The DataWeave Blog

Category: Product Availability

  • Amazon US Prime Day 2023: Insights on Pricing and Discounts Across Popular Categories and Brands

    Amazon US Prime Day 2023: Insights on Pricing and Discounts Across Popular Categories and Brands

    Amazon’s Prime Day this year proved to be a record-breaking success, becoming the largest Prime Day event in the company’s history. Over the two-day extravaganza, shoppers in the US spent a staggering $12.7 billion, a 6.1% increase from the previous year. Amid inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions, Amazon adopted a bold discounting strategy, offering steeper discounts compared to Prime Day 2022.

    An interesting aspect of Amazon’s approach is their loyalty based offerings. In the weeks leading to Prime Day on July 11-12, members of the loyalty program were given access to “invite-only deals” where shoppers could request invites to specific products that they were looking to purchase on deals. Overall, Amazon’s pricing and discount strategies during Prime Day were carefully designed to create a buzz among shoppers, generate increased sales, and maintain a competitive advantage in the market.

    While Prime Day is Amazon’s showstopper, it’s interesting to also see how other leading retailers respond to such a massive sale by their biggest competitor. Do they also lower their prices during the event, or are they happy to take a backseat? To answer these questions, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to analyze the prices and discounts of Amazon and its leading competitors across key product categories – Apparel, Home & Furniture, Consumer Electronics, and Health & Beauty – during Prime Day.

    Since products on Amazon and other eCommerce websites are often sold at discounts even on normal days not linked to a sale event, we delved into the real value that Prime Day offers to shoppers by focusing on price reductions or additional discounts during the sale compared to the week before. As a result, our approach highlights the genuine benefits of the event for shoppers who count on lower prices during the sale.

    Research & Methodology

    For our analysis, we tracked the prices of a large number of products across several leading retailers during Prime Day as well as the week prior to the event. The details of our sample are mentioned below:

    • Number of SKUs: 110,000+
    • Websites: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Overstock, The Home Depot, Wayfair, Ulta Beauty, Sephora
    • Categories: Apparel, Home & Furniture, Electronics, Health & Beauty
    • Pre-event Analysis: 4-10 July 2023
    • Prime Day Analysis: 11-12 July 2023

    Our Key Findings

    Our data reveals that Amazon’s price reductions were most aggressive in the Consumer Electronics category, with an average price reduction of 10.4% on Prime Day, due to the category’s popularity and high demand.

    The Health & Beauty (6.7%), Apparel (5.9%), and Home & Furniture (4.8%) categories offered relatively modest deals during the sale event.

    The Health & Beauty (6.7%), Apparel (5.9%), and Home & Furniture (4.8%) categories offered relatively modest deals during the sale event.

    Below, we delve deeper into our analysis of each category to better understand how price reductions were distributed across key subcategories on Amazon as well as the discounting strategies of Amazon’s leading competitors.

    Apparel

    As Amazon grappled with surplus inventory, heightened storage costs, and reduced profit margins in apparel (like most other retailers), its average discount before Prime Day was already as high as 13.3%. Then, on Prime Day, Amazon’s apparel deals were tempered at around 5.9% across an impressive 33.1% of its assortment, while Target and Walmart chose not to compete in a meaningful way.

    Unlike Prime Day 2022, when Target competed with Amazon with high discounts, the retailer offered only 0.8% additional discount across 4.4% of its assortment in this category. Walmart, too, reduced its prices by only 1.4% on 8.5% of its assortment during Prime Day.

    Check out our latest analysis on fashion pricing trends across 2022-23 to better understand the pricing dynamics in this category in greater detail.

    Across all the apparel subcategories we analyzed, Women’s Athleisure (8.7%), Men’s Swimwear (8%), and Women’s Tops (7.6%) were among the ones with the highest price reductions. On the other hand, Men’s Athleisure (2.5%), Women’s Shoes (3.5%), and Men’s Innerwear (4.1%) had conservative markdowns.

    Pricing decisions across the various subcategories are likely to have been influenced by several factors like inventory levels, demand patterns, and the need to balance competitive offers with maintaining reasonable profit margins, as Amazon tried to cater to a more price-sensitive consumer.

    Across all apparel subcategories, leading brands that offered the highest markdowns were Tommy Hilfiger (11.5%), Amazon Essentials (9.4%), Adidas (8.6%), and Calvin Klein (8.6%).

    For brands, however, lowering prices is only one lever to attract and convert shoppers. They also need to ensure they’re highly visible and discoverable on Amazon’s search listings. This exponentially improves their chances of driving more clicks and conversions. In our analysis, we tracked the Share of Search of brands across several popular search keywords. Share of Search for a brand is defined as the proportion of the brand’s products in the top 20 search results for a search query.

    Our data indicates that several brands gained impressive ground in their discoverability during Prime Day, while others fell behind. Gildan in Men’s Innerwear, Adidas in Men’s and Women’s Shoes, Anrabess in Women’s Athleisure, and Lululemon in Men’s Athleisure, among others, improved their Share of Search by significant levels during Prime Day.

    On the other hand, brands like Hanes in Men’s and Women’s Innerwear, Kanu Surf in Men’s Swimwear, Cupshe in Women’s Swimwear, and others lost around 10% in their Share of Search during the event. This is likely to have impacted their sales volumes adversely.

    Home & Furniture

    The Home & Furniture industry has been challenged with reduced demand due to inflationary pressures over the past year or so. Leading retailers in the category overestimated the demand, leading to overstocking of inventory. As a result, Home & Furniture is one of the few categories that saw Amazon’s competitors participate at a significant level on Prime Day in order to ensure they don’t fall behind on liquidating their stock.

    Amazon’s additional discounts averaged 4.8% across 30.2% of its assortment. Wayfair and Overstock too reduced their prices by 4.8% and 4.3% on around 44% of their respective assortments. Wayfair’s move is likely a part of their strategy to attract new customers and expand their market share, in response to a decline in their consumer base. Last year, Wayfair experienced a loss of 5 million out of its 1.3 billion consumers due to weakening demand.

    Target and Walmart did offer additional discounts, but they were not at a competitive level. The Home Depot effectively opted not to compete at all during the sale event. Overall, the pricing actions of these retailers are in stark contrast to the highly conservative pricing strategies observed on Prime Day last year.

    Our recent pricing analysis of the Home & Furniture category revealed more interesting insights and pricing dynamics over the past year.

    Across all the subcategories we analyzed, Bookcases (8.2%), Rugs (7.8%), Mattresses (6.5%), and Luggage (6.2%) were among the ones with high price reductions.

    Meanwhile, Sofas (2.4%), Washer / Dryers (2.4%), and Entertainment Units (2.7%) had lower markdowns. These are large and substantial purchases, making retailers more cautious about deeply discounting them while still ensuring profitability.

    The brands that stepped up and offered the highest markdowns in this category include Zinus (20.2%), Comfee (10.8%), Sauder (9.9%), and Best Choice Products (8.7%).

    In terms of Share of Search, Rockland in Luggage gained the highest (21%), followed by Farberware in Dishwasher, Olee Sleep in Mattresses, and Homeguave in Mattresses gained significant ground in their respective categories as shown in the image below.

    Brands like Best Choice Products in Coffee Tables, Molblly in Mattresses, and Black+Decker in Washer/Dryers and Dishwashers lost a good portion of their Share of Search during the event. Due to high competition for visibility during sale events, brands that fail to keep an eye on their Share of Search stand to take a hit in their sales, especially in categories like Home & Furniture that tend to have low brand loyalty.

    Consumer Electronics

    2023 was the year of consumer electronics on Amazon Prime Day. Amazon’s price reduction during the sale averaged 10.4% across 54.5% of its assortment in the category. Target and Walmart, on the other hand, offered significantly lower additional discounts of 1.9% and 2.7% on 10.4% and 19.1% of their assortment, respectively.

    The consumer electronics category often witnesses aggressive price reductions during Prime Day and other sale events due to its popularity and high demand. In addition, since retailer margins are usually low in this category, shoppers often have to wait for sale events like Prime Day (when brands markdown their wholesale rates) to have several attractive deals to choose from.

    Across all the subcategories we analyzed, Smartwatches (15.4%), Wireless Headphones (15.4%), Earbuds (14.9%), Headphones (12.5%), and Tablets (12.0%), were among the ones with the highest price reductions. All of these subcategories are quite popular that tend to sell in large volumes during sale events.

    Meanwhile, Laptops (2.1%), TVs (3.1%), and Smartphones (7.6%) had lower markdowns. A lower markdown on smartphones may reflect steady demand throughout the year, reducing the urgency to offer significant discounts during the short Prime Day window.

    Amazon (22%), Tozo (12.5%), Lenovo (10.8%), JBL (8.3%), and Apple (5%) offered the highest price reductions in Consumer Electronics as a whole. Clearly, Amazon didn’t hold back on offering attractive deals on its own private label products in this category.

    Consumer Electronics as a category tends to have a brand loyal shopper base. However, Share of Search generic search keywords are still very important for keywords like earbuds, headphones, and tablets that result in relatively lower priced products. HP in Laptops, Samsung in Tablets and TVs, and Oneplus in Smartphones all made strong strides in building their discoverability on Amazon during Prime Day. Beyond just driving more sales, this also has the intended effect of boosting brand awareness among high-intent shoppers.

    Sony in Headphones, Asus in Laptops, and Insignia in TVs lost out to other brands in terms of their discoverability during the sale. Sony and Asus, especially would be hurting as they are prominent brands in their respective categories.

    Health & Beauty

    The Health & Beauty category is a favorite among consumers during Prime Day, as it encompasses a wide range of products like skincare, cosmetics, and grooming items. As shoppers often tend to stock up during the sale, brands and retailers are willing to offer competitive discounts and gain an edge over their competitors.

    Our data reveals that the average additional discount on Amazon was 6.7%, offered on a little over a third of its assortment. Walmart reduced its prices sizably as well, by an average of 3.1% on 13.4% of its assortment.

    Interestingly, Sephora and Ulta Beauty, leading retailers in the Health & Beauty category did not compete on price at all this Prime Day. It is likely they are confident their loyal customer base will not be influenced by Amazon’s Prime Day deals and be driven away merely by lower prices. In addition, keeping their prices steady during Prime Day might have been a strategic choice to protect their brand reputation and premium positioning.

    Relatively premium subcategories like Electric Toothbrushes (10%), Moisturizer (8.3%), Beardcare (7.3%), and Make Up (6.7%) saw the highest price reductions on Amazon.

    In contrast, staple items like Toothpaste (3.7%), Shampoos (5.4%), and Conditioners (5.7%) had lower markdowns.

    Among the leading brands in this category, Oral-B (10.3%), Philips Sonicare (8.7%), Neutrogena (8.4%), and Colgate (5.6%) offered the most attractive deals during the sale event.

    In terms of significant gains in Share of Search for brands, Oral-B in Electric Toothbrushes led the pack again. Neutrogena in Sunscreens and Somall in Toothpastes also gained more than 10% in their Share of Search during the sale event, followed by Tresemme in Shampoos and Airspun in Make-Up products.

    Other popular brands like Crest in Toothpastes, e.l.f in Make-Up, Philips Sonicare in Electric Toothbrushes, and Sheamoisture in Beradcare surprisingly had reduced visibility among the top search results for relevant subcategories.

    Staying Ahead of the Curve During Sale Events

    This Prime Day, Amazon leveraged its scale to offer aggressive discounts across key product categories, while several competing retailers chose to sit back and let the sale play out. Others chose a selective discounting strategy that focused their modest price reductions on a small set of items.

    At DataWeave, we understand the pivotal role competitive pricing insights play in empowering retailers and brands to gain a competitive edge, especially during crucial events like Prime Day. For retailers, the ability to track competitor prices accurately, at scale, in a timely manner is essential to plotting and acting on impactful pricing strategies and staying ahead of the curve.

    To learn more about how this can be done, reach out to us today!

  • Navigating the Turbulent Home and Furniture eCommerce Market in 2023 with the Power of Competitive Intelligence

    Navigating the Turbulent Home and Furniture eCommerce Market in 2023 with the Power of Competitive Intelligence

    The home and furniture retail industry is going through a turbulent time. As inflation reared its head mid-2022, leading retailers in the category have been grappling with the higher costs associated with producing and distributing their products, as well as reduced shopper demand. The rising costs of raw materials, transportation, and labor have had a direct impact on the pricing dynamics within the industry. For example, reports indicate container rates soared to nearly 10 times pre-pandemic levels towards the end of 2021.

    Furthermore, shoppers’ spending power has been constrained, while higher interest rates have suppressed demand. Retailers have had to adapt their assortment and pricing strategies to cater to a wider range of shopper preferences driven by changing lifestyles and a growing emphasis on sustainability. Post-pandemic, demand has been primarily driven by affluent shoppers.

    Towards the end of 2021, due to supply delays and disruptions, retailers heavily stocked up on available products. However, when demand subsequently decreased in 2022, they were left with a significant amount of unsold stock that was purchased at high rates. This put them in a difficult situation, as they had an excess of products but were unable to sell them even at reduced prices without impacting their profit margins. Additionally, staying competitive in a rapidly changing market environment was equally important.

    Given this context, it is crucial for home and furniture retailers to adopt a data-driven approach that utilizes competitive and market insights to consistently maintain or increase their online sell-through rates. DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence solution offers exactly that, empowering retailers across various industry segments to stay updated on evolving consumer trends and competitor actions.

    To gain a better understanding of the pricing strategies employed by leading home and furniture retailers throughout the past year, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to track and analyze the pricing of a wide range of products across multiple retailers and subcategories within the industry.

    Our Research Methodology

    • Number of SKUs: 400,000+
    • Key retailers tracked: Amazon, Wayfair, Home Depot, Overstock, Target, Walmart
    • Key categories reported: Home and Office, Bed and Bath, Bathroom, Bedroom, Decorative, Dining Room, Kitchen, Garden & Patio, Hardware
    • Timeline of analysis: April 2022 to April 2023

    Our Findings

    Interestingly, our analysis indicates that average prices in the home and furniture category rose by around 5% between March 2022 and April 2023. However, there have been seasonal fluctuations in the prices over the course of the year.

    Among the various subcategories, the most substantial price surge was observed in home office equipment, with an uptick of 9.3% in January 2023 when compared to March 2022. The surge in demand for home office furniture, fueled by the widespread adoption of work from home arrangements, played a pivotal role in depleting inventories and consequently driving up prices. Additionally, the shift towards collaborative workspaces and the gradual expansion of office environments have contributed to the sustained demand for office furniture.

    Avg. price changes MoM across home and furniture subcategories from April 2022-23.

    While prices for several subcategories rose significantly, others experienced subdued growth, such as bed and bath. The subcategory experienced the lowest price increment, registering a modest 2.8% increase annually. This can be attributed to the impact of a subdued housing market and a decrease in first-time buyers, which may partly be due to the global recession and inflationary pressures.

    Moreover, retailers overestimated the demand for home furniture during the holiday season, leading to an overstocking of inventory. Consequently, prices experienced a dip from October to December 2022. In fact, this was a common trend across all home and furniture subcategories. As retailers emerged from the holiday season, prices rose to their highest level in January 2023, and have stayed relatively stable since.

    Some of these trends vary among retailers as each faces different challenges and responds in distinct ways.

    Wayfair, for example, shows a significant dip in pricing after October 2022, with prices stabilizing in 2023. This could be in response to the retailer’s shrinking consumer count, losing 5 million of its 1.3 billion consumers in 2022 due to declining demand.

    Avg. price change MoM within the home and furniture sector across retailers from April 2022-23.

    In fact, online furniture retailers like Wayfair and Overstock reported declines in annual revenue in 2022, as the furniture sector continued to normalize from the high spending seen during COVID-era lockdowns. Wayfair reported that its 2022 net revenue was $12.2 billion, down almost 11% from the year prior. The company also laid off 10% of its workforce in August 2022. Overstock’s reported annual net revenue in 2022 was $1.9 billion, a 30% decrease year-over-year.

    Interestingly, both companies took contrasting approaches in response to this situation. Wayfair opted for aggressive cost-cutting measures, including layoffs and a reduced marketing budget. On the other hand, Overstock focused on attracting new customers through influencer marketing and improving their app, aiming to expand their customer base. With a strategy geared towards younger buyers, Overstock allocated a larger marketing budget than ever before. Our data supports the fact that Overstock did not rely on price reductions to entice shoppers.

    Target has consistently maintained lower price increases compared to Walmart, defying the common perception of Walmart being more conservative in its pricing. Notably, Amazon also stood out minimal price increases throughout the year, being surpassed only by Wayfair since November 2022.

