The DataWeave Blog

Tag: brand analytics

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 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!
August 24, 2022
How Brands Can Outperform Rivals With Next-Gen Digital Shelf Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

Dashboard for Multiple Functions

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

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

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

Prioritized, Actionable Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scalable Insights – From Bird’s Eye to Granular Views

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competitive Benchmarking

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

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

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

Sales & Market Share Estimates Correlated with Digital Shelf KPIs

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

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

Take Your Digital Shelf Growth to the Next Level

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

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

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

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

November 30, 2021
This Mother’s Day, Dazzle Moms With These Beauty & Fashion Trends
Show moms extra love this year. With Mother’s Day coming up fast, savvy beauty and fashion brands will use this special occasion to inspire pampering and gift giving to fuel their e-commerce sales growth.

This year, beauty and fashion are poised to boom, as 40% of consumers plan to buy beauty products and 37% will buy new outfits for going out. ¹ According to eMarketer, apparel and accessories e-commerce sales will grow nearly 19% this year due to pent-up demand for clothing, while health and beauty sales will rise 16%. ²

“People will be happy to go out again …
there will be a fiesta in makeup and in fragrances.”

~L’Oréal CEO and Chairman Jean-Paul Agon

After beauty and apparel sales declined last year, brands now seize every opportunity to capitalize on the categories’ resurgence in 2021. To differentiate their goods, brands can use e-commerce marketing best practices to position their fashion and beauty items as spectacular gifts that moms will love.

Aligning with the latest trends can help brands boost online growth.

Hot trends dominating beauty and fashion

This Mother’s Day, shoppers can delight moms with beauty bestsellers like:
- Mask-friendly makeup: As we continue to wear masks over the short-term, cosmetics like false lashes, smudge-proof mascara and ultra-hypoallergenic eyeshadow will remain popular. ³
- Fragrances: Online fragrance sales rose 45% year-over-year in 2020. Clean and organic beauty categories grew 56% with fragrance brands growing the most. ⁴
- Purpose-led brands: Consumers crave companies that care. More online searches contain keywords like “ethical beauty” and “sustainable makeup” for products that help consumers look good and feel good. ⁵
Online fashion is in vogue

Before the pandemic, consumers bought less than one-third of their apparel or footwear online; last year, the proportion surged to an astounding 51%. In 2021, consumers will invest even more in their wardrobes, including trends like:
- Comfort: Athleisure will remain in demand as many consumers still prefer comfortable clothing when they work from home. ⁷
- Beloved staples: Classic pieces like jeans, dresses and simple yet elegant tops are making a comeback as consumers start to go out more. ⁸
- Retro ‘80s: Ladies are ready to party like it’s 1984. Bright and metallic colors and sequins for occasionwear (and even NFL linebacker-inspired shoulderpads) are recreating a fun, indulgent ’80s vibe. ⁹
Brands’ secret weapon for a competitive advantage

For successful Mother’s Day campaigns, more fashion and beauty brands will use digital shelf analytics for marketing decisions that maximize their ROI and e-commerce sales.

To ensure online shoppers discover Mother’s Day products with ease, brands are using Share of Search insights to measure their share of digital shelf. These DataWeave analytics tell brands which keywords perform best. Brands can also benchmark their search and navigation visibility against rivals’ rankings across e-commerce categories, websites and geographic regions.

Using Content Audit insights tells brands how their content is performing. They can discover and fill content gaps so their products show up more prominently. Optimizing content (like keywords, product page titles, descriptions, ads and sponsored space) and images to align with the retailers’ search algorithms ensures a consistent brand experience across all online channels. Improving content helps brands connect to consumers with marketing that resonates and inspires them to buy.
Brands also use

Pricing and Promotions insights to measure the effectiveness of their online promotions and secure sales. Brands can stay competitive by ensuring their pricing and promotions are in line with rivals’ offers, such as identifying first movers and rivals with the deepest discounts across retailers and SKUs. Brands can even determine how imitating rivals’ pricing and promotional moves could impact revenue and sales volume.

Help shoppers make Mom’s day

Since Mother’s Day is almost here, beauty and fashion brands can apply these data insights to connect consumers with a variety of products moms will love. Digital shelf analytics from DataWeave can help brands deliver timely campaigns, improve their return on digital marketing spend and make effective marketing decisions to drive e-commerce sales.

^{1 Howland, Daphne. Wells Fargo sees permanent behavior shifts from the pandemic. Retail Dive. March 29, 2021.
2 Droesch, Blake. US Ecommerce by Category 2021. eMarketer. April 27, 2021.
3 Wood, Dana. Is Makeup Dead? The Robin Report. April 18, 2021.
4 Larson, Kristin. Fragrance Sales Pick Up As Consumers Reengage With The Outside World. Forbes. April 27, 2021.
5 What Can Brands Learn About Sustainability From Green Beauty Consumers? Beauty Business Journal. June 15, 2020.
6 Howland, Daphne. Wells Fargo sees permanent behavior shifts from the pandemic. Retail Dive. March 29, 2021.
7 Ibid.
8 Bhattarai, Abha. Americans are starting to buy real clothes again. The Washington Post. March 18, 2021.
9 Warren, Liz. Loose Denim and Bold Occasionwear on Full Display for Fall 2021. Sourcing Journal. April 2, 2021.}
May 6, 2021
How Brands Boost Their E-Commerce Profitability

Brands that protect their bottom line will win online.

As global e-commerce smashes sales records, more brands are now taking control over their online presence (“digital shelf”) to enhance their performance and profit margins.

In the U.S., the increase in e-commerce penetration during the first half of 2020 was equivalent to that of the last decade.¹ Last year also marked the first time in history that all retail sales gains came from e-commerce.² E-commerce has lasting appeal, as two-thirds of consumers plan to continue to shop online after the pandemic.³

“Brands need to continue to look for ways to
mitigate the high costs of acquiring customers online.”⁴

To keep up as shopping migrates online, brands face bigger expenditures. In the second quarter of 2020, e-commerce costs grew much faster (up 60% year-over-year) than revenues (up 40%).⁵ Namely, brands face steep costs for customer acquisition and logistics, which erode their online profit margins.

The bottom line for brands is they must sell online – profitably – to stay