, seemingly fueled organically, as only moderate additional discounts took place in Week 5, and although the average discount on school supplies was only around twenty-seven percent during Weeks 1 through 4, it surged to just over forty-seven percent in Week 5. Generous additional discounts in Week 5 may have inspired online shoppers to shift spending from clothing to school supplies in late July and August ahead of students’ return to the classroom.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Prioritizing Product Availability with Digital Advertising Strategies

Seventy-eight percent of B2C marketers increased their 2021 digital advertising spend to fuel online product discoverability (Share of Search), and sales and market share, but out-of-stock experiences simultaneously surged 172% this year from pre-pandemic levels. Paying for ads that drive traffic to your out-of-stock products can be as detrimental to your brand as a bad user experience. Our review of the ‘Featured Products’ sold on Walmart.com show consistent, low-levels of product availability each week throughout the months reviewed.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average availability percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

Additionally, the average discount offered on these products tended to be higher than most other categories reviewed, indicating brands participating in the featured product section of the website were not only investing in digital ads, but also doubling down with promotional activity as well.

Source: DataWeave Digital Shelf Analytics for Brands – Category average discount percentages from May to August 2021 between Week 1 (the 1st to the 7th day of the month) and Week 5 (the 29th, 30th and 31st day of the month).

How Brands can Replenish Their Digital Shelf

It is well known just how important it is to have products available during the right time of day, week, month, or season to improve customer satisfaction rates, but with your e-commerce store open 24/7 and omnichannel fulfillment strategies in place, it drastically changes the way in which strategic execution is prioritized for a retailer to reduce basket abandonment and for brands to build loyalty.

Our greatest takeaway from this analysis is realizing how crucial it is for brands to proactively track product availability and competitive pricing insights to stay ahead of the curve and achieve their digital growth goals. Early visibility to stock replenishment could help brands align with heightened cyclical and seasonal demand to avoid out-of-stocks and grow e-commerce sales.

This is why more leading brands now rely on our Digital Shelf Analytics solutions, including Pricing and Availability insights, to keep eCommerce planning agile, to maximize online conversions, and ultimately maintain shopper satisfaction and loyalty.
December 8, 2021
Top 7 AI tools for your eCommerce business

The 2020 global health crisis sped up the adoption of omnichannel shopping and fulfillment. Consumers spent $791.70 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2020, a 32.4% rise compared to 2019. To keep up with this digital shift, offline businesses have substantially moved investments to online infrastructures for everything from e-commerce platforms, product recommendations, inventory management, and communications. AI tools for eCommerce have played a major role in helping businesses in the digital shift.

However, the benefits of setting up e-commerce stores are potentially outweighed by the increased costs. As markets transition to online retailers, they must learn to efficiently collect, secure, and analyze data coming in from multiple sources. Strategically approaching the data problem with artificial intelligence (AI) can help better serve customers, gain a competitive advantage, and drive loyalty.

In this blog, you will learn about seven data and AI tools for eCommerce businesses:

Seven Data and AI tools for eCommerce businesses

1. Data Warehouse

Data is the one advantage that eCommerce merchants and marketers have over brick and mortar retailers. When buyers are from the internet, eCommerce retailers can collect data and measure almost every aspect of their interactions. However, that advantage is worthless unless there is a system to make sense of the data they collect. Companies assume that they have a sound system in place. But, what they have is a network of silos. In such a system, data sticks to different platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Klaviyo and can’t move to deliver valuable insights. Funneling all your data into a single location for your eCommerce stores is the right way to go. Data warehouses centralize and merge a plethora of data from various sources, helping organizations to derive valuable business insights and improve decision-making.

Data Warehouses support real-time analytics and ML operations quickly & are designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities like performing queries and analysis on a colossal amount of data. Data could range from customer-related data, product or pricing data, or even competitor data.

However, the time needed to gather, clean, and upload the data to the warehouse is a time-consuming process. Here’s where DataWeave’s AI-Powered Data Aggregation & Analysis Platform can help! Get critical insights on your competitor’s pricing, assortment, and historical sale trends with a real-time dashboard. Build a winning eCommerce strategy with market intelligence without the need to store your data.

2. Data Lake

A data lake is a centralized repository that can store structured and unstructured data at any scale. Companies don’t have to provide a schema to the data before storing it, but they still can run different analytics and ML-related operations. However, it takes more time to refine the raw data and then analyze or create ML models for predictions.