    As price sensitive shoppers increasingly compare prices before making a purchase decision, retailers need to ensure they are priced competitively in the market on a consistent basis to liquidate stock and gain market share without compromising significantly on margins.

    A Sophisticated and Versatile Product Matching Solution is Essential to Achieving Price Leadership

    Product matching plays a vital role in monitoring competitive prices and analyzing price leadership. Within the home and furniture category, there is often a multitude of representations for the same product across various online platforms. Furthermore, eCommerce websites offer a wide array of options, including variations in size, color, material, and similar products. Without an accurate and comprehensive method of matching these products, it becomes impossible to track and compare prices effectively, especially on a large scale. Thus, a versatile product matching engine tailored to the unique requirements of the home and furniture sector becomes essential.

    DataWeave offers an industry-leading product matching platform that harnesses advanced AI models specifically trained to identify and leverage multiple product attributes extracted from titles, descriptions, and images to accurately match products across websites. Additionally, our platform intelligently matches similar products based on a diverse range of extracted attributes. This empowers our retail partners to gain competitive pricing intelligence not only on exact product matches but also on similar and substitute products, as well as their respective variants.

    With our competitive pricing intelligence solution, retailers in the home and furniture industry can confidently analyze and track prices, ensuring they stay at the forefront of price leadership in their market.

    To learn more, reach out to us today!

  • Decoding the 2022 Black Friday Record Sales: The Who, The What, and The How?

    Decoding the 2022 Black Friday Record Sales: The Who, The What, and The How?

    Contrary to popular speculation of lukewarm online sales owing to the weak economy, high inflation, and stretched wallets, Black Friday this year recorded a whopping $9 billion in e-commerce sales. Despite the lull in online shopping across many retailers in the months preceding Thanksgiving and weakened consumer sentiment, US online merchants saw a sizable boost in sales during and after Thanksgiving, albeit at a slower growth of 2.3%, as reported by Adobe Analytics.

    This article looks closely at the Black Friday data to understand which brands, retailers, and product categories were key players. Through DataWeave’s innovative Digital Shelf Analytics product, we deep dive into the availability, discount, and share-of-search data to deduce why some product categories and retailers fared better than others.

    Who: Retailers and Brands that had the Highest Presence

    Black Friday sales this year were driven by consumers grabbing the biggest and best deals to make the most of their already stretched wallets. Many shoppers opted for flexible payment schemes, and Buy Now Pay Later (BPNL) payments rose by 78% compared to the week before Thanksgiving. Surprisingly, Amazon, which was the most searched retailer during Black Friday last year, came only fourth this year, as reported by the Search Intelligence company, Captify.

    According to Captify, Walmart was the most searched retailer for Black Friday deals, followed by Target, Kohls, and Amazon in that order. Amazon, however, has reported its biggest Thanksgiving sale this year, with independent retailers selling through Amazon seeing a total sales of $1 billion. With the economic slowdown and thin wallets looming large, discount rates greatly influenced consumer spending. Mobile shopping accounted for 55% of digital sales, 8.5% more than the previous year. 

    As told by Adobe, Electronics were the significant sales driver, reporting 221% higher sales than in October this year, with smart home items and audio equipment playing an important role with 271% and 230% higher sales. Toys ( popular purchases were Fortnite, Roblox, Bluey, Funko Pop!, and Disney Encanto) and exercise equipment also registered a substantial growth of 285% and 218%, respectively. 

    Other top-selling items included gaming consoles (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 devices, games including FIFA 23, NBA 2k23, and Pokemon Scarlet & Violet), drones, Apple MacBooks, and Dyson products (airwrap and vacuum). Amazon’s most popular items were reported to be Apple Airpods, Nintendo Switches, Echo Dot smart speakers, and Fire TV sticks. 

    What: Top Selling Product Categories

    Electronics, closely followed by home appliances (robotic vacuum cleaners), toys, and exercise equipment, were popular product categories in demand during Black Friday this year. Several retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kohls, BestBuy, and Home Depot, offered lucrative pre-Black Friday discounts to trigger early sales kick-off. 

    Amazon carried an early discount of 50% on its Echo smart speaker, Target offered 30% off on Dyson vacuum cleaners, Walmart offered 25-35% off on Apple ipads and watches, and Kohls offered 51% off on the iRobot Roomba. 

    Amazon’s top ten best-selling products ranged from Amazon devices like Echo Dot speakers, Fire TV sticks, and Echo Show to Apple AirPods, Nintendo Switches, New Balance sneakers, Champion Apparel, and Burt’s Bees Lotions. The popular product categories were home, fashion, toys, beauty & health, and Amazon devices. Consumers heavily supported small businesses, contributing to $1 billion in sales. Top sellers from small businesses included card and board games.

    Briefly correlating the discounts offered with the best-selling product categories, one can notice that the deals have largely influenced Black Friday sales this year. Popular categories are those that have had deep discounts, reflecting the consumer’s tendency to wait and grab the best deals.  

    How: Role of Digital Shelf Analytics – Key Performance Indicators 

    Digital Shelf Analytics
    DataWeave’s Analysis Methodology

    We have seen a summary of the Black Friday 2022 statistics – sales recorded, top-selling products, product categories, and retailers. Using DataWeave’s e-commerce analytics product, we track and study the variations in digital shelf KPIs across retailers before Thanksgiving and during Thanksgiving to understand how these influence sales. 

    Availability scores, discount rates, and share of search data are analyzed for top retailers in the US for key product categories. Data is tracked and analyzed across two time periods – before Thanksgiving (Nov 10 – Nov 21) and during Thanksgiving (Nov 21 – Nov 25).

    Methodology

    • Retailers tracked: Amazon, Best Buy, Sephora, Target, Ulta, Walmart
    • Product Categories tracked: Electronics, Home Improvement, Beauty, Furniture
    • Digital Shelf KPIs tracked: Availability, Discount rates, Share of Search
    • Location: USA
    Amazon Digital Shelf Analytics

    Amazon maintained good availability across all product categories – Beauty ranks the highest.

    Salient Insights

    • Amazon maintained good overall availability – an improvement of 3% over Prime day. 
    • Beauty had the highest availability of 95%, with none and Lotion & Brushes reporting 97% and 95% availability, respectively. Shampoo reported the lowest availability at 92%
    • Home Improvement had the least availability at 87%, with dishwashers (68%) and washers and dryers (78%) having the lowest availability. 
    • Unlike Furniture and Home Improvement, most categories maintained similar availability scores before and during Black Friday.
    • Furniture improved its availability during Black Friday by 4%, while Home Improvement reported a decrease in availability during Black Friday by 4%. 
    • Electronics, which was a major sales driver, had an availability of > 90% across all sub-categories except for Television, which had a low availability of 70%
    • Tables and chairs registered 99% availability under Furniture

    The above data indicates that Amazon ensured the high availability of utility products that consumers would buy even during a slow economy. Other retailers showed similar availability trends, with scores being similar prior to and during the event.  

    Black Friday Discounts with ecommerce analytics

    Discounts Drove Sales – Best Buy offered the Highest Discounts

    Highlights

    • Best Buy offered the highest early Black Friday discount of 30%, followed by an additional 9% discount around Black Friday. Walmart followed next with 21% early discounts and an extra 4.5% discount during the event. Amazon came next with 17% early discounts and a 5% discount during Black Friday. Discount rates seem to strongly correlate with online searches, with Walmart beating Amazon this year as the most searched retailer for Black Friday deals. 
    • Electronics was the most discounted category across Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, with an average discount of 21%. Walmart gave lower deals on electronics (12%). Electronics also had heavy early discounts of 12%, with most retailers giving an additional discount of 7-8% closer to Thanksgiving.
    • Best Buy offered early discounts of 10% and further upped their discounts by another 12% closer to Thanksgiving. Being the most discounted category, electronics was also a significant sales driver this Black Friday.
    • Amazon offered the highest discounts for Beauty products (18%), followed by Ulta at 10% and Walmart at 8%. Sephora and Target gave minimal discounts on beauty products (3%)
    • Best Buy gave the maximum discounts on Home Improvement products (16%), followed by Amazon at 14%. Walmart gave much lower discounts of 7% on Home Improvement products. 
    • Furniture is another category with 12-13% discounts at both Amazon and Walmart.
    • Best Buy’s strategy this year has been to offer heavily discounted early deals to boost their sales.
    Black friday 2022 Beauty Analytics
    Icons: Flaticons.com
    Black friday 2022 Electronics analytics
    Icons: Flaticons.com
    Home improvements black friday 2022
    Icons: Flaticons.com
    home furniture black friday 2022
    Icons: Flaticons.com

    Highlights

    • Airpods and headphones were the most discounted item under Electronics, with Amazon and Target offering a whopping 27-29% discount. This clearly resulted in heavy sales of AirPods this Thanksgiving.
    • Best Buy and Target had good discounts on all electronic items, while Amazon gave heavier discounts on AirPods, headphones, and smartwatches.
    • Walmart did not offer hefty discounts on laptops and headphones, instead focused on Smartwatches, smartphones, and television.
    • In Home improvement, Best Buy offered the biggest discounts for refrigerators, washers and dryers, and dishwashers, while Amazon focussed more on Tools.
    • Walmart did not offer many discounts in this category.
    • Amazon topped the discount charts for maximum combined discounts for makeup and hair brushes on the day of the event. 
    • All retailers offered better discounts for utility products like tables, chairs, and cots (~15-17%), while dressers and couches carried lower discounts (~6-10%).
    Discount brackets - Black Friday 2022

    Highlights

    • Different companies had different discount strategies based on price buckets.
    • Amazon gave heavier discounts in the lower price buckets (< 200$) and lower discounts for products priced higher than 200$. 
    • Best Buy offered the heaviest early discounts of >25% on products priced under 20$ but provided a few additional discounts during the event. For products priced higher than 20$, Best Buy uniformly offered substantial early discounts as well as further discounts during the event.
    • On the other hand, Target focussed on mid and high-priced items, offering heavy early discounts of 16-18% on products priced higher than 100$ and early discounts of ~7% for middle and lower-priced items. For middle-priced products (40-100$), it offered heavier discounts of 10-12% during the event. 
    • Walmart focussed on mid-priced products, offering the highest discounts (both early (~12%) and additional discounts (5%)). It offered the least discounts (~8-9%) on products priced higher than 200$.
    Share of Search - Digital Shelf Analytics - Dataweave

    Share of Search – Amazon is the only retailer with sponsored searches; Apple AirPods rule the roost.

    Salient Insights

    • Amazon is the only retailer with sponsored searches, with HP, Lenovo laptops, and Apple AirPods occupying the highest share. This correlates with AirPods being one of the most sold products.
    • HP laptops had the highest share on Amazon pre-Event but gave the spot to Lenovo during Thanksgiving.
    • Tracphone and Motorola smartphones, Insignia Televisions, and JBL headphones had a good SoS on Amazon.
    • On Best Buy, HP and Dell laptops featured most in searches, with HP ruling the roost during the event. Lenovo had a small presence.
    • Samsung smartwatches, televisions, and Apple AirPods have a big chunk of the search at Best Buy.
    • On Target, pop sockets, smartphones, Apple smartwatches, headphones, and AirPods have the most prominent presence. Apple was the most featured brand in this segment.
    share of search beauty - black friday 2022
    Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (makeup, lotion, shampoo, hair dryers and hair brushes) of Beauty.

    Salient Insights

    • Amazon, Target, Sephora, and Ulta sold beauty products, with Amazon being the only retailer with sponsored products.
    • Ogx, bs-mall, conair, hywestger were popular brands on Amazon, with interest-based ads occupying a substantial part of the search results, especially in Lotions (~40-50%)
    • Tresemme, Scotch Brite, Revlon and Cerave were popular brands in Target
    • Dyson products (brushes and hair dryers) are featured at Ulta’s top of the search, followed by Pureology shampoos.
    • Sephora’s own collection of brushes featured prominently on their website both before and during the event, followed by Dyson and T3 brushes and hair dryers.
    share of search -Digital Shelf Analytics- home improvements
    Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (refrigerator, washers/dryers, dishwashers, tools and coolers) of Home Improvements.

    Salient Insights

    • In Amazon, Frigidaire and RCA had the highest SoS amongst Refrigerators, and LG occupied the highest share among washers and dryers, Coleman in Coolers, Dewalt in Tools, and  Comfee in Dishwashers, both before and during Black Friday.
    • In contrast, on Best Buy, Samsung had the highest share of SoS amongst Refrigerators, package deals were most prominent in washers and dryers, LG among dishwashers, ifixit in Tools, and Corsair in Coolers.
    share of search furniture on amazon
    Note: The share of search percentage reported here is the average score across all subcategories (bed, chair, couch, dresser, and table) of Furniture.

    Salient Insights

    • Interest-based ads occupied the highest SoS on Amazon for Beds.
    • Urban shop and Amazon basics were popular in Chairs, Lifestyle in Couches, WLive in Dressers both before and during the event.
    • Vasagle was more popular during the event than Furrion in Tables, though the reverse was true prior to the event.

    Summary & Key Takeaways

    Black Friday this year was a pleasant surprise to Brands and Retailers, reporting much larger sales than predicted. After experiencing a slump in sales in the months leading up to Thanksgiving, e-commerce vendors have a reason to be optimistic about their holiday season sales forecasts.

    • A record-breaking $9.2 Billion in online sales was reported by Adobe Analytics, a growth of 2.3 % compared to the previous year.
    • Mobile shopping accounted for 55% of digital sales, a rise of 8.5% compared to last year.
    • Retailers wooed customers through deep discounts (~30%) prior to Thanksgiving and around Black Friday. Heavily discounted items like Apple AirPods were the most popular.
    • Thanks to inflation and stretched wallets, consumers were willing to spend but waited to grab the best and biggest deals. Utility products had better sales.
    • With tough competition between retailers on who offers the best discounts, Amazon slid down to the fourth position, and Walmart was the most searched retailer.

    DataWeave, through its Digital Shelf Analytics and Commerce Intelligence solutions, gleans useful insights from e-commerce data and breaks down trends during global shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. If you are a brand or a retailer who would like to know more about our products and solutions, contact us at contact@dataweave.com.

  • It’s not easy being a Bakery Brand: Insights from Digital Shelf

    It’s not easy being a Bakery Brand: Insights from Digital Shelf

    By 2028, Fortune Business Insights projects that the global bakery products market will reach USD 590 billion. The CAGR (Compounded annual growth rate) for 2021-28 is estimated at 5.12%. Products in this segment include bread, buns, cookies, tortillas, salted snacks, English muffins, bagels, confectionery food, hot dogs, cakes, popcorn, and so on.

    Due to disruptions in the global supply chain caused by lockdowns and border closures, the pandemic has had a negative impact on the demand for bakery products and snacks worldwide. However, the market is not only changing, but consumer demand is increasing. Post-pandemic, health, food, and safety have gained renewed attention.

    People across the world are making healthier choices with a focus on wellness. 

    A growing number of people are interested in plant-based foods and beverages, reducing sugar consumption, and understanding the link between lifestyle and health, including obesity and diabetes. As a result of these trends, food producers are reshaping their product strategies to meet new consumer demands.

    In this article, we take a look at the ways companies can leverage data to inform their e-commerce strategy.

    What’s driving up the demand for bakery products?

    More people are choosing easy-to-use bakery products and snacks over other foods due to urbanization, convenience, western diets, and women’s participation in the workforce. Additionally, innovations in baking systems, food technologies, ingredients, formulations, and product ideas are providing customers with a greater level of choice, flexibility, and freedom.

    How is e-commerce changing the game for bakery product companies?

    To optimize their supply chains, bakery food and snack companies must better understand e-commerce metrics given the wide variety of products available and eventually convert sales. There are several measures that companies need to pay attention to. 

    Stock availability metrics, discounts across locations, and share of search results – are all critical metrics companies need to track. In addition to providing manufacturers and retailers with an insight into the trends, DataWeave’s tools also allow them to make better business decisions and ultimately improve their bottom line. 

    Grocery Retailers and Bakery Brands tracked

    Methodology

    • Data Scrape period: February 2022 to September 2022
    • Country: Canada
    • Grocery Retailers tracked: Atlantic Superstore, Fortinos, InstaCart, Loblaws, Voila, Walmart Grocery, Zehrs.
    • Bakery brands: Betty Crocker, Dempsters, Hostess, No Name, Presidents Choice, Quaker, Vachon, Doritos.
    • Category tracked: Bread and Bakery, Chips, Crackers, Deserts, Snacks.

    Share of Search Analysis

    Which brands feature the most on e-commerce portals?

    When listing items on e-commerce platforms, share of search is crucial. The highest share of the top ten or top twenty items available on these platforms is correlated with how many times the item may be viewed. As a result, it would have a greater chance of being selected by the customer.

    By Retailer for Category “Desserts”

    Share of Search for Brands in each retailer
    • In Walmart Grocery, Vachon has the highest share of search at 41%, whereas Betty Crocker, Presidents Choice and No Name had the lowest share of search at 0%, in the Desserts Category.
    • In Loblaws, Presidents Choice had the highest share of search of 34%, whereas Dempsters had the lowest share of search of 2%  in the Desserts Category. 
    • The brand Presidents Choice consistently ranks high in the share of search results for Desserts across multiple retailers, including Atlantic Superstore, Fortinos, Instacart, Loblaws, and Zehrs – except at two retailers, Voila and Watlmart Grocery, where its share is zero.

    Trend of Share of Search for “Desserts”

    Share of Search analysis by Brands over Time in category “Desserts”
    • Share of search had dropped by around 4% for No Name, whereas for Vachon, it increased by 3% from Jan’-22 to Sep’ 22
    • By brands, Presidents Choice had the highest share of search at 42%, whereas Betty Crocker had the lowest share of search at 12% between Jan’ 22 and Sep’ 22 in the Desserts Category.

    Availability Analysis

    Which products are widely available across e-commerce portals?

    The availability of the product on the e-commerce portal is one of the key indicators of meeting customer demand. Brands can use insights from DataWeave to strategize how to restock their inventory and ease customer demand. Based on data analysis, brands can also determine which products to prioritize on which platforms.

    By Category

    Availability analysis by Category over Time
    • Availability of all five categories was around 52% in Feb’ 22, which steadily increased to 61% until Aug’ 22 and has reduced to reach 55% availability in Sep’ 22
    • Sliced Bread category has seen the most drop in availability by 12% between Jun’ 22 and Sep’ 22
    • The tortilla category has the most rise in availability. It has increased by 16% between Feb-22 and May-22. It also showed an overall rise in availability of 5% from Feb-22 to Sep-22

    By Location

    Availability analysis by Location and Category
    • Across categories, Snacks & Candy had better availability at 73% than Bread & Bakery, with 56% availability.
    • By Location, New Brunswick had more than 65% availability across all three categories; the closest Location is Nova Scotia, with 63% availability.
    • Alberta had the highest availability of 100% in the Snacks & Candy category and the lowest availability of 21% overall in all three categories (weighted aggregate)

    Discounts Analysis

    Several discount-based insights can be studied on e-commerce platforms. From location-based trends, retailer-based trends, and manufacturer-based insights. These insights can help companies make the most of the revenue opportunity while creating an attractive value proposition for the retail consumer.

    By Category

    Discount analysis by Category
    • Discounts of all three categories were around 24% in Feb’ 22, which steadily reduced to reach 15% in Sep’ 22
    • Snacks, cookies & chips category has contributed the most to the drop in discounting, which dropped by 17% between Apr’ 22 and Sep’ 22
    • The Tortilla Category does not have any discount in the month of Jul’ 22

    By Retailer

    • Discount on Bread & Bakery category in Walmart Grocery was around 9% in Feb’ 22. It steadily increased to 13% by Jun’ 22 and thereon reduced to reach 11% availability in Sep’ 22.

    By Location

    • Across Retailers, Nova Scotia had the highest availability of discounts at 22%, whereas New Brunswick had the lowest with discounts at 9% in Bread & Bakery category.
    Discount analysis by Retailers and Locations – Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia
    Note: Analysis does not cover all locations

    Bakery and snack product manufacturers on e-commerce platforms have access to a rich trove of insights they can leverage to benchmark their strategies. They can better understand customer demands, align their supply chain and critically understand the trends impacting their bottom line. Engaging with a third-party platform like DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics  can help brands unlock tremendous value. 

  • The Rapid Rise of Alcohol eCommerce in the UK

    The Rapid Rise of Alcohol eCommerce in the UK

    Alcohol eCommerce has been rapidly growing over the years, and like a lot of other industries, the pandemic accelerated its growth. Convenience, safety & home delivery became important criteria for customers in the post pandemic era and so the sale of alcohol via eCommerce went up. Kantar reported that UK booze sales were up £261m & online and convenience stores were the biggest winners. The latest IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Report 2022 reported on another interesting trend – when ordering alcohol online, consumers prefer using websites v/s apps in most parts of the world except China and Brazil. In the UK the largest chunk of online alcohol purchases happens on a retailer website instead of an app. 

    Platform used for last online alcohol purchase. Source

    To get a better understanding of this, we tracked 2 grocery retailers and 3 grocery Q-Commerce apps in the UK to get insights into Alcohol sales, pricing, trends & more! 

    Methodology

    • Data Scrape time period: Feb 2022 – June 2022
    • Grocery Retailers tracked: Tesco & Ocado
    • Grocery Apps tracked: Gorillas, Weezy & Getir
    • Category tracked: Alcohol

    Which retailer was the Price Leader in the alcohol category? 

    Before the pandemic Tesco was the only Big 4 retailer to increase their alcohol market share & Waitrose was the biggest loser, with its share of booze sales falling from 5.4% to 4.7%. Maintaining Price Leadership is a critical element and plays a big role in increasing sales & market share because consumers will buy the most competitively priced product. We wanted to track and see which retailer was the Price Leader in the alcohol category – i.e., had the most number of lower-priced items in the alcohol category. We also wanted to see if & how Tesco’s position had changed post pandemic. 

    Price Leadership
    • Tesco enjoyed price leadership in the Alcohol category from Feb – June 2022 with 38.9% products priced the lowest. This, followed by Ocado at 33.8%. Gorillas had price leadership for the least amount of products in the alcohol category at 5.6%. Tesco was the clear winner! 
    • Tesco’s Price Leadership kept declining through the months though – at the beginning of the year in Feb, Tesco had 44% products priced the lowest but by June, that number fell to a little over 36%. Ocado showed a reverse trend – in Feb they had price leadership on 32% items and by June that number rose to 35.3%.
    • One player Tesco could’ve potentially lost price leadership to was Getir. In Feb, Getir had price leadership on only 8.2% products but that increased gradually over the months to land on 14.5% in June. 

    Which retailers focused on Discounts to perk up alcohol sales? 

    Discounts are a great way to draw in inflation-hit shoppers. Loyalty card discounts, reward vouchers, and other promotional strategies retailers offer help make their products more competitive & attractive to customers. To stay competitive, retailers need to be aware of the discounts their competition is offering. They also need to understand the risk of deep discounting and the impact on margins. We wanted an insight into alcohol related discounts in the UK so we dug into our data. Here’s what we saw. 

    Average discounts across months by retailers
    • A host of European and UK based startups like Jiffy, Dija, Weezy, Zapp, Getir & Gorillas launched with the promise of delivering groceries the fastest & cheapest. 
    • Our data showed that Gorillas offered discounts in line with the competition, however, Getir likely went the deep discounting route. 
    • Getir offered the highest discounts across all months. And in the month of April they offered almost 9% more discount than Ocado – the retailer with the 2nd highest discounts. 
      Like we discussed above, Getir gained price Leadership from Feb to June. Deep discounting could have potentially played a role. 
    • Gorillas on the other hand had the lowest, almost non-existent discounts.

    Let’s look at Price Index trends across 5 months 

    We tracked the Price Index (PI) across these 5 retailers to measure how alcohol prices changed over a 5 month period from Feb – June 2022. 

    Note: Retailers selling at the 100% mark were selling at an optimal price & did not undercut the market. The pricing sweet spot is 95% – 105%. Anything lower would compromise margins, and higher would mean the retailer was not competitive. 

    Price Index across months by retailers
    • Weezy had a Price Index that was the most optimal, sitting in the 100% – 102% range.
    • Gorillas had the lowest Price Index, between 89% – 91%.
    • Getir had a low price index in Feb (96.1%) but slowly kept increasing to cross 110% in April, May & June.
    • What was interesting to see was the competition between the 2 retail giants Ocado & Tesco. Ocado had a lower price index at the start of the year at 105.1%, while Tesco was at 109.8%. In the subsequent months, Ocado kept increasing prices to be competitive with Tesco and Tesco decreased prices to likely match Ocado’s pricing. By June BOTH Tesco & Ocado had the exactly the same price index – 108.7%

    Which retailers were the quickest to make price changes?

    Competitive pricing is critical to eCommerce success. Competitive pricing involves tracking your competitor’s pricing & strategically tweaking your own prices without hurting margins. We tracked the month-wise average Price change from Feb – June across all 5 retailers to see which retailer was making price changes and at what frequency. 

    Average price change across months by retailers
    • Most retailers did not make massive prices changes, they were ballpark competitive with each other from a pricing standpoint. 
    • However, Gorillas made significant changes in the month of March when they dropped prices by 3.8% and in May when they increased prices by 5.5%!
    • In May, the same month Gorillas made a big price hike, Weezy dropped their prices significantly by 10% widening the gap between the 2 retailers. 

    Which retailers avoided lost sales by maintaining stock availability?

    Having a near real time view on stock availability is crucial to driving sales. Customers can buy products only when they’re available! So, we went ahead, looked into our data to see how each of these retailers managed stock availability from Feb to June.

    Average availability across months by retailers
    • Our data showed varying availability levels across retailers with Ocado having the highest availability across all 5 months. They had a robust stock at the beginning of the year at 100% but kept dwindling through the months to land at 95.8% by June. 
    • Tesco had a sharp drop in availability in May & June – from 97% at the beginning of the year to the 92-93% range.
    • Gorillas had the lowest availability across months between 90 & 94%.
    • Weezy consistently maintained availability at 95% across all 5 months.

    Conclusion

    For the most part, the UK market has a positive outlook towards buying alcohol online thanks to changes to shopper behavior arising from the pandemic. As per the IWSR Drinks Market Analysis Report 2022 in website-led markets, such as the UK, breadth of product range is important to customers along with price. These 2 play a key factor in purchase decisions. By contrast, consumers in app-driven markets have different preferences. While price matters, it is less important than convenience and speed. 

    As an alcohol retailer, if you need help tracking your competitor prices, discounts and product assortment, reach out to the team at DataWeave to learn how we can help!

  • 5 Ways to Manage and Improve Stock Availability

    5 Ways to Manage and Improve Stock Availability

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

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

    Why Stock Availability Matters

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

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

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

    7 Ways to improve stock availability 

    1. Collect Accurate Data

    Availability across Brands and Categories

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

    2. Managing eCommerce inventory

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

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

    3. Understand Consumer Demand

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

    4. Adequate forecasting 

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

    Availability across regions

    5. Improve supplier relationships

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

    Availability Analysis
    Availability Analysis across Retailers and Categories

    Consequences of Inefficient Inventory Management

    What are the effects of overstocking?

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

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

    What are the effects of understocking?

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

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

    Conclusion

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

  • 5 Ways DataWeave Helps Brands Drive Growth With Amazon Ads

    5 Ways DataWeave Helps Brands Drive Growth With Amazon Ads

    Consumers are discovering and trialing new eCommerce marketplaces, brands and products at a faster rate than ever before, given the vast amount of choices encountered browsing for products online. A recent analysis shows how events like Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are especially fruitful for new-to-brand customer advertising, encouraging B2C marketers to increase their digital advertising spend to fuel product discovery, sales and market share for their brands.

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

    The majority of eCommerce consumers are discovering products via relevant keywords attributable to their needs, with most clicks happening on page one results for the first few products listed. Simplifying the digital shopping experience is critical for brands to be in the consideration set for the majority of consumers who won’t venture past page one results. 

    An internal analysis conducted shows getting a product to page one on retailer websites can improve sales by as much as 50 percent, but figuring out the right levers to pull to get there organically—without paid advertising—is a real challenge, especially given fast-changing algorithms. While more than half of all retail related online browsing sessions are “organic”, sometimes brands need to boost their product visibility by investing in sponsored (paid) opportunities to improve a product’s rank.

    Data analytics can equip brands with intelligence to help them decide when, where, and how to make digital advertising investments profitably, while simultaneously acting on insights that help drive organic growth. Considering a majority of U.S. consumers begin their product discovery on marketplaces like Amazon, it makes sense for brands to prioritize digital advertising opportunities with Amazon.

    Maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads

    Brands use Amazon Ads to drive brand awareness, acquire new customers, drive sales and gain market share, with the goal of furthering their marketing return on investment. Top performing advertisers average 40 percent greater year-on-year (YoY) sales growth, 50 percent greater YoY growth in customer product page viewership on Amazon, and 30 percent higher returns on ad spend (ROAS) with Amazon Ads, according to a recent analysis. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display are among the types of Amazon Ads options cited that produce maximum return.

    Ensuring your product listings appear at the top of page one results on Amazon for the most relevant discovery keywords is therefore the most important determinant for maximizing ROAS. DataWeave has become a vetted partner and measurement provider in the Amazon Advertising Partner Network, with the goal of supporting brands to optimize digital advertising campaigns by providing visibility to Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) key performance indicators (KPIs), like Share of Search, Pricing and Product Availability, Content Audits, Ratings and Reviews, and Sales Performance and Market Share.

    Below is a summary of how our Digital Shelf solutions, in partnership with Amazon Ads, can improve the performance of your Amazon Ads campaigns

    1. Keyword Recommendations Improve Share of Search

    With the DataWeave Share of Search solution, brands can monitor their placement of both organic and paid discovery keywords relative to their competition. Once your keywords are determined, you are also provided a weighted Share of Search score that helps measure how well each keyword performs relative to product discoverability. Below is an example of insights you’d gain.

    Share of Keyword Search

    Brands can provide their own list of keywords to monitor, or through our Amazon Ads collaborative solution, learn which keywords are the “best” for them to measure in the realm of Amazon. Performance results are based on data that shows which keywords consumers are actually using when browsing online alongside other keywords brands request to measure. Users are able to see exactly which keywords are most popular, competitive (and even unexpected), and relevant at an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) level of granularity. 

    We can also estimate the degree of relevance and estimated traffic for the recommended keywords. Brands can then use these insights to adjust campaign strategies based on these parameters, which can boost product discoverability and rank visibility. A brand could assume people find its products by brand name, yet traffic insights may reveal a majority of people look for a generic product type before they end up buying that particular brand. 

    2. Content Audits Increase Discovery Relevancy Scores

    Strong product content is critical to succeeding on Amazon. Thorough, accurate, and descriptive content leads to better click through rates (CTR), conversion rates, more positive reviews, and fewer returns, which results in increased discoverability. DataWeave’s Content Audit solution reviews existing copy and images on a per-attribute basis to highlight any gaps essential to improving visibility, as seen in the example below.

    Content Analysis

    To further growth, it is equally as important that your product content aligns with your advertising strategy. With Amazon Ads partner add-on, our solution can also audit your content to measure how effectively you are incorporating Amazon Ads keywords into your product content to enhance discovery relevancy.

    3. Discover More Opportunities with Pricing and Product Availability Insights

    Quality content and keyword updates will only get you so far if your products are not consistently available and priced competitively. With DataWeave’s Pricing and Promotions and Product Availability modules, advertisers can monitor their selling prices and availability trends alongside their competitors to uncover more opportunities to incorporate into advertising campaigns, as seen in the Pricing and Promotions dashboard example below.

    Promotion Analysis

    Additionally, product targeting recommendations can be utilized to target a competitor’s ASIN that may be overpriced or that is having issues staying in stock. Alternatively, broaden your strategy to target specific brands, complementary products, or category listing pages.

    You can also create alerts on your own products to monitor when items are low on inventory or out of stock to ensure key products are consistently available when customers are shopping.

    4. Leverage Ratings and Reviews to Increase Conversion

    Product ratings and reviews are also a critical component to running a successful Amazon Ads campaign. A large number of reviews and a positive star rating will provide customers with the confidence to purchase, resulting in higher conversion rates. Conversely, negative feedback can have a detrimental impact, resulting in lost sales and wasted ad spend. DataWeave’s Ratings and Reviews module can help you monitor your reviews and extract attribute-level insights on your products. This information can then be utilized to further optimize your advertising strategy.

    If you see consistent feedback in your reviews on aspects of a product not meeting customer expectations, address them in your product content to prevent potential misplaced expectations. Alternatively, if customer reviews are raving about certain product features, ensure these are promoted and relevant keywords are populated throughout your descriptions and feature bullets. Below is an example of insights seen within the DSA Ratings & Reviews dashboard.