An Aberdeen survey saw businesses implementing a Data Lake outperforming similar companies by 9% in organic revenue growth. The organizations that implemented Data Lake could perform various analytics over additional data from social media, click-streams, websites, etc. A Data Lake allows for the democratization of data and the versatility of storing multi-structured data from diverse sources, improving insights and business growth.

eCommerce businesses can collect competitors’ data in data lakes like their popular products, categories, landing pages, and ads. Analyzing competitors’ data helps retailers price their products correctly, helps with product matching, historical trend analysis, and much more. However, data lakes can also be used to store consumer data such as who they are, what they purchase, how much they spend on average, and how they interact with a company. Successful retailers leverage both competitor and consumer data to understand their consumers better, what brands to carry, how to price each product, and what categories to expand or contract. Retailers also store identity data such as a person’s name, contact information, gender, email address, and social media profiles. Other types of data stored are website visits, purchase patterns, email opens, usage rates, and behavioral data.

The major challenge with a data lake architecture is that it stores raw data with no oversight of the contents. Without elements like a defined mechanism to catalog and secure data, data cannot be found, or trusted resulting in a “data swamp.” Consequently, companies need teams of data engineers to clean data for data scientists or analysts to generate insights. This not only increases the turnaround time of gaining valuable information but also increases operational costs.

However, you can rely on platforms like DataWeave that stores competitor pricing & assortment information at a centralized location. You can leverage intelligently designed dashboards to get real-time insights into the collected data and make data-driven decisions without the need for storing, cleaning, and transforming the data.

3. Data Ingestion & ETL

To churn out better insights, businesses need access to all data sources. An incomplete picture of data can cause spurious analytic conclusions, misleading reports and inhibit decision-making. As a result, to correlate data from multiple sources, data must be in a centralized location—a data warehouse or a data lake. However, extracting and storing information into these systems require data engineers who can implement techniques like data ingestion and ETL.

While data ingestion focuses on getting data into data lakes, ETL focuses on transforming data into well-defined rigid structures optimized and storing it into a data warehouse for better analytics workflows. Both processes allow for the transportation of data from various sources to a storage medium that an organization can access, use, and analyze. The destination can be a data warehouse in the case of ETL and a data lake in case of data ingestion. Sources can be almost anything from in-house apps, websites, SaaS data, databases, spreadsheets, or anywhere on the internet.

Data ingestion & ETL are the backbones of any analytics/AI architecture since these processes provide consistent and convenient data, respectively.

4. Programming languages

Programming languages are tools used by programmers to write instructions for computers to follow since they “think” in binary—strings of 1s and 0s. It serves as a bridge that allows humans to translate instructions into a language that computers can understand. Some common and highly used programming languages for building AI models are Python and R.

While Python is the most widely used language for training and testing models, R is mostly embraced for visualizations and statistical analysis. However, to productize the ML models, you would require Java programming language so that models can be integrated with your websites to provide recommendations.

5. Libraries/AI frameworks

An AI framework is a structure that acts as a starting point for companies or developers to add higher-level functionality and build advanced AI software. A framework serves as a foundation, ensuring that developers aren’t starting entirely from scratch.

Using AI frameworks like TensorFlow, Theano, PyTorch, and more saves time and reduces the risk of errors while building complex deep learning models. Libraries and AI frameworks also assist in building a more secure and clean code. They future aid developers in simpler testing and debugging.

Various open-source frameworks in the market also come with pre-trained models for specific use cases. Organizations can leverage off-the-shelf models and tweak with existing data to enhance the accuracy of the predictions.

6. IDE & Notebooks tools

IDE or Integrated Development Environment is a coding tool that allows developers to write and test their code more efficiently. However, notebooks are one of the most popular AI tools for organizations to execute analysis and other machine learning tasks. It offers more flexibility over IDEs in terms of exploratory analysis.

All the features, including auto-complete, that IDEs or notebooks offer are beneficial for development as they make coding more comfortable. IDEs/Notebooks increase developers’ productivity by combining common software activities into a single application: building executables, editing code, and debugging.

7. Analytics tools

Data Analysis transforms raw data into valuable statistics, insights, and explanations to help companies make data-driven business decisions. Data analytics tools like PowerBI and Tableau have become the cornerstone of modern business for quickly analyzing structured and semi-structured data.

However, these platforms aren’t optimized specifically for the eCommerce industry. Consequently, you should embrace analytical tools particularly designed for eCommerce companies to make better decisions about product assortment, pricing, and promotions. With data analytics, companies can gain insights into the most popular and discoverable brands on their own and competitors’ platforms. Paired with attribute matching, competitive intelligence gives a deeper understanding of the latest trends and why certain products are popular with your customers. Some more meaningful metrics that retailers can track are discount gap, price gap, catalog strength, and product type gaps.