    Ratings and Reviews

    5. Correlate Digital Shelf KPIs to Sales Performance and Market Share

    The newest DSA module, Sales Performance and Market Share, provides SKU, sub-category, and brand-level sales and market share estimates on Amazon for brands and their competitors, via customer defined taxonomies, to easily benchmark performance results.

    This data can also be correlated with other Digital Shelf KPIs, like Content Audit and Product Availability, giving brands an easy way to check the effect of attribute changes and how they impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how search rank, both organic and sponsored, affects sales and market share estimates.

    Understanding the correlation between your advertising campaigns and your Digital Shelf brand visibility will help you identify which areas to prioritize to drive sales and win more market share.

    Digital Shelf Insights Help Brands Win with Amazon Ads

    The need for access to flexible, actionable eCommerce insights is growing exponentially as a way to help brands drive growth, increase their Share of Voice, and to gain a competitive edge. As a result, more global brands are seeking Digital Shelf Analytics for access to near real-time marketplace changes and to develop data-driven growth strategies that leverage pricing, merchandising, and competitive insights at scale.

    By monitoring, measuring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) like Sales Performance and Market Share, Share of Search, Content Audits, Product Availability, Pricing and Promotions and Ratings and Reviews alongside competitors, brands will know what actions to take to boost brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and online sales. 

    DataWeave’s acceptance into the Amazon Advertising Partner Network enables Amazon advertisers to effectively build their Amazon growth strategies and determine systems that enable faster and smarter advertising and marketing decision-making to optimize product discoverability and overall results.

    Connect with us now to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs, or for access to more details regarding our Amazon Ads Partnership or Digital Shelf solutions.

    UPDATED: Read the full press release here

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

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

    Amazon India’s much-awaited annual two-day shopping event, Prime Day, kicked off with a bang on July 23rd & 24th this year & was one of the most successful Prime Day events yet! Amazon reported that more than 32,000 sellers saw their highest ever sales day during the event. Interestingly 70% of these sellers who received orders during Prime Day were based in Tier 2 cities in India, further validating how the post-pandemic eCommerce boom has spread across the country. Also, Indian exporters saw 50% business growth on Amazon on Prime Day as customers across markets like North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan continued to purchase Made In India products.
    It was a great 2 days for Indian sellers, but what about customers who were waiting in anticipation for the great deals typically offered on Prime Day? We dug into our data to take a look at the deals, discounts, and brands that shone bright on Prime Day in India.

    Methodology

    • In addition to Amazon IN, we also tracked Flipkart on 23 & 24th July 2022, on Prime Day.
    • Categories tracked – Electronics, Grocery, Fashion & Beauty.
    • We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime Day price. 
    • We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.

    Amazon v/s Flipkart – who offered better discounts?

    Prime Day discounts are legendary. And across the globe, during Prime Day retailers try and compete to see if they can offer better deals than Amazon. Forbes even published an article on the 36 Prime Day competitor sales that were way more enticing than what Amazon had to offer. In India, we wanted to see if Amazon’s homegrown rival Flipkart might give it a tough fight, so we tracked the volume of discounts across categories on both retailers. 

    Discounts on Amazon & Flipkart across categories
    Discounts on Amazon & Flipkart across categories
    • Out of the 4 categories we tracked, in spite of Prime Day, Amazon offered discounts higher than Flipkart in only 2 categories – Electronics & Beauty. 
    • … while Flipkart offered higher discounts than Amazon in the Grocery & Fashion category. For groceries, Flipkart offered a 3.2% additional discount v/s 2.2% on Amazon. However, in the Fashion category, the difference was marginal – 8.1% on Amazon v/s 8.6% on Flipkart
    • Post-event, both Amazon & Flipkart went back to the original pre-event prices. This made it clear that Flipkart was tracking and making price changes based on their closest competitor. It’s what smart eCommerce businesses do to stay ahead in the race. 
    • Interestingly, post-event, in the fashion category, not only did Amazon revert to the original pre-event price, they even increased prices by close to 2%.

    Let’s take a look at discounts across 4 categories & the Brands that WON in each category.

    From Electronics to Fashion, Beauty & Groceries, let’s deep dive into the data to see which products were highly discounted within each category and brands that sprinted ahead to win the race on Amazon on Prime Day 2022.

    ELECTRONICS

    Tech publication Gadgets360 reported on the biggest Smartphone deals right from Brands like Samsung, Redmi, Oppo, and more. There were some fab deals on earphones too with Boat taking the lead. We wanted to take a look at electronics on Amazon and see which products had the heaviest discounts & if discounts were more lucrative than Prime Day 2021

    Discounts on Electronics on Prime Day
    Discounts on Electronics on Prime Day
    • Amazon India released highlights from Prime Day and reported that Smartphones & Electronics were among the categories that saw the most success in terms of units sold.
    • From the 6 product categories we tracked within electronics, we saw the highest additional discounts on Smartwatches (13.4%), followed by Bluetooth headphones (10.5%)
    • TV, Smartphones, cameras, and laptops had an additional discount of between 3 – 5.5%

    ELECTRONICS Brands that had the highest Share of Search on Amazon during Prime Day

    Research shows that on Amazon, the first 3 products garner 64% of business generated. This is why it is critical for brands to appear in the top few listings when consumers are searching for products. Being on top helps shoppers find your brand with ease & increases the chances of a sale. 

    On Prime Day 2022, Amazon India reported that the top-selling consumer electronics brands were HP, Lenovo, Asus, and Boat to name a few. Our assumption is, these brands must’ve had a high Share of Search (SoS), which played a massive role in increasing sales, so we looked into our data to see which brands had the highest SoS against specific keywords related to electronics. 

    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    • Our data aligned with what Amazon reported. HP had high sales, perhaps because they occupied the premium #1 spot in the laptop category with a 44% SoS! Simply put, this means of the 100 laptops that appeared on a page, against a search for the keyword laptop, 44 products were listed by HP! Consumers always gravitate towards buying products they can find with ease. 
    • Lenovo had a 32% SoS for Laptops. Asus at 14% 
    • The top selling smartphone brands reported by Amazon included OnePlus, Redmi, Samsung, Realme & iQOO – our data showed that 3 out of these 5 brands were in the top 5 listings on Prime Day! Redmi had a whopping 30% SoS against the keyword smartphone, Samsung at 15%, and iQOO at 5% – clear validation that a high SoS can positively impact sales.

    BEAUTY & GROOMING

    Now let’s look at discounts in the beauty & grooming category. 

    Discounts on Beauty Products on Prime Day
    Discounts on Beauty Products on Prime Day
    • The highest additional discounts were given on shampoos (9.3%), followed by Lipsticks (6.6%)
    • Shaving kits for men were at an additional discount of 3.4%. Hair gel at 4.9% & Face Masks at 4.3%

    BEAUTY Brands that had the highest Share of Search on Amazon during Prime Day

    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    Brand Visibility against the Keywords

    In the beauty category, Amazon India reported that top-selling brands included Head & Shoulders, Dove, Biotique, L’Oreal, Sugar Cosmetics, and Mamaearth to name a few. Once again, we looked into our data to see the sort of brand visibility & SoS each of these brands had.

    • All the top-selling brand’s Amazon reported on we noticed appeared in the top 5 search results. 
    • Head & Shoulders & Dove were the top 2 listings against the keyword Shampoo at 26% & 16% SoS respectively. Biotique came in at #5 with a 7% SoS
    • Bombay Shaving Company, Gillette, and Axe were the top grooming brands for men in the Shaving Kit category. 
    • Lakme made a clean sweep with a 19% SoS against the keyword lipstick, which speaks volumes, considering the aggressive competition from D2C beauty brands in India today.

    GROCERY

    According to the New eCommerce in India report by consulting firm Redseer, grocery has been a major contributor to the growth of ecommerce in India & Amazon Fresh used Prime Day to grab a larger piece of that pie! As part of the Prime Day sale, Amazon Fresh also pushed discounts on groceries, as well as fruits and vegetables. We tracked products that fell into the “snack” category, and here’s what we saw.

    Discounts on Snacks on Prime Day
    Discounts on Snacks on Prime Day
    • Given changing lifestyles & healthy food fads, it was no surprise that we saw the highest additional discounts were given on Healthy Snacks (3.2%) & Diet Food (2.7%)
    • Chocolates and chips saw much lower additional discounts at 1.2% each.
    • Drinks were additionally discounted by 2.5% during Prime Day.

    SNACK Brands that had the highest Share of Search on Amazon during Prime Day

    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    • Cadbury had a 69% share of search against the keyword Chocolate, leaving some of its key competitors way behind. Amul had a 20% SoS, while Hershey’s was at just 4%. 
    • According to an article in the Economic times, YogaBar tripled sales in FY22, which is why we were not surprised to see the brand at #1 when users were searching for “Healthy Snacks” during Prime Day. YogaBar products typically enjoy high visibility year-round, which clearly helped with brand awareness on Amazon & sales.

    FASHION

    Amazon reported that Men’s t-shirts and polos, denims, Kurtis, tops, and dresses for women, designer wear, and clothing for kids were some of the most-loved fashion categories on Prime Day. We looked into our data to see the trends that emerged.

    Discounts on Fashion on Prime Day
    Discounts on Fashion on Prime Day
    • From the categories we tracked, women’s handbags had the highest additional discount (11.8%), followed by watches (9.1%)
    • Sneakers & jeans had additional discounts in the ballpark of 7% and sunglasses at 4.4%

    FASHION Brands that had the highest Share of Search on Amazon during Prime Day

    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    Brand Visibility against the Keywords
    • Some of the usual suspects made it to the top 5, but what really stood out for us were brands that popped up against the keyword Jeans. While Levi’s came in at #2 with an 11% SoS, 2 Private Label Amazon brands featured in the top 5! Symbol at 27% SoS and Inkast Denim at 9%
    • Against the keyword Handbag, Lavie had a massive lead at 38% v/s the #2 brand – Caprese, at 13%
    • Boat found a #2 spot against the keyword watches, racing way ahead of the age-old popular brand Fastrack at #5 with a 4% SoS.

    Conclusion

    Amazon Prime Day 2022 in India came to a successful close as shoppers across India discovered the joy of the 2 day celebration with the best deals, savings, new launches, and more. Prime members from 95% of pin codes in India made purchases, there were 1000’s of deals and 500+ new product launches from brand partners & sellers. Nearly 18% more sellers grossed sales over INR 1 crore, and close to 38% more sellers grossed sales of over 1 lakh vs Prime Day 2021. Local neighborhood shops that sell on Amazon witnessed 4x sales growth. And start-ups and brands under the Amazon Launchpad program witnessed a growth of 3x. All in all, a successful event for everyone involved! 

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

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

    In 2022, Amazon sold 300 million products during Prime Day – selling roughly 100,000 items per minute. Since Amazon started Prime Day in 2015 to celebrate its 20th birthday, the shopping festival has grown into a holiday and rivals Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. and Singles’ Day in China. 

    According to RetailDetail, the leading B2B retail community in Benelux, Amazon is planning a 2nd Prime Day shopping festival in the autumn, just a few months after its annual Prime Day event. The retailer has asked its sales partners to prepare for a promotional event in the autumn where they have until the beginning of September to propose attractive discounts, with at least 20% discounts. This year’s second Prime Day may occur in October, with or without the same name. 

    But before that, let’s examine what happened in Germany this year on Prime Day 2022.

    Methodology

    • We tracked Amazon.de both before & on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day.
    • Categories Tracked – Electronics, Wine & Spirits, Grocery, Furniture, Fashion, and Beauty. 
    • We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price.
    • We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.

    What kind of Discounts did Amazon.de offer?

    Amazon Prime Day will be significant, especially for customers hoping to get discounts amid soaring inflation. Both Amazon as well as other sources reported that electrical and electronic items were the most popular purchases, followed by general retail products. Electrical and electronics saw the value of transactions soar 90% on the first day. Mobile phones and accessories were the most popular, with transaction values almost doubling to 96% on day one.

    Discounts across Categories on Amazon.de
    Discounts across Categories on Amazon.de
    • Based on trends from past events, Amazon likely knew electronic items were going to be best sellers. Keeping this in mind, they made sure to offer high discounts in the electronics category. They offered a 6.5% additional discount on electronics on Prime Day. And once the sale ended, they continued to discount electronics by 1.3%.
    • The Fashion category also had a fair bit of discounts and came in at a close second at 5.9%
    • Looks like Amazon discounted everyday use items minimally. Groceries had an additional discount of just 1.8% on Prime Day, and wine and spirits had 2% extra discount.  
    Discounts on Electronics Category on Amazon.de
    Discounts on Electronics Category on Amazon.de
    • Within Electronics, in the four categories we tracked, we saw the highest additional discounts were offered on Bluetooth earphones (10.6%) and Smartwatches (9%)
    Discounts on Fashion Category on Amazon.de
    Discounts on Fashion Category on Amazon.de
    • Jeans and Sunglasses had the highest discounts at 8.6% & 7.6% respectively.
    • Sneakers & Watches too had additional discounts of 6.6% on Prime Day.
    • Post the Prime Day event, Amazon retained an average of 1.5% discount across all products in the fashion category instead of pricing them at the original price. 
    • However, in the case of women’s T-Shirts, they increased the price by 1.7% from the pre-event price.

    Discounts across Price Tiers

    Retailers must consider several factors when making strategic discounting decisions, including customer buying behavior, the type of discount offered & the volume of discount offered. The best discounting approach will vary depending on the product and other factors like the original selling price of the product.

    Now let’s compare the discounting strategy Amazon used in the Electronics v/s Fashion category on Prime Day.

    Discounts across Price Ranges
    Discounts across Price Ranges
    • Interestingly, in both the Electronics and Fashion categories, Amazon increased prices for the lowest-end products between the €0-10 range by 3.6% and 13.2%, respectively, during the sale instead of discounting them! Maybe this was a strategy to drive consumers to higher-value products with greater discounts? 
    • Another similarity in strategy was that most of the mid-priced items had maximum discounts. In electronics & fashion both, the maximum discounts were given to products between the € 30-100 range. 
    • Here’s a difference that stood out – for Electronics in the higher price range between €100 – 500, the volume of discounts dropped a bit which meant Amazon gave moderate discounts on high-end electronics. But the trend flipped for Fashion as luxury fashion items were made to look more attractive with higher discounts.

    Monitoring stock availability during key sales days is critical

    Brands need to have the right stock availability, especially during sale events, because more customers shop online during sales. What’s worse, non-availability of products may drive customers to competitors that are stocking the same product.  Out-of-stock situations lead to missed opportunities & lost sales! Let’s take a look at our data and see how Amazon planned product availability across categories on Prime Day. 

    Availability Analysis across Categories on Prime Day
    Availability Analysis across Categories on Prime Day
    • Amazon was betting big on 2 categories – Electronics & Home. This meant they needed to keep a keen eye on availability in these categories, especially since they forecasted the highest sales to be generated here.
      … it was no surprise that the Furniture category had almost 100% availability during Prime Day! Electronics too had a high availability at 94% during the event.
    • Generally, our data showed that availability across multiple categories we tracked seemed robust and above 80% in more cases. Only Beauty & Grocery had 79% availability.

    Conclusion

    Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!

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

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

    Prime Day launched in 2015 as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Amazon’s founding & has quickly become the biggest shopping event of the year for Amazon. Prime Day is a great opportunity for customers to snag fantastic deals on products they might not otherwise consider buying. Last year, Amazon Prime Day was a tremendous success, with Prime members spending billions of dollars on discounted items. In 2022 alone, global sales during the event reached a new record high of $12 Bn.

    18 countries participated in Prime Day this year, including the US. We did a deep dive into what happened in the UK – the discounts Amazon offered and categories with the highest discounts as well as checked to see if other retailers tweaked their pricing strategy to compete with Amazon on Prime Day.

    Methodology

    • In addition to Amazon UK, we tracked some key retailers on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day.
      Retailers tracked – eBay UK, OnBuy, Selfridges, ASOS.com, Net-A-Porter 
    • Categories tracked – Electronics, Wine & Spirits, Grocery, Furniture, Fashion, Beauty. 
    • We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price. 
    • We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.

    Did other retailers compete with Amazon on Prime Day?

    Traditionally, as Amazon’s Prime Day sale approaches, other retailers adjust their prices by offering summer deals or getting creative with offers. However, we did not see aggressive strategies from other retailers this year. In the US, Walmart always has a sale during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart announced there wouldn’t be an annual promotional event on Prime Day 2022 this year.