Competitive pricing is another benefit of data analytics with which retailers can identify gaps and keep up with actionable pricing insights. Retailers get to maximize profits and respond to demand by cashing in on insights into rivals’ pricing. With the right analytics tools, they can also track changes in pricing across crucial metrics such as matched products, recent price changes, highest price positions, stock status, and much more.

Analytics tools can also help eCommerce companies to capture information about competitors’ promotional banners through AI-powered image analysis. It can provide insights into how and where to spend promotional expenditure.

Conclusion

This listicle discusses some of the AI and data tools commonly used by the eCommerce industry. Data analytics has become a popular method for retailers to understand their customers and boost productivity. Data analytics help companies improve customer experience, improve customer loyalty, generate insights, and advise on data-driven actions. Business intelligence tools can help companies monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), perform proper data analyses, and generate accurate reports.

Want to learn how DataWeave can help make sense of your and your competitor’s pricing, promotional, and assortment data? Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.

December 5, 2021
How Brands Can Outperform Rivals With Next-Gen Digital Shelf Analytics

As eCommerce grows in complexity, brands need new ways to grow sales and market share. Right now, brands face urgent market pressures like out-of-stocks, an influx of new competition and rising inflation, all of which erode profitability. As online marketplaces mature, more brands need to make daily changes to their digital marketing strategies in response to these market pressures, shifts in demand, and competitive trends.

eMarketer forecasts 2021 U.S. eCommerce will rise nearly 18% year-over-year (vs. 6.3% for brick-and-mortar), led by apparel and accessories, furniture, food and beverage, and health and personal care. The eCommerce industry is also undergoing fundamental changes with newer entities emerging and traditional business models evolving to adapt to the changed environment. For example, sales for delivery intermediaries such as Doordash, Instacart, Shipt, and Uber have gone from $8.8 billion in 2019 to an estimated $35.3 billion by the end of 2021. Similarly, many brands have established or are building out a Direct to Consumer (D2C) model so they can fully own and control their customer’s experiences.

In response, DataWeave has launched the next generation of our Digital Shelf Analytics suite to help brands across retail categories directly address today’s costly market risks to drive eCommerce growth and gain a competitive advantage.

“Our new enhancements help brands improve online search rank visibility and quantify the impact of digital investments – especially in time for the busy holiday season.”
~ Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder, DataWeave

The latest product enhancements provide brands access to tailored dashboard views that track KPI achievements and trigger actionable alerts to improve online search rank visibility, protect product availability and optimize share of search 24/7. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics platform works seamlessly across all forms of eCommerce platforms and models – marketplaces, D2C websites and delivery intermediaries.

Dashboard for Multiple Functions

While all brands share a common objective of increasing sales and market share, their internal teams are often challenged to communicate and collaborate, given differing needs for competitive and performance data across varying job functions. As a result, teams face pressure to quickly grasp market trends and identify what’s holding their brands back.

In response, DataWeave now offers executive-level and customized scorecard views, tailored to each user’s job function, with the ability to measure and assess marketplace changes across a growing list of online retail channels for metrics that matter most to each user. This enhancement enables data democratization and internal alignment to support goal achievement, such as boosting share of category and content effectiveness. The KPIs show aggregated trends, plus granular reasons that help to explain why and where brands can improve.

Brands gain versatile insights serving users from executives to analysts and brand and customer managers.

Prioritized, Actionable Insights

As brands digitize more of their eCommerce and digital marketing processes, they accumulate an abundance of data to analyze to uncover actionable insights. This deluge of data makes it a challenge for brands to know exactly where to begin, create a strategy and determine the right KPIs to set to measure goal accomplishment.

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics tool enables brands to effectively build a competitive online growth strategy. To boost online discoverability (Share of Search), brands can define their own product taxonomies across billions of data points aggregated across thousands of retailer websites. They can also create customized KPIs that track progress toward goal accomplishment, with the added capability of seeing recommended courses of action to take via email alerts when brands need to adjust their eCommerce plans for agility.

“Brands need an integrated view of how to improve their discoverability
and share of search by considering all touchpoints in the digital commerce ecosystem.”
~ Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder, DataWeave

Of vital importance, amid today’s global supply chain challenges, brands gain detailed analysis on product inventory and availability, as well as specific insights and alerts that prompt them to solve out-of-stocks faster, which Deloitte reports is a growing concern of consumers (75% are worried about out-of-stocks) this holiday season.

User and system generated alerts provide clarity to actionable steps to improving eCommerce effectiveness.

You also have visibility to store-level product availability, and are alerted to recurring out-of-stock experiences.