    Another report published by Forrester stated that major retailers scaled back their promotions, and overall offers from other retailers were less than impressive. We took a look at the data we gathered in the UK to see if this trend aligned. 

    Discounts offered on Prime Day on Amazon v/s other retailers
    Discounts offered on Prime Day on Amazon v/s other retailers
    • Our data showed that most retailers we tracked offered negligible discounts (in the range of 0.1 – 1.5%) and did not really try and compete or match the discounts Amazon was offering. 
    • However, ASOS was the one retailer that competed heavily with Amazon in the Fashion & Beauty category. While Amazon offered an average additional discount of 7.7% in the Fashion category, ASOS offered 13.2%. And in the beauty category, Amazon offered 6.7%, while ASOS offered 15.2%.
    • When we looked at post-prime day discounts, we saw that as soon as Prime Day ended, ASOS went back to the original price and stopped offering a discount which clearly shows they were keeping an active eye on out their competitors pricing. In fact, ASOS was offering up to 80% off almost everything on the site until Prime Day.

    Which were the popular categories that offered the most discounts?

    During Prime Day, shoppers saw tons of deals on essential gadgets. Tech deals were a massive hit and saw big discounts on everything from TVs, laptops, smartwatches, phones, and tablets. We look at the data we collected to see if we saw a similar trend. 

    Discounts on Amazon UK across categories
    Discounts on Amazon UK across categories
    • Amazon offered discounts across categories and reported that some of the best-selling categories were Consumer Electronics & Home. 
    • Our data too showed that the highest additional discounts were offered in electronics – Bluetooth Earphones at 18.4%, followed by Smartwatches at 14.9% and Laptops as well as Cameras, both at 12%.
    • Low discounts were offered on Alcohol, with Beer at 0.9% and Wine at 1.3%, respectively.
    • Relatively attractive discounts were seen in the Fashion & Beauty category – Sunglasses (9.1%), Shampoo (9.7%), & Watches (9.4%)
    Discounts on Amazon UK in the Electronics category
    Discounts on Amazon UK in the Electronics category

    Electronics being the hot favorite – we wanted to deep dive into the data and get more insights on Amazon’s pricing & discounting strategy here. Discounts can entice customers to buy more, encourage customer loyalty, or clear out old inventory. However, businesses must be careful since too much discounting can eat into profits. They also have to be mindful of which products should be discounted and by how much. 

    • Our data showed that the highest discounts (between 13 – 18%) were given on electronics priced between the £ 20-100 price range.
    • Electronics priced higher, between the £ 100 – 500 pound price range, were discounted less than 10%
    • However, high-value premium electronics over £ 500 were discounted slightly above 10%

    How did Amazon manage stock availability during Prime Day?

    Keeping track of inventory is especially important during big sales like Prime Day when thousands of customers are actively looking for deals.  There’s nothing worse than them finding the item they wanted is out of stock (OOS). OOS leads to lost sales, a situation that must be avoided at all costs. Read about how a small short term stock out on Amazon led to long term negative impacts for one of our customers. And let’s also look at the data and see what product availability looked like on Prime Day.

    • Overall, Amazon maintained robust availability across categories, and re-stocking was constant both before, during & after the event. 
    • Furniture, Fashion & Electronics had the highest availability. No surprise there since Amazon estimated that Home/ Furniture would be one of the best-selling categories.
    • Grocery saw average availability – perhaps cause some of these products are perishables, so it’s best to be mindful about overstocking.

    Which Brands Won on Prime Day?

    If there is one thing to remember about improving your product visibility on Amazon, it’s that it all boils down to the usage of the right keywords. Using relevant keywords makes your product appear higher up in search when customers are running searches on Amazon for those products. And the higher up a product appears in search, the higher the chances of a sale! 

    Let’s take a look at some popular categories and which brands had the highest Share of Search (SoS) during Prime Day.

    • Corona, San Miguel, and Becks were the top 3 brands optimized for the keyword Beer. However, what’s really important to note is both Corona & Becks had 20% SoS that was completely organic. San Miguel had a 20% SoS too, but it was sponsored ads that gave them this artificial boost. 
    • While a whole bunch of other brands had a 10% SoS most of them achieved this via Sponsored Ads. Youngever was the only brand that achieved this completely organically. They must have made sure they optimized key KPIs like content, ratings & reviews & product availability to achieve this result.
    • There were deep discounts on a wide range of Lenovo laptops. For example, the Lenovo IdeaPad duet Chromebook and Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chromebook were available at £100 off. Our data, too saw Lenovo & Asus fight for the top spot.
    • Asus sponsored 28% of products before Prime Day, hoping to capitalize on the pre-sale frenzy. During the event, they sponsored only 13% of products, bringing down their total SoS from 31% before the event to 13% during the event. 
    • Lenovo followed the opposite strategy; they sponsored just 6% of products before the event and during the event sponsored a whopping 25% which made them “almost” dominate the Laptop category during Prime Day.
    • Then there was Microsoft, with the highest SoS at 38%, of which all of it was organic!
    • The Smartphone SoS battle was clearly between Samsung & Xiaomi. Samsung was a consistent #1 at all 3 time periods (Before, During & After Prime Day) with the highest total SoS. Xiaomi came in at a close second. 
    • Samsung had an exciting strategy – they went heavy on sponsorships before and after the event. Their sponsored SoS was 31% & 39% respectively. And SoS of 13% during the event. 
    • Xiaomi’s strategy was just the opposite. Their sponsored SoS was 16% before the event. And 17% after the event, which was moderate compared to their Sponsored SoS during the event at 25%, which was much higher than Samsung’s 13%
    • Critical to note, Xiaomi’s organic search visibility before, during, and after the event was 0%. It definitely should be a concern area for any brand.
    Share of search
    Share of search
    • Both before & after the event, Cadbury had the highest visibility for the keyword Chocolate. During the event, they were not in the top 5 brands.
    • During Prime Day, Nestle won the top spot and had a 29% SoS. However, before the event, they were at #3 and after at #2. Artificially boosting visibility might’ve had something to do with this.

    Conclusion

    Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!

  • The Role of eCommerce in Sustainable Fashion

    The Role of eCommerce in Sustainable Fashion

    Today, environmental damage is rapidly occurring on a global scale. And there are many reasons and causes for this. Global warming is one, deforestation, over population are some others. The list is long. In a small way, the retail & clothing industry contributes to environmental damage too. The good news is that sustainable fashion addresses this issue. Sustainable clothing is designed using sustainable fabrics like organic cotton, hemp, and Pima cotton that have less of a negative impact on the planet. 

    sustainable clothing and its benefits
    Sustainable clothing and its benefits

    In this blog, we will discuss the rise of sustainable clothing and its benefits. We will also discuss marketplaces for sustainable fashion.

    Benefits of Sustainable Fashion

    a. Reduces carbon footprint

    The fashion industry emits numerous greenhouse gases annually. Most clothes are made from fossil fuels and require significantly more energy in production. Sustainable brands often use natural or recycled fabrics that require less chemical treatment, water, and energy. Organic fabrics such as linen, hemp, and organic cotton are biodegradable and environmentally sound.

    b. Saves animal lives

    Leather isn’t a by-product of the meat industry, and it’s estimated that it alone is slaughtering and killing over 430 million animals annually. Sustainable fashion brands are increasingly embracing the use of cruelty-free alternatives. Various alternatives include polyester made with ocean trash, plant-based compostable sneakers, bags from recycled seatbelts, silk created from yeast, and bio-fabricated vegan wool. Another interesting leather alternative comes from pineapples, where the fabric is produced using the leaves of pineapples.

    c. Requires less water

    Water is used in the dyeing and finishing process for nearly all items in the fashion industry. It takes 2,700 liters of water to produce a single T-shirt. Cotton is highly dependent on water but is usually grown in hot and dry areas. Linen, hemp, Refibra, and recycled fibers are some other sustainable fabrics that require little to no water during production.

    d. Supports safer working conditions

    Endless working hours, unacceptable health & safety conditions, and minimum wages, are the reality for most garment workers in the fast fashion sector. A few informative documentaries like “The True Cost” or “Fashion Factories Undercover” document the social injustices of the fast fashion industry. Eco-ethical brands advocate for sustainable fashion, health care, humane working conditions, and fair wages for their workers. 

    e. Healthy for people and the environment

    Fast fashion products often undergo an intense chemical process where 8,000 types of chemicals are used to bleach, dye, and wet process garments. Those chemicals often lead to diseases or fatal accidents for workers and inflict serious congenital disabilities on their children. These chemicals harm our health, as our skin absorbs anything we put on it.

    5 Sustainable & Ethical Online Marketplaces

    Here is a list of five earth-minded and socially responsible marketplaces that have sustainable and fair trade brands for the discerning and mindful shopper:

    1. thegreenlabels

    Netherlands-based webshop thegreenlabels is a sustainable fashion retailer that sells sneakers, womenswear, and accessories from various “green labels” brands. Founded in 2018, this is a marketplace where people can buy products from brands that care about a positive impact on the environment. All brands featured here guarantee fair working conditions and represent at least one of these 4 values – “CLEAN PROCESS” environmentally friendly production, clothes that support “LOCAL” communities, “VEGAN” brands to assure no animals were harmed and “WASTE REDUCTION”

    2. LVRSustainable

    LVRSustainable
    LVRSustainable

    Luisa Via Roma started as a family-owned boutique in the early 1900s. They have grown into a luxury e-retailer and created an LVRSustainable section for people trying to insert sustainability into their wardrobes. They have brands rated ‘Good’ or ‘Great.’ The site offers a wide range of products like bags, accessories, sports, shoes, lingerie, and much more for men, women, and kids. You can find organic, vegan, eco-friendly, ethical, and recycled & upcycled items here.

    3. Brothers We Stand

    Brothers We Stand
    Brothers We Stand

    Brothers We Stand is a retailer set up in solidarity with the people who make our clothes. This retailer conducts rigorous research to ensure that every product in their collection meets the following three standards: designed to please, ethical production, and created to last. It’s a great platform to shop for ethical and sustainable menswear. They also have their private clothing line along with other brands.

    4. Labell-D 

    Labell-D was launched with a clear mission to reduce the negative impact of fast fashion on the planet. This retailer wants to make Responsible Fashion the new norm. They intend to make sustainable clothing and fashion easy for both brands and consumers. Labell-D has a transparent accreditation process where they evaluate the brand’s carbon footprint and environmental impact. Their verification assessment includes animal welfare, emissions, materials, production processes, chemical usage, waste management, and traceability.

    5. Cerqular

    Cerqular wants to make sustainable shopping affordable and accessible for all. The retailer promises that every product and seller is verified as organic, recycled, sustainable, carbon-neutral, eco-friendly, vegan, or circular. They have a wide range of sellers and do not limit products only from luxury brands, so sustainable shopping is no longer expensive or inconvenient.

    Conclusion

    The fashion industry is a contributor to worldwide carbon emissions. Sustainable fashion is the new big thing giving rise to more and more sustainable brands and marketplaces. 

    To stand out and shine in the crowded eCommerce space is not easy. Having a robust Digital Shelf becomes critical for brands. A brand’s Digital Shelf is all of the ways their customers digitally interact with the brand, not only on marketplaces but on the brand’s DTC website & shoppable social media. This is why brands need to closely track & optimize their Digital Shelf KPIs like assortment, availability, pricing, ratings & reviews, product discoverability & product content to increase their online sales.

    Want to learn how DataWeave can help you win the Digital Shelf? Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.

  • The challenges in scaling a ‘House of Brands’

    The challenges in scaling a ‘House of Brands’

    Let’s start with the basics – what is a ‘House of Brands.’

    House of Brands is a portfolio management strategy that defines how a family of brands owned by one parent company, each independent of one another and each with its own audience, marketing, look & feel operate in harmony with each other. 

    Advantages of a House of Brands Strategy

    • The Profit Playbook: The playbook generated by the success of one brand can be leveraged to scale other brands.
    • Economies of Scale: Cost across Marketing, Supply chain, Advertising, and Operations gets shared across multiple brands helping optimize costs.
    • Market Coverage: Multiple products enable brands to cover multiple market niches and audiences while maintaining unique messaging for each niche. 
    • Future-Proofing: By hedging bets across multiple brands, it cushions the parent company against changes in customer preferences and trends. 

    … for these reasons and more, it’s no surprise that every digital-first consumer brand today aspires to leverage a portfolio strategy to become a House of Brands.

    More and more companies are slowly adopting this strategy

    • In the US the brands like P&G, Newell, and Unilever which found early success in the online space are quickly acquiring more brands and betting on the “House of Brands” strategy to scale.
    • In India, Unicorn D2C start-ups like MamaEarth, Good Glamm Group, Sugar Cosmetics, Rebel, Boat, and Lenskart to name a few, are already knee-deep into this strategy as their brand portfolio keeps growing.
    • And then there are brand roll-ups like Thrasio, Perch, HeyDay in the USA, Branded, Hero in the UK and Mensa, and GlobalBees in India which started as a House of Brands from the get-go.

    More Brands. More Data. More need for Monitoring!

    You cannot improve what you cannot measure! In order to scale these brands, the first thing needed is DATA. Data across all digital platforms – data on social media performance, customer engagement, eCommerce sales, product stock availability, pricing, reviews, and customer sentiment to name a few. This data will unlock huge value for brands and it gives them a sense of what’s working and what needs to be improved in order to increase sales & scale. 

    All brands need to track this information – but here’s a challenge unique to a House of Brands – it is the sheer volume & scale of data needed across multiple brands across multiple digital platforms! For example, a House of Brands with let’s say 10+ brands, each brand with 50 SKUs, selling on 10 eCommerce platforms is the equivalent of managing 10 retail shops with 500 SKUs! 

    Let’s look at some of the questions the analytics, marketing, and brand management teams at House Of Brands would ask. And the data they would need almost on a daily basis for every single brand. 

    • What is the search ranking for all of our SKUs across each and every single eCommerce store it is available on? How does this benchmark to the closest competitor? And are competitors using aggressive advertising strategies to outperform & overshadow our SKUs?
    • Are competitors offering discounts? Are those discounts higher than what we’re offering leading customers to purchase their products instead of ours?
    • Are my products & SKUs available and not out of stock across every single marketplace and online store?
    • Are positive ratings & reviews driving my customers to purchase my product? Or do our competitors have a better customer perception than my brand does?
    • Are Amazon and other marketplaces displaying my product content correctly so customers have enough information to make an informed purchase decision?

    … if the sheer scale across multiple brands was not a big enough challenge when this data needs to be tracked hyper-locally for each brand, it becomes anyone’s worst data nightmare!

    Need Data? Lots of it? No problem!

    To get ample data, across key KPIs brands need to invest in a Digital Shelf Solution. However, traditional Digital Shelf Solutions were built for brands that got a majority of their revenue from in-store sales and only a part of their revenue was being generated online. 

    That’s where DataWeave is different. DataWeave’s AI-Powered Digital Shelf Solutions was built with Digital Native brands in mind. 

    What KPIs do we help House of Brands track?

    • Keyword Search Ranking: Track & improve your search rankings for priority keywords. Boost product visibility and sales
    Keyword Analysis
    Keyword Analysis
    • Content: Optimize your brand’s product content to drive up conversions
    Content Quality Analysis
    Content Quality Analysis
    Availability Analysis
    Availability Analysis

    The following metrics are available to view in one single dashboard, across multiple online stores and multiple geographies making it so easy to get a consolidated view of the health of the entire portfolio of products! What’s more, we’ve created a dashboard with multiple views – brand-wise, function-wise & even hierarchy-wise. This means a brand manager can see all KPIs specific for only the brand they manage, while the marketing team can look at keyword search rankings across all brands and the leadership team can see a brand-level daily scorecard for a quick health check. And that’s not all! Our dashboard highlights insights that can be “actioned asap” to make it easier to understand what critical tweaks and changes can help improve sales. Lastly, as a House of Brands adds more Brands & SKUs to its portfolio, our solution has the full flexibility to add and delete SKUs on the go!

    If you are a House of Brand and wish to explore how some of the problems you face daily can be solved – please email: contact@dataweave.com.

    Brand Roll-Ups and House of Brands are always scouting for new brands to acquire. DataWeave has a unique product to help you track a category daily, highlighting brands that show exceptional KPIs across – Ranking, Reviews, Ratings, Bestseller ranks, Sales Estimates, etc. Read more about how VC’s & Brand Rolls up are using Data for faster Acquisitions. 