Scalable Insights – From Bird’s Eye to Granular Views

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics allows brands to achieve data accuracy at scale, including reliable insights from a top-down and bottom-up perspective. For example, you can see a granular view of one SKUs product content alongside availability, or you can monitor a group of SKUs, say your best selling ones, at a higher level view with the ability to drill down into more detail.

Brands can access flexible insights, ranging from strategic overviews to finer details explaining performance results.

Many brands struggle with an inability to scale from a hyper-local eCommerce strategy to a global strategy. Most tools available on the market solve for one or the other, addressing opportunities at either a store-level basis or top-down basis – but not both.

According to research by Boston Consulting Group and Google, advanced analytics and AI can drive more than 10% of sales growth for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, of which 5% comes directly from marketing. With DataWeave’s advanced analytics, AI and scalable insights, brands can set and follow global strategies while executing changes at a hyper-local level, using root-cause analysis to drill deeper into problems to find out why they are occurring.

As more brands embrace eCommerce and many retailers localize their online assortment strategies, the need for analytical flexibility and granular visibility to insights becomes increasingly important. Google reports that search terms “near me” and “where to buy” have increased by more than 200% among mobile users in the last few years, as consumers seek to buy online locally.

e-Retailers are now fine-tuning merchandising and promotional strategies at a hyper-local level based on differences seen in consumer’s localized search preferences, and DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution provides brands visibility to retailer execution changes in near real-time.

Competitive Benchmarking

Brand leaders cannot make sound decisions without considering external factors in the competitive landscape, including rival brands’ pricing, promotion, content, availability, ratings and reviews, and retailer assortment. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution allows you to monitor share of search, search rankings and compare content (assessing attributes like number of images, presence of video, image resolution, etc.) across all competitors, which helps brands make more informed marketing decisions.

Brands are also provided visibility into competitive insights at a granular level, allowing them to make actionable changes to their strategies to stay ahead of competitors’ moves. A new module called ‘Sales and Share’ now enables brands to benchmark sales performance alongside rivals’ and measure market share changes over time to evaluate and improve competitive positioning.

Monitor competitive activity, spot emerging threats and immediately see how your performance compares to all rivals’, targeting ways to outmaneuver the competition.

Sales & Market Share Estimates Correlated with Digital Shelf KPIs

In a brick-and-mortar world, brands often use point of sale (POS) based measurement solutions from third party providers, such as Nielsen, to estimate market share. In the digital world, it is extremely difficult to get such estimates given the number of ways online orders are fulfilled by retailers and obtained by consumers. Dataweave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution now provides sales and market share estimates via customer defined taxonomy, for large retailers like Amazon. Competitive sales and market share estimates can also be obtained at a SKU level so brands can easily benchmark their performance results.

Additionally, sales and market share data can also be correlated with digital shelf KPIs. This gives an easy way for brands to check the effect of changes made to attributes, such as content and/or product availability, and how the changes impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how modified search efforts, both organic and sponsored, correspond to changes in sales and market share estimates.

Take Your Digital Shelf Growth to the Next Level

The importance of accessing flexible, actionable insights and responding in real-time is growing exponentially as online is poised to account for an increasing proportion of brands’ total sales. With 24/7 digital shelf accessibility among consumers comes 24/7 visibility and the responsibility for brands to address sales and digital marketing opportunities in real-time to attract and serve online shoppers around the clock.

Brands are turning to data analytics to address these new business opportunities, enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, drive growth and gain a competitive advantage. Companies that adopt data-driven marketing strategies are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year, and DataWeave is here to help your organization adopt these practices. To capitalize on the global online shopping boom, brands must invest in a digital shelf analytics solution now to effectively build their growth strategies and track measurable KPIs.

DataWeave’s next-gen Digital Shelf Analytics enhancements now further a brand’s ability to monitor, analyze, and determine systems that enable faster and smarter decision-making and sales performance optimization. The results delight consumers by helping them find products they’re searching for, which boosts brand trust.

Connect with us to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs. No project or region is too big or small, and we can start where you want and scale up to help you stay agile and competitive.

November 30, 2021
Top 4 ways to optimize content to drive e-commerce sales
Content is the reigning king for e-commerce & plays a big role in driving sales and conversions. And, consumer-centric content that drives traffic is vital for e-commerce sales. Unlike offline retail where the sales staff on the ground is always available to answer customer queries, online that is not the case. When shopping online, customers rely on audio & visual product content to give them the information they need in order to make purchase decisions. Understanding that your product speaks to your customers directly on online channels is critical – so optimizing your product content to represent your brand in the best light is very important.