  • How short term Stockouts on Amazon can have a long-term impact on your eCommerce business

    How short term Stockouts on Amazon can have a long-term impact on your eCommerce business

    It’s common knowledge that upward of 70% of Amazon customers never scroll past the first page of search results. And that the first 3 products garner 64% of business generated. This is why it is critical for brands and businesses to make sure they rank well on Amazon. A good search ranking helps customers find your product with ease. And findability is fundamental! Having a better ranking is also a driver of the “flywheel effect” at online retailers. According to this effect, products that sell more tend to rank better in search results, and products that rank well in search results tend to sell more.

    Negative impact on Sales Ranking due to Stockouts

    If you want to stay on top of search rankings on Amazon, one of the things you need to keep an eye out for is your product stock availability. It’s not the ideal customer experience to have to click on a product listing only to find out it’s currently out of stock. This is why Amazon will not rank products at the top if they’re not available & customers cannot buy them immediately. Not only does this lead to a lost sale for a brand, to make things worse, but customers also end up buying a competitor’s product instead. 

    We were tracking product availability on Amazon for one of our customers in the CPG space. We tracked availability for products across varying ranks & looked at how going out of stock impacted their search rankings.

    Product Availability
    Product Availability

    Impact on products with a Search Rank between 1 to 10:

    • Our data showed that when products that ranked between 1-10 went out of stock for just 1 day, their rank fell by over 28%. After 3+ days of being out of stock, their rank fell by 83% and after being out of stock for over 10 days their rank fell by close to 150%! 
    • This clearly illustrates that when the longer top-ranking products are out of stock, the greater the impact on search rank and product discoverability.

    Impact on products with a Search Rank between 10 to 20:

    • The impact of being out of stock on products that ranked lower, i.e. between 10 to 20 was much lower. After being stocked out for 1 day, the ranking fell 17% compared to the 28% dip for products in the top 10 ranks. 
    • Incremental change was minimal, too. After 3+ days of being OOS, search rank dropped by 22% and by 53% after 10+ days v/s close to 150% for higher-ranked products.

    Impact on products with a Search Rank between 20 to 30:

    • These products had the least impact but there was an impact nonetheless. 
    • After being OOS for 5+ days, search ranking fell by close to 8% and to close to 30% after 10 days of product unavailability.

    Avoiding Stockouts with better Inventory Management

    Customers can buy your product only when it is available. Failing to provide products at the right time will lead to losing sales to your competitors. If your products become unavailable, you’ll notice a drop in customers’ overall satisfaction and shopping experience too in addition to a lost sales rank on Amazon. In fact, your reputation and sales will take a beating long term in case of consistent product unavailability. Moreover, once the product is back in stock, the climb back to the top ranking is a slow and not-so-easy process. This is why brands need to maximize conversions by tracking product availability on a constant basis.

    Conclusion

    Stockout is a critical issue that has a significant impact on sales, brand image, and customer loyalty. Items ranking higher on eCommerce platforms take the biggest hit when they get out of stock. Brands can recapture their search share after restocking their inventory. 

    Want to maximize sales by reducing latency periods between stock replenishment? Reach out to our Digital Shelf Experts to know how! 

  • Feminine Hygiene Products Face Supply Chain Shortage and Price Increases

    Feminine Hygiene Products Face Supply Chain Shortage and Price Increases

    Last week the DataWeave analytics team identified the states most impacted by the baby formula shortage, only to see feminine hygiene products following similar trends with price increases occurring alongside a supply chain shortage. In this analysis, the team has identified over four hundred feminine hygiene products made available across eighteen retailer and delivery intermediary websites from August 2021 through June 2022, to see how product availability and price changes correlated.

    Within the feminine care products analyzed, both tampons and sanitary pads show to have under 58% availability as of June 2022. For sanitary pads, June 2022 shows the lowest level of product availability at around 58%, which has steadily declined each month from August 2021 where product availability started around 69%. Tampons however, reached their lowest level of availability in April 2022 at 45%, and appear to be slowly recovering each month, now reaching around 53% availability in June 2022.

    Product Availability for Feminine Care Products - June 2022
    Product Availability for Feminine Care Products – June 2022

    The Evolution of the Tampon Shortage by Retailer

    Looking at tampons in more detail and at a retail level, we can see how much and how often product availability fluctuated from August 2021 through June 2022 across Kroger, Meijer, Baker’s Plus, Target and Walmart websites. Baker’s Plus, for example, shows the lowest product availability, maintaining an average of around 39% from October 2021 through June 2022. Kroger appears to be a notable exception only facing stock availability issues in March and April 2022, achieving nearly 78% availability in June 2022, which is 16% greater than the other retailers analyzed.

    Product Availability for Tampons by Retailer - June 2022
    Product Availability for Tampons by Retailer – June 2022

    Feminine Care Product Price Changes Over Time

    When looking at Pricing Intelligence insights and average price changes occurring alongside declining product availability for tampons and sanitary pads combined, we see a very different story. Tampons have seen steep price hikes from December 2021 onward, increasing the most in June 2022, up 6% compared to prices seen in November 2021. This steep price increase could be attributed to consistently low availability for tampons that has been seen in recent months.

    To the contrary, sanitary pads have seen a price reduction of around 1.25% as of June 2022 compared to average prices seen in November 2021. While prices are lower in June 2022 for sanitary pads, the percentage by which they are lower is shrinking in recent months, potentially for the same reasons related to decreasing product availability.

    Price Change for Feminine Care Products - June 2022
    Price Change for Feminine Care Products – June 2022

    When looking at month-over-month average price changes for tampons only, we can clearly identify which months had the biggest price changes, noting price hikes that lead to the currently high prices seen in June 2022. In March and May 2022, over 10% of tampons offered had seen a price increase, and around 8% had seen significant price increases of more than 10%.

    Month-Over-Month Price Changes for Tampons - June 2022
    Month-Over-Month Price Changes for Tampons – June 2022

    eCommerce Intelligence Provides Early Visibility to Evolving Trends

    Price increases don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon given there was a 3.6% price hike seen on average in May 2022 versus April, with June seeing yet another .6% increase from May’s prices. That being said, as the market evolves and feminine hygiene products stabilize, our team will continue to provide visibility to critical pricing and product availability changes to enable our clients to stay ahead of the curve.

    From a baby formula shortage to a tampon shortage, what category will be next to follow the supply chain shortage trend? Follow our blog for access to the latest insights and be sure to reach out to our team if there is any particular category you are interested in tracking next, or for access to more information on our Commerce Intelligence and Digital Shelf solutions.

  • Baby Formula Shortage Continues Alongside National Price Increases – June 2022

    Baby Formula Shortage Continues Alongside National Price Increases – June 2022

    As the baby formula shortage continues, retailers and brands are working quickly to meet evolving consumer demand, considering supply chain driven headwinds, a baby formula recall, and inflationary-driven impacts. The DataWeave analytics team has actively tracked marketplace changes, alongside reports from the FDA, for the baby formula category at a state-level, and has shared the latest snapshot of product availability through June 7th, 2022, below.

    Average Baby Formula Product Availability by State - June 2022
    Average Baby Formula Product Availability by State – June 2022

    While the U.S. has reached an average of 84% baby formula availability the first week of June 2022, given recent news headlines related to the baby formula shortage, and tracking out of stock encounters by state, we see a continued decline in availability throughout the Midwest versus product availability levels seen in May 2022.

    Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky all show average availability for baby formula to be less than 50%, with Wisconsin being impacted the most at less than 18% average availability. While Texas shows an average availability improvement of 3.5% from the first two weeks of May 2022 to the first week of June 2022 as noted in the below chart, availability is also very low overall at less than 60%.

    Average Change in Baby Formula Product Availability by State: May-June 2022
    Average Change in Baby Formula Product Availability by State – May 2022 to June 2022

    Outside of the Midwest and Texas, the other states for consumers to be cautious in are California, Virginia, and South Carolina as their month-over-month average change in availability also declined 4%, 12.6% and 8.2% respectively. Below is a snapshot of where the baby formula availability average started as of May 1st through the 15th, 2022.

    Average Baby Formula Product Availability by State - May 2022
    Average Baby Formula Product Availability by State – May 2022

    Baby Formula Product Availability Changes – March 2021 through May 2022

    At an aggregated level overall, the availability for baby formula was relatively stable across all retailers considered within our analysis from March 2021 through September 2021, but has been on a steady decline ever since, starting at 81.7% availability in September and ending at 53.8% availability in May 2022 as noted in the below chart.

    Monthly Average Availability for Baby Formula Across Major Retailer Websites
    Monthly Average Availability for Baby Formula Across Major Retailer Websites

    Looking at baby formula availability at a retail level, we saw yet again not all availability challenges were alike, by month or retailer. Costco.com lead the other retailers within our analysis for greatest average availability from March 2021 through May 2022, but had one of the lowest availability percentages at 62.7% in May 2021, and dropped to the lowest availability of the group in May 2022 at 37.5%.

    Average Availability for Baby Formula Across Major Retailer Websites
    Average Availability for Baby Formula Across Major Retailer Websites

    Baby Formula Prices Increase as Availability Changes

    While unnecessary price gouging is prohibited, price increases are still happening at a slow and steady rate across all the accounts included within our Pricing Intelligence analysis given external market factors outside of baby formula recall related stockout scenarios.

    Kroger.com experienced the greatest average price increases overall, with the peak being in May 2022 at a 19% increase, 8% higher than other retailers on average, versus prices seen in March 2021 for the same baby formula products. The most significant price hike occurred on Kroger.com from December 2021 to January 2022. Other retailers like H-E-B, Target and Wegman’s have had minimal price changes from March 2021 through May 2022. 

    Average Price Inflation for Baby Formula, Indexed to March 2021
    Average Price Inflation for Baby Formula, Indexed to March 2021

    Address the Baby Formula Shortage With eCommerce Intelligence

    As the market continues to evolve and baby formula supply works its way to catching back up to demand, our team will continue providing critical pricing, merchandising, and competitive insights at scale, to enable retailers and brands to develop data-driven growth strategies that directly influence their eCommerce performance, accelerate revenue growth and drive profitability.

    Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis, or for more information on our Commerce Intelligence and Digital Shelf solutions, and let us know what other category insights you’d be interested in seeing this year.

  • eCommerce in South Africa: Data-Driven approach to getting ahead

    eCommerce in South Africa: Data-Driven approach to getting ahead

    What an exciting month we’ve had at DataWeave! Our team flew down to gorgeous Cape Town, South Africa to attend the 8th edition of #EcomAfrica! After months of Zoom calls and virtual events, it was a refreshing change to see our customers in person and meet some of the movers and shakers in eCommerce and some of the top South African brands. 

    Top eCommerce Companies in South Africa
    Top eCommerce Companies in South Africa

    My last visit to South Africa was before the pandemic. Things have changed since then, & the difference was stark! The eCommerce landscape had a paradigm shift during Covid-19 and grew exponentially. My customers spoke to me about the new opportunities, growth potential as well as challenges that came in because of this boom. For one, eCommerce in South Africa has become more competitive than ever – from online retail to grocery and food delivery to even alcohol delivery! All retail businesses seem to have jumped onto the eCommerce bandwagon.

    A recent Deloitte report found that over 70% of South Africans shop online at least once a month & 2 out of 3 respondents said they plan to increase their frequency of online shopping. 65% said they know what they want, search online & check all stores that stock the product to compare prices. Price is one of the key factors that influence consumer purchase decisions. Other critical factors include delivery fee, delivery time, promotions & discounts & product assortment to name a few. In order to stay ahead in this highly competitive arena, both retailers and brands need to make data-driven decisions about critical KPIs like pricing to stay ahead of the competition.

    Increased Online Shopping & Online Shopping Frequency
    Increased Online Shopping & Online Shopping Frequency

    We’ve been working with customers in South Africa for over 4 years now, even before the pandemic. So on Day 2 of the event – S.Krishnan Thyagarajan “Krish”, President & COO, Dataweave had a chance to share our learnings and experience from all these years and how user data is critical to getting ahead & winning the eCommerce race in South Africa.

    For the purpose of Krish’s keynote address, we tracked pricing insights for a finite set of categories across key South African retailers like Checkers, Pick n Pay, EveryShop, Incredible, Makro, Waltons, Shoprite & Dis-Chem to name a few over a period of 16 months from Dec 2020 to April 2022. We highlighted price increase and decrease opportunities and how each retailer reacted in order to stay competitive, increase sales and protect margins. 

    BATTLE of the eCommerce GIANTS!

    Key Highlights from the Keynote

    • Increasing prices where an opportunity exists helps retailers increase their margins exponentially. Pick n Pay had the highest action rate (73%) when it came to capitalizing on price increase opportunities v/s Dis-Chem at 11%. 
    • When it came to price decrease opportunities (in order to stay competitive with rival brands) Takealot was the most responsive retailer – they capitalized on 30% of the opportunities, followed by Pick n Pay at a close second (28%) and Shoprite & Dis-Chem at just 4%.
    • Most retailers took between 1 – 5 days maximum to make price changes which means responsiveness to the market among all retailers is high making it more important for online retailers to always be on their toes.  
    • The 2 categories where most retailers capitalized on Price Increase Opportunities were Sauces & Condiments and Crackers & Biscuits.

    Want to watch the Keynote video on Demand? Click here to register & watch.

    Price Increase & Decrease Opportunities
    Price Increase & Decrease Opportunities

    Bonus video content! 

    • Watch the Impact of price increase & decrease opportunities on Private Label brands! 
    • See how product stock availability impacts price changes over a 16-month period. 
    • Find out which brands are in the lead in the Skin Care, Pet, Baby, Laundry & Cleaning Aid categories 

    If you’re an online retailer in South Africa & need insights on staying competitive with the right pricing, product assortment, delivery time, delivery rates, and the other key influencers that affect customers’ choice of online retailers, sign up for a demo with our team at DataWeave to know how we can help!  

  • How Inflation has hit the Retail Industry

    How Inflation has hit the Retail Industry

    Inflation has resurfaced after a decade of tranquil price increases. The persistent COVID-related supply chain disruptions have been a driving factor in increasing consumer costs since some commodities are harder to come by. While inflation is a normal economic phenomenon, the current 3.81% inflation rate has increased the cost of living for families across the globe.

    Global Inflation Rate
    Global Inflation Rate. Source: Statista

    Worldwide inflation is expected to remain near 5.0% in early 2022 before gradually easing in response to industrial and agricultural commodity price declines. Additionally, the global consumer price inflation peaked from 2.2% in 2020 to 3.8% in 2021 and will average 4.1% in 2022 before subsiding to 2.8% in 2023.

    In this blog, you’ll learn about the impact of inflation on the Retail Industry. 

    What is Inflation?

    Inflation is an economic term that describes an overall increase in the price of goods and services in an economy, and a by-product of inflation is the devaluation of the currency used within that economy. For example, a clothing retailer that used to pay $8 for a t-shirt two years ago will now have to pay $10 for that exact product. The t-shirt hasn’t changed at all. However, it has become 25% more expensive. Inflation and the devaluation of currency are part of the reasons why they’d now pay $2 more for that same T-shirt.

    Also Read: Top 7 strategies to sell effectively on Amazon

    Impact of inflation on Retail

    FMCG

    The Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector will continue to grow because there is growth in household goods spending despite the Russia-Ukrainian crisis, global interest rate, and rising fuel prices. In fact, the demand for consumer packaged goods rose sharply in countries heavily affected by the pandemic. However, the FMCG sector will see a rise in prices of commodities because crucial resources such as cooking oil, tea, cocoa, etc., become scarce. The persistent shock to the supply chain has forced various FMCG companies to increase their prices. For instance, Mondelez, a Fortune 500–listed snack and beverage company, announced a 6-7% price increase. 

    Inflation for Fashion & Pharma Industry
    Inflation for Fashion & Pharma Industry

    Fashion

    The global fashion industry posted a 20% decline in revenues in 2019–20. Inflation in fashion is caused by transportation bottlenecks, material shortages, rising shipping costs, and straining supply and demand. The global fashion industry will see complete recovery in 2022. COVID-caused supply and demand constraints have eased, but shoppers will have to reconcile to price jumps in everything from bags to shoes.

    Pharma

    Pharmaceuticals are recognized as an essential commodity and therefore have a massive impact on the household budget. Vizient has projected a 3.09% increase in the inflation rate in drug prices from July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2023. It shows how inflation has a direct impact on prescription drug costs. Notably, retail prices for some of the most widely used prescription drugs are expected to increase 2x as much as inflation. The demand for pharmaceutical drugs has been higher post-pandemic, ensuring that consumers’ total demand and spending in this vertical will remain unchanged. 

    Comparison of New, Used & Electric cars
    Comparison of New, Used & Electric cars
    Highest & Lowest Inflation in Beauty category. Source: nielseniq.com

    Automotive

    The rise of both new and used cars has been steeply increasing partly because of the shortage of semiconductors and the backlog from the closure of factories during COVID-19. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there has been a 24.4% inflation in the used car purchase prices and an 8.8% increase in the new car purchase price. Rising oil prices across the globe and the historical oil crisis fuelled by the Ukraine-Russia war have strained many people’s budgets. However, the automobile market is seeing an uptake in demand for electrical vehicles (EVs). EVs represented 14% of car sales between January and June 2021. 

    Beauty

    COVID-19 brought new challenges to the cosmetics industry, chief among this being face-covering required by law. In light of social distancing and lockdowns across the globe, consumers were buying less makeup. The rising cost of labor, energy, and raw materials used in beauty products have resulted in a “once-in-two-decade” backdrop for price hikes. The cost of palm oil, a common material in beauty products, has soared 82% in two years due to Indonesian labor shortages. Nevertheless, consumers will spend more time outside the house. Beauty price per unit changes shot up 17% in-store and online in 2021.

    5 Things that will help retailers during inflationary times

    1. Observe Competition

    Retailers should follow their competitors closely—when they start to raise/lower prices, consider following suit. Using competitive data to gauge price changes will help in managing price parity. However, excessive discounts and lower prices to gain an advantage over your competitor could backfire in various ways. For example, low pricing may convey that your products aren’t as good as your competitors’, impacting your long-term brand image. Moreover, lowering prices to sell more doesn’t necessarily mean higher profits, especially during high inflation. To leverage this strategy effectively, retailers must first identify SKUs that have the highest impact on their pricing.

    2. Build a structured and targeted pricing strategy

    An effective pricing strategy that leverages differences in product, channels, and customers will help retailers to maintain long-term value for their business and customers. However, customers might react differently to a steep price increase. Broad price increases will demonstrate insensitivity and erode customer trust. Instead, retailers can thoughtfully tailor their inflationary price increases for each customer and product segment with a competitive pricing strategy. With a competitive and historical pricing strategy, brands can examine their customers’ end-to-end profitability and willingness to pay relative to a comparable peer set. 

    Price Competitiveness for the right items
    Price Competitiveness for the right items

    3. Rethink commercial positioning

    The pandemic and rise of inflation during 2020–2021 have profoundly impacted how consumers live and what they value. Understanding how your consumer’s needs have shifted and used a promotion strategy to manage today’s inflationary pressures is crucial. As new behaviors emerge post-pandemic, retailers must prepare for the potential top-line impact of demand shifts. Rethink commercial positioning and review marketing and packaging strategies, including the potential use of nonuniform and, in some cases, nonprice mechanisms.

    4. Ensure price competitiveness on the right items

    The Key-Value Item (KVIs) list should be reviewed again, considering changing shopper needs and habits during the pandemic, plus the supply and demand shock that the industry is currently experiencing. Price-sensitive and vulnerable shoppers are finding this inflationary period particularly tough, so brands might require an even deeper investment in KVI pricing. Reinvest base prices on essential products to drive volume for your best price-sensitive (PS) customers. Compete only where you need to be without overspending. Online channels should continue to reflect in-store prices and diverge during this time. Pricing Optimisation software enables best practices to simultaneously manage a high number of price increase requests.

    5. Revisit promotions to conserve costs and preserve stock availability

    Increasing the number of promoted products is a reflexive response to inflation, but it’s not the right response for building sustainable sales or longer-term loyalty. Inflationary times offer an excellent opportunity to reset promotional strategies to save money and margin. Retailers can increase sales and seize opportunities with a promotional pricing strategy. Increased promotional activity has a knock-on effect vs pricing position in high-low strategies and erodes overall value perception, creating a vicious circle of more promotions equals poorer value.

    Conclusion

    Today’s economic climate and associated pricing pressures are challenging for retailers and customers. Some companies have responded by announcing an increase in prices across product categories. Companies can manage pricing margins responsibly and profitably during inflation. Determining how and where new opportunities exist can help companies control inflation, drive growth, and remain profitable.

    Need help to arrive at the right pricing & discounting strategies to counter inflation? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how we can help!  

  • Share of Keyword Search Cinco de Mayo 2022

    Share of Keyword Search Cinco de Mayo 2022

    As inflation continues to hike costs for consumers and supply chains challenge them to maintain loyalty, there is still an active audience willing to pay the ultimate price for the convenience of food and alcohol delivery. That being said, we analyzed 8 popular Retail and Delivery Intermediary websites and 11 popular ‘Cinco de Mayo’ keywords to see which Brands are predicted to win the battle of Digital Shelf Share of Search this holiday.

    2022 Cinco de Mayo Share of Search Insights - Top Brands for 'Cinco de Mayo'
    2022 Cinco de Mayo Share of Search Insights – Top Brands for ‘Cinco de Mayo’

    Opportunities for Food & Bev on Cinco de Mayo

    While most of our analysis focused on popular Cinco de Mayo food and beverage products, none of these brands populated on either Target (pictured on left below) or Walmart (pictured on right below) page 1 search results for the term ‘Cinco de Mayo’. Keyword search results for this term are dominated primarily by décor brands as indicated below.

    Brands Achieving Top Share of Search for Food and Beverage Categories on Cinco de Mayo 2022
    Brands Achieving Top Share of Search for Food and Beverage Categories on Cinco de Mayo 2022

    Share of Keyword Search Results – Alcohol Category

    Three of the most popular alcohol types sought out during Cinco de Mayo are ‘Mexican Beer’, ‘Mezcal’, and ‘Tequila’. Below are the brands dominating Share of Keyword Search results on each of the major retail websites we researched.

    AmazonFresh, Meijer, Kroger, and Sam's Club Share of Search - Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
    AmazonFresh, Meijer, Kroger, and Sam’s Club Share of Search – Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

    We also reviewed the same keyword performance across popular delivery intermediaries to see how Share of Keyword Search altered for ‘Mexican Beer’, ‘Mezcal’, and ‘Tequila’. The results are below for TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly and GoPuff:

    TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly, and GoPuff of Search - Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
    TotalWine, Instacart, Drizly, and GoPuff of Search – Beer, Mezcal, and Tequila Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

    The keyword ‘Agave’ is also a popular search term within the alcohol category during the time leading up to Cinco de Mayo. We reviewed keyword search performance at various zip codes to see how price points that populated on page 1 search results varied given the change in median income. Below are the results:

    Share of Search for Alcohol by Price Point and Zip Code on AmazonFresh
    Share of Search for Alcohol by Price Point and Zip Code on AmazonFresh

    Share of Keyword Search Results – Grocery Categories

    We also reviewed some of the most popular grocery items purchased during Cinco de Mayo by Keyword Share of Search results to see which brands are primed to win the Digital Shelf this year. Below are the results for Target.com and Walmart.com.

    Walmart and Target Share of Search - Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
    Walmart and Target Share of Search – Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

    Below are the results for the same popular grocery items and alcohol keywords related to Cinco de Mayo and the page 1 results seen for Brand Share of Search on Safeway.com.

    Safeway Share of Search - Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022
    Safeway Share of Search – Food and Beverage Keywords on Cinco de Mayo 2022

    Access to these types of real-time digital marketplace insights can enable retailers and brands to make strategic decisions and help drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis, and let us know what other holiday insights you’d be interested in seeing this year. Happy Cinco de Mayo!

  • 11 Reasons why your eCommerce Business is failing

    11 Reasons why your eCommerce Business is failing

    No matter where your eCommerce business sells, there are some fundamentals that brands have to get right to achieve sales targets. Brands need to find the right product/market fit, nail their lead acquisition strategy, and design a qualified sales funnel to turn prospects into leads and eventually returning customers. They will also have to analyze their customer’s buying journey and get insights into competitors’ strategies to understand what works for their business.

    If your eCommerce business is struggling, read this blog to learn about steps you can take to increase sales and keep your business afloat. 

    1. Lack of social proof

    Customers often check for reviews or testimonials before making a purchase. Our decisions are consciously or unconsciously influenced by the opinions, choices, and actions of people around us. Social proof helps brands build customer trust, adds credibility to their business, improves brand presence, and validates customers’ buying decisions. 92% of consumers are more likely to trust user-generated content (UGC) and non-paid recommendations than any other type of advertising. Additionally, brands should also find ways to combat negative reviews since bad reviews can sometimes be extremely damaging. 

    Understanding these reviews or the impact of your brand’s social proof is critical. At DataWeave, we help brands analyze online reviews to understand customer sentiment and adapt to feedback to enhance their experience with your brand. 

    2. Slow site speed

    Site speed of the home page and checkout page on your D2C website can be a roadblock. Slow sections on your site like My Accounts, checkout, and cart are often overlooked when it comes to tracking site speed. Brands should run their checkout process at least once a month to ensure it’s fast, smooth, and bug-free. You can optimize images, strip unused scripts, implement HTTP/2, etc., to improve site speed and performance. 

    3. Poor customer service

    69% of US consumers say customer service is very important when it comes to their loyalty to a brand. Guaranteeing a return customer is important to maintaining customer loyalty. While the focus is on the first purchase for new customers, your brand’s customer service will determine if first-time customers become repeat buyers. Loyal customers are known to spend 67% more on a brand product than new customers, even if they make up only 20% of your audience. 

    Types of customer service
    Types of customer service

    4. Failure to send traffic to popular products

    Be it your own D2C website, or when selling on a marketplace, you should be able to drive traffic to your best-selling products. One of the best ways for sending traffic to popular products on your website is to run paid ad campaigns and reach new audiences with influencer marketing on social media. Brands can also attract customers with organic media such as writing blogs and producing podcasts. 

    If you’re looking at driving traffic to key products on Amazon & other such marketplaces, sponsored ads are the way to go! Sponsored ads help your best-selling products more discoverable & helps shoppers find your brand with ease. 

    5. Inadequate pricing

    Finding the right pricing strategy for your eCommerce business is crucial for optimizing sales and increasing revenue. The first step is to perform a competitor and historical data analysis to get a general idea of the market and then develop a pricing strategy that is the right fit for your products. Brands also have to ensure that they have dynamic pricing that can adjust according to supply and demand. 

    Our Digital Shelf solution at DataWeave helps brands track pricing for products across different pack sizes & variants across multiple online retailers and marketplaces helping them stay competitive in the market. 

    Optimize the right pricing strategy
    Optimize the right pricing strategy

    6. Not targeting the right audience

    One of the biggest mistakes that eCommerce businesses can make is targeting the wrong audience. It’s crucial for brands to define that target audience and then tailor products and marketing toward them. To increase sales as an eCommerce business, brands have to understand their audience, their interests, and how to appeal to their interest. Start by creating ideal buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. Also, segmenting audiences and targeting various groups based on buyer personas for ad campaigns will lead to better sales and revenue. 

    Targeting the right audience
    Targeting the right audience

    7. Poor product descriptions

    One of the major and common mistakes by eCommerce brands is using irrelevant product descriptions that are not optimized for the product. Customers don’t add products to their cart if they have difficulty finding sufficient information relevant to the product. Brands should write attention-grabbing descriptions optimized for SEO that are informative for the users. Here are some tips to optimize content to drive more eCommerce sales.

    At DataWeave, our AI-Powered solution helps brands optimize content and visuals across product pages to improve discoverability. 

    8. Not having multiple revenue streams

    Due to COVID-19, many businesses have had to modify or temporarily shut down their daily operations. However, finding new revenue streams can be a great way for eCommerce businesses to make up for the lost income and keep the company afloat. The best solution is to diversify your product offerings by offering commonly purchased products in bundles. 

    9. Low-quality visuals

    Businesses fail to hit their sales targets because of low-quality visuals in product descriptions. High-quality and custom images can improve conversion rates from both marketplaces and image-based channels like social media. Social media users are attracted to exciting, high-quality content that conveys a desirable lifestyle. Brands should use high-resolution, attractive pictures of their products. Brands can also utilize UGC and influencers to help build up their content libraries.

    Low-quality visuals
    Low-quality visuals

    10. Wrong Assortment. Poor Availability

    When your target audience lands on your eCommerce store and cannot find what they’re looking for, it leads to a poor shopping experience, but more importantly a lost sale for your brand! While you cannot have endless inventory, it’s essential to optimize your assortment & product availability to decrease the chances of your customer walking away. Assortment & availability optimization begins with analyzing current and historical inventory trends. If done manually, assortment can be a time-consuming task. A healthy assortment can increase retail sales by creating a positive shopping experience for your customers and encouraging them to return to your store again.

    11. Bad eCommerce UX

    Offering a sub-standard user experience is a common reason why eCommerce businesses find it difficult to increase sales. According to a study, the conversions can fall by up to 7% for every one-second delay in page load time. Businesses can use a countdown clock on their landing page and exit pop-ups to improve conversations. Your landing page and product descriptions should provide information that helps your users make a better and more informed decision. 

    Conclusion

    If your eCommerce’s business sales are tanking, improving site speed, customer service, social proof, and product descriptions are some of the levers you can pull to remedy the situation. Brands should also work on improving online reviews & ratings, availability, assortment, visuals, and website UX to improve customer experience. These steps not only increase loyalty but also improve customer retention. 

    Need help tracking online pricing for your eCommerce business? Or decoding customer sentiment from reviews they’ve left for your products? Or do you need insights into your product assortment and availability? Sign up for a demo with our team to know how DataWeave can help!  

  • eCommerce Performance Analytics for CPG Private Label

    eCommerce Performance Analytics for CPG Private Label

    The combination of economic uncertainty, inflation, and perceived affordability has increased consumer’s willingness to buy and try more private label products, challenging National brands to differentiate their eCommerce strategies, especially those related to price positioning, in other ways.

    Our previously released report, Inflation Accelerates Private Label Share and Penetration, confirmed 8 out of 10 brands with the highest SKU count carried across all grocery retailer websites to be private label, signaling the strength of their digital Share of Voice. Given the growing shift in consumer preference toward private label brands, we are providing access to the latest trends seen from September 2021 through March 2022. Below you will find a summary of what the data revealed about the growing presence of private label brands on the Digital Shelf.

    Private Label Account and Category Penetration

    We analyzed private label penetration at an account level to understand which private label brands have the greatest presence on retailer digital shelves, and to see which retailers may be leaving product assortment opportunities on the table.

    Private Label Penetration Across Retail Grocer Websites

    As a retailer, it is important to understand how your private label penetration stacks up against the industry average at a category level, especially given the performance tracked for retailers included within our analysis and the vast number of SKUs they offer online (over 20,000).

    Private Label Penetration by Category Across Retail Grocer Websites

    The Private Label and National Brand Price Gap Widens

    Private label brands tried out of necessity mid-pandemic increased in popularity as grocery prices continued to rise, providing an opportunity for retailers to increase brand affinity and loyalty for their online shoppers. Retailers alike were able to keep affordability at the forefront of their strategies and maintain a price gap of 23% or more, despite inflationary pressures to increase prices.

    Private Label / National Brand Price Gap by Retailer

    Looking at the results at a category level, we can see that Meat is the only category found within our analysis where private label brands are priced higher than National brands at an average of 8% greater. The Alcohol & Beverages category tends to always see the greatest price gap between private label and National brands given the price variances by unit (ranging from under $10 to over $100), in this case averaging a 148% price gap.

    Private Label & National Brand Price Gap by Category

    Private Label Total Basket Value Comparison Across Retailers

    While SKU-level pricing is extremely important to product strategy, for a retailer, it is equally as important to be as mindful of the total basket value even more so now as consumers further their private label loyalty across various categories. A few SKU-level missteps in pricing decisions can exacerbate cart abandonment and negatively impact shopper loyalty in a world where prices can be compared instantly in the palm of your hand.

    Based on our analysis, Walmart and H-E-B private label products offered the lowest priced total basket of goods at $42.90 and $45.06 respectively, whereas AmazonFresh and Safeway offered the highest total at $73.19 and $69.52 respectively.

    Private Label Item Level Price Comparison by Retailer

    Inflation-driven Price Changes are on the Rise with Room to Grow

    Based on the 20,000+ SKUs analyzed, we saw a continual price increase every month since September 2021 when comparing future monthly prices to those we tracked in September. The greatest price increase happened in March 2022 at 12.5% on average, however, there are still 48% of SKUs that have yet to see a price increase even as inflationary pressures rise.