Here are the Top 4 ways to optimize content & drive ROI.

1. Focus on your customer & set a brand tone

Who is your customer? And what type of product is your brand selling? The golden rule to getting the right content for your brand is to answer these two questions right. For instance, if you’re selling furniture and focusing on a family audience then using flowery language will not help your cause. You need to share factual, product-specific content, calling out furniture specs from color, fabric, size, and so on.

Take for instance ProFlowers – a US-based flower retailer who created an entire Florapedia® – an in-depth flower guide. This content helped their customers learn more about the various flowers & discover new flowers they never knew of when making purchase decisions. To drive e-commerce sales, ProFlowers set the brand tone using educational content.
On the other hand, if you are selling clothing or lingerie, you need to be extremely specific about the details of each product. Let’s look at reputed outdoor clothing brand Jack Wolfskin – they use high-quality images for content optimization and showcase real instances and moods in which the clothing can be worn or what they can be paired with. This is a good way to allow customers to picture themselves owning the item, as well as research their unique qualities.

Educational, visual-heavy, or fun & quirky – pick your content style based on your brand tone.

2. Use videos as a powerful content optimization tool

Videos empower content and hook your customers in. In a report, Cisco had earlier projected that by the year 2022, videos will be responsible for 82% of all consumer internet traffic. For e-commerce, video content can not only deliver a message but is easily shareable across all platforms. Videos not only possess the power to captivate people for extended amounts of time, but according to research, if a video is embedded on your website, you’re 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google.

Videos work as a descriptive medium to give more details about your product. Further, explanatory videos relieve consumer fears regarding the quality of the product by allowing viewers to visually experience its usages and benefits. MAC for instance uses a host of make-up tutorials and other video content on their website.

Videos bring brand storytelling to life and keep visitors informed. In the case of the videos created by MAC, they are not only informative and engaging, but they also help the brand answer common shopper questions with live examples. Customers who land upon the MAC website can watch videos relevant to the products they want to shop for, understand the product details and then decide if the product is for them. Thus, brands using videos can create a better customer experience by giving the visitors an immersive brand exposure online, just like they could have got offline.

3. Focus on making your product page consumer-centric

A product page can be highly discoverable if it aligns with the best practices & standard e-commerce algorithms put in place by popular marketplaces and e-commerce channels. This is because the organic product ranking algorithms vary across channels and are composed of direct and indirect factors used to match a consumer’s popular search queries to products they are most likely to purchase. For better content optimization that ensures visibility, start by mapping platform-specific content standards. Then follow the SEO trends and tweak your product titles and description, to give your brand content a boost.

Love Hair Product

Take for instance the LOVE Hair product pages – the product titles are crafted using product features and benefits like revitalizing, nourishing, volumizing. Consumers searching for shampoos normally type in these attributes to look for shampoos that may suit their requirements – so using attributes as a hook in the product title is a great idea to make the product more discoverable against that keyword or attribute.

Next, keeping these standards as a backbone, fine-tune the product details you are putting out on the page. Your product features are the reasons why your consumer will buy your brand as compared to your competitors, so your descriptions should be crisp, easy to read, highlighting all the product features & facts that help them make that purchase decision. Let’s look at the Fitbit product page…

Fitbit Product Page

4. Optimize content based on devices

With mobile commerce reaching the tipping point in the e-commerce sales funnel, you cannot ignore attending to content optimization for hand-held devices. Many times, buyers on the go use mobile devices to conduct their research and your success lies in being able to entice them with a perfectly optimized e-commerce page even on their mobile device. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- Keep their reading experience in mind. Use shorter titles, and bite-sized product information so key points are upfront and visible on a tinier screen
- Be concise with your content presentation
- Video content should not autoplay on mobile. The less invasive your content, the better
- Keep video & image file sizes small so that page load time is quick
E-Commerce Product Page

A perfectly balanced e-commerce product page is even more vital in the new normal, given that COVID has accelerated e-commerce, globally. So, whether you are selling furniture, books, clothes, or health juices, with the right focus on product content, you can convert shoppers into customers more easily and increase your sales & revenue. Feel free to take inspiration from some of the examples above to apply some of these strategies to your online store.

And if you need to get your brand discovered with content optimization, here’s how DataWeave can help!

Building the right product page with the right content is not enough. You will also need to keep rehashing your product pages with reviews, offers, and other such relevant nodes to deliver the right punch. After all, delivering the right customer experience starts with a product page done right.

Want to see first-hand how DataWeave can help brands with content optimization? Sign up for a demo with our Digital Shelf experts to know more.
November 29, 2021