    When viewing the split between National and private label brand price increases in March 2022 versus September 2021, we saw National brands increased prices on average by 13% where private label brand prices only increased an average of 7%.

    Private Label & National Brand Price Change
    Private Label & National Brand Price Change (%)

    Price decreases are still occurring across all categories, despite inflation, but to varying degrees ranging from 5% for Deli items to 17% for Dairy & Eggs. Within the Dairy & Eggs and Pantry categories, private label brands reduced prices for an additional 10% of total SKUs compared to National brands.

    The greatest category of opportunity for price increases within private label were found within Beauty & Personal Care with 67% of private label products yet to see a price change since September 2021.

    Price Change (%) by Category and Brand Type

    Private Label Price Change Correlation to Product Availability

    The category with the greatest magnitude of price increase seen within private label brands occurred within Baby at 16.3% followed by Home at 14.3% on average. Private label products within Home and Baby categories were also showing the lowest availability rates, 75.9% and 79.5% respectively, indicating a high demand for these items even as prices increased.

    The private label categories with the smallest price increase on average were Dairy & Eggs at 2.4% and Other Foods and Pantry at 3.4% and 3.6%, respectively.

    Private Label Price Change Magnitude & Availability
    Private Label Price Change Magnitude & Availability

    While in many accounts both private label and National brands struggled with stock availability in March 2022, National brand availability is much lower (around 10% on average) than private label availability.

    H-E-B had the lowest overall product availability at 76% across both private label and National brands on average. Only Walmart had lower availability for Private Label at 75% compared to 93% for National brands, but they also had the greatest price gap between private label and National brands.

    Private Label & National Brand Product Stock Availability

    The Future of eCommerce Growth for Private Label

    Our greatest learning from this analysis is that it’s time for retailers to start thinking and planning more like the National brands they carry when it comes to positioning their private label brands for success. Successful retailers are taking this time to reset their private-label strategies and transfer short-term switching behavior into long-term customer loyalty.

    Retailers playing catch up have the opportunity to address some of the gaps highlighted throughout this analysis, for example, relative to pricing and assortment changes. Below are some of the highlighted opportunities:

    • Though inflation is driving price hikes, more than 50% of products analyzed have yet to see a price increase indicating an opportunity to protect margin
    • Narrowing the price gap between a store’s brand and National brands should not be the only focus as competitive private label brands are becoming a greater threat at a category and basket level
    • Modifying and expanding assortments as demand increases for private label can improve customer retention and loyalty, especially for cross-shopping consumers

    According to The Food Industry Association (FMI), only 20% of food retailers currently promote private brands on their homepages, and only 48% include detailed product descriptions indicating even more opportunities left on the table for retailers to optimize private label digital performance.

    Many leading retailers are leveraging real-time digital marketplace insights and eCommerce analytics solutions like ours to further their online brand presence and optimize sales performance. This report highlights only a small sample of the types of near real-time insights we provide our clients to effectively build competing strategies, make smarter pricing and merchandising decisions, and accomplish eCommerce growth goals. Be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis.

    For access to a previously recorded webinar presented in partnership with the Private Label Manufacturers Association and conducted by DataWeave’s President and COO, Krish Thyagarajan, click here.

  • How Restaurants can use QSR Intelligence to Drive Sales

    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.

    QSR availability across 4 Food Delivery apps
    Availability across 4 QSR Food Delivery apps
    Availability trend during peak hours - Lunch & Dinner
    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 Time Analysis
    Delivery Fee 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
    Ad spends by identifying carousels with the highest visibility
    Track QSRs performance across Carousels across multiple zip codes
    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.

  • Valentine’s Day eCommerce Insights

    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.         

  • Quick Commerce in 2022: An Era of Hyperlocal Delivery

    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
    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 delivery service
    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

    q 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

    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

    same day delivery
    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

    quick delivery
    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
    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. 

  • 2021 Cost-Push Inflationary Trends Ran Rampant, Impacting Holiday Discounts

    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.

    Inventory Availability 2021 Holidays
    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.

    2021 MoM Retail Inflation Tracker
    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.

    2021 Black Friday MSRP Increases
    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.

    Black Friday 2021 vs. 2020 SKU-level Price Changes
    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.

    Pre-Black Friday 2021 and 2020 SKUs on Discount and Magnitude
    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.

    2021 Black Friday Furniture Category Price Decreases
    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.

    Black Friday 2021 and 2020 SKUs on Discount and Magnitude
    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.

    SKUs with Price Increases Black Friday 2021 and 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.

    2021 YoY Price Changes on Black Friday
    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.

    Magnitude of Black Friday 2021 Price Increases
    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.

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

    The Aftermath Post-2021 Cyber Weekend

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

    SKUs with Price Decrease Post Cyber Weekend 2021
    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.         

  • How Brands Boost Sales & Satisfaction on Walmart.com

    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.

  • Top 7 AI tools for your eCommerce business

    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
    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

    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

    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

    Competitive Pricing

    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.

  • How Brands Can Outperform Rivals With Next-Gen Digital Shelf Analytics

    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.

  • 2021 Cyber Weekend Preliminary Insights

    2021 Cyber Weekend Preliminary Insights

    The exponential growth of eCommerce has forever changed holiday shopping as we know it. What was once led by the launch of Cyber Monday in 2005, has since expanded to ‘Cyber Five’ in 2018, now spans beyond an eight-week period, and is collectively the busiest digital shopping period of the year. Most retail websites have launched a ‘Thanksgiving Comes Early’ sales event for a mosaic of products, causing one to wonder how this ‘early start’ to holiday shopping will impact the traditional promotional cadence consumers have grown to expect to see launch closer to the holidays. Given today’s environmental challenges, threats of scarcity are also encouraging consumers to buy early, which could also impact traffic on the shopping days that have traditionally seen the highest sales volume from digital shoppers.

    In the current environment, the onus will be on consumers to keep a watch for their categories of interest and buy them as and when they appear on sale in their favorite store, because there is no guarantee of sustained availability. Of course, they might return and buy at a different store if a better deal comes up, but there’s a time cost for the dollars saved. More broadly, there has been enough noise made about deals and discounts to keep consumer interest and curiosity going.

    The early promotional start and heightened demand has influenced our team to get a jump start on our 2021 Black Friday analysis to look deeper at trends seen pre-Black Friday 2021 versus 2020. With this assessment, we can track how promotional prices and product availability rates may have changed throughout the event leading in to 2021 Cyber Five, and compare it to last year’s activity to understand how 2021 holiday sales may be impacted.

    We reviewed popular holiday categories like apparel, electronics, and toys (for kids and pets), to have a broad sense of notable trends seen consistently throughout various, applicable marketplaces. What we found is a consistent decline in product availability over the last six months and as compared to last year, alongside an increase in prices.

    We first analyzed availability changes for popular categories on Amazon, noted in the chart below, to understand how inventory may have changed throughout the year, and also compared to 2020. With the exception of batteries and solar power goods and books and maps, there appears to be consistency in greater product availability in 2021 versus 2020, but a slow decline in availability throughout 2021, leading into the holiday season.

    Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability in-stock percentage from July 2020 through September 2021 for a sample size of 1000+ products on Amazon.com

    When it came to our pricing analysis, we reviewed select categories on Amazon and Target.com, and found around fifty percent of products on both websites to have seen a price increase year-over-year, while only thirty-seven percent and sixteen percent of products saw a price decrease on Amazon and Target.com, respectively. We also see an increase in the manufacturer’s retail price (MRP) in 2021 versus 2020 for a very high proportion of products (forty-eight percent of products on Amazon and thirty-five percent of products on Target.com), but the discount percentages have remained the same.

    Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Intelligence: MRP and promotional pricing for 1000+ products on Amazon and Target.com were analyzed from November 13th – 15th, 2021 versus Pre-Black Friday November 24th & 25th 2020

    *Please reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to sub-category details available within the above analysis conducted on Amazon and Target.com.

    This indicates 2021 discounts may appear to be greater than or equivalent to 2020, but in reality, consumers will end up paying higher prices than they would have for the same items in 2020. The remainder of this article highlights our key findings found within each key category reviewed – Electronics, Apparel and Toys.

    Electronics Category Analysis

    The television category showcases a great example of how pricing fluctuations impact holiday promotional cadences. Based on our analysis, we found the average television price to have increased around seven percent from April to October 2021, as seen below and as noted within our analysis conducted with NerdWallet.

    Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Intelligence: The change in average price captured for televisions sold on Amazon from May 2021 through October 2021.

    In fact, on Amazon and Target.com, we see around eighty-four percent of the SKUs listed show both an MRP and promotional price increase in 2021 versus 2020 during pre-Black Friday times. One specific example found on Amazon is noted below for Samsung TV model QN65LS03TAFXZA, a 65 inch QLED TV that was priced at $1697 during this analysis at a fifteen percent discount from MRP, but was priced last year at $1497 without a discount from MRP. In essence, even though the TV offers a greater discount this year, it is actually more expensive than it was in 2020 at this same time of year.

    Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Intelligence: MRP and promotional pricing analysis on Amazon.com comparing prices from November 13th – 15th, 2021 versus Pre-Black Friday November 24th & 25th 2020

    Unlike TVs, the price of laptops has experienced a decrease over time based on our analysis conducted during the same timeframe, indicating these are a great buy for consumers this holiday season versus promotional offers seen in 2020.

    Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Intelligence: The month-over-month change in average price captured for televisions sold on Amazon from April 2021 through September 2021.

    Overall, our prediction is that within the electronics category, promotions during Cyber Five may be equivalent to last year’s offers, however, supply will be limited and the total spend versus last year will be greater to the consumer outside of Doorbuster deals offered on select models.

    Apparel Category Analysis

    The Luxury market is seeing a Roaring 20s-like feeling this season given the Covid-induced changes in work and lifestyle and higher disposable income. Therefore, our prediction is that prices for these goods are likely to remain flat, or offer very little discounts this season both due to supply constraints as well as higher demand. For example, our analysis on shoe pricing changes shows relative stability from April to October 2021.

    Source: DataWeave Commerce Intelligence – Pricing Intelligence: The change in average price captured for shoes sold on Amazon from May 2021 through October 2021.

    Given heightened demand and the Global shipping crisis, we anticipate luxury apparel categories to face out-of-stock challenges this holiday season, and therefore we also anticipate seeing less promotional activity for these items as well during Cyber Five 2021. To dive deeper into the severity of the impact, we looked at availability for clothing, accessories, and footwear categories from August 2020 until present to verify our thesis.

    Focusing only on clothing, accessories, and footwear, these categories followed the same downward trending pattern regarding product availability decreases this year with a decline from June (seventy-six percent versus eighty-six percent in May 2021) to September 2021 (the lowest rate seen at sixty-eight percent availability), followed by a partial recovery in October and November (achieving seventy-seven percent availability).

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability: 10k SKUs tracked across 11 retailers US websites (Farfetch, Brownsfashion, NetAPorter, EndClothing, 24s, Selfridges, Ssense, Harrods, Luisaviaroma, MyTheresa, MrPorter) tracked daily stock status in apparel categories; Availability is calculated as percent of instances when product is in stock against all instances tracked.

    Not all recoveries were the same however, and given this, we predict accessories to have the lowest availability rate and greatest risk of facing out of stocks heading into Cyber Five. From May through November 2021, accessories availability continued to decline significantly from month to month, beginning at eighty-three percent in May and ending at seventy-four percent in November. Given this continued decline and with Black Friday right around the corner, we don’t anticipate inventory levels to increase enough to meet the increased holiday demand.

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability: 10k SKUs tracked across 11 retailers US websites (Farfetch, Brownsfashion, NetAPorter, EndClothing, 24s, Selfridges, Ssense, Harrods, Luisaviaroma, MyTheresa, MrPorter) tracked daily stock status in apparel categories; Availability is calculated as percent of instances when product is in stock against all instances tracked.

    Toys & Games Category Analysis

    As noted by DigitalCommerce360, we also anticipate toys to be one of the greatest impacted categories this holiday season given the continued decline in overall availability for these items on Amazon.com, as one great example. Within our category analysis, we saw a steady decline in availability from March 2021 through June (eighty percent to sixty-one percent), followed by a period of stability from June through August (approximately sixty percent), followed by another decline from September through October, finally reaching the lowest availability of fifty-six percent (down twenty-four percent from March 2021).

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability – hundreds of Toys & Games SKUs tracked on Amazon.com on a weekly basis from March 2021-October 2021

    The biggest sub-category within the toys department on Amazon, Sports and Outdoor Play, followed the same trend as Toys and Games overall through June 2021, also reaching its lowest availability of fifty-six percent. Instead of continuing along that pattern, Sports and Outdoor Play started on a recovery path, ending at a relatively high availability level of sixty-seven percent in October, which is only five percent lower than its highest availability (seventy-two percent in March 2021). Games and Accessories, the second largest sub-category in Toys and Games, had a continuous decline starting with eighty-nine percent in March 2021, reaching its lowest availability of fifty-four percent in October.

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability – hundreds of Toys & Games SKUs tracked on Amazon.com on a weekly basis from March 2021-October 2021

    The sub-category Tricycles, Scooters and Wagons interestingly had its highest availability from July to September 2021 (around eighty percent), unlike other sub-categories which as a whole, had their lowest availability during the same timeframe. From September through October, there was a significant decline (fourteen percent), reaching its lowest availability of sixty-seven percent. The sub-category Babies & Toddlers started on a continuous decline from its highest availability of eighty percent in April to its lowest availability of fifty-six percent in October.

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability – hundreds of Toys & Games SKUs tracked on Amazon.com on a weekly basis from March 2021-October 2021

    *Please reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to sub-category details available within the above analysis on the Toys and Games category on Amazon.com.

    Pet Toys Category Analysis

    When it comes to in demand holiday toys, you can’t forget about the needs for gifts for our furry friends and family. We also tracked sub-categories such as dog, cat, and bird toys, following the same methodology as tracked within Toys and Games to track pet toy availability changes.

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability – hundreds of Pet Toys SKUs tracked on Amazon.com on a weekly basis from March 2021-October 2021

    Dog toys, the biggest sub-category out of the three pet toys analyzed, had high availability – ninety percent in March 2021, but started to decline reaching a low of sixty-five percent in October. There was a period of stability from April to August (averaging seventy-seven percent), followed by a significant decline of over thirteen percent in from September to October. Cat toys, the second largest sub-category, also had its highest availability in March (eighty-nine percent) followed by a steady decline to sixty-six percent in June, a recovery from July to August (achieving seventy-three percent), followed by another decline during September and October, reaching its lowest availability of sixty-three percent (down twenty-six percent from eighty-one percent in March). Interestingly, dog toys which has a product count eight times greater than cat toys, had higher availability than cat toys during each of the months considered during the analysis.

    Source: DataWeave’s Commerce Intelligence – Product Availability – hundreds of Pet Toys SKUs tracked on Amazon.com on a weekly basis from March 2021-October 2021

    In Conclusion

    If we consider discounts and availability to be a good indicator of sales for the 2021 holiday season, with the Global shipping crisis looming over this year’s event, we expect retailers to have trouble keeping their inventory well stocked, which might affect growth rates. That being said, while discounts may be muted and popular items may come on very limited sales given constraints, we believe digital sales on Black Friday will see the highest year-over-year growth to date, given a number of supporting factors: scarcity threats increasing demand and the reason to buy, and consumers waiting to see if holiday offers surpass those see in the early start promotions, followed by the sudden rush to buy on Black Friday so as not to risk a given product being out of stock beyond this time period.

    We also anticipate seeing a continued decline in product availability day-to-day as we progress throughout Cyber Five 2021. Given the analysis conducted on 2020 trends, (we tracked nearly a one percent decline in availability on Black Friday 2020 vs. Thanksgiving Day, followed by a two percent decline on Cyber Monday), our data indicates products went out-of-stock at a faster rate then also.

    Ultimately only the digital-savvy retailers and brands will thrive during these opportune times, while others will continue to be in catch-up mode. Access to real-time marketplace insights can enable a first-to-market strategy, while having access to historical patterns can also help react faster to commonly seen future market factors, such as another pandemic or Global shipping crisis. These types of insights also support day-to-day operations, enabling retailers and brands to accelerate eCommerce growth, determine systems to distinguish their online strategies, discover efficiencies and drive profitable growth in an intensifying competitive environment.

    Continue to follow us in the coming weeks to see the insights we track through Cyber Five 2021, and be sure to reach out to our Retail Analytics experts for access to more details regarding the above analysis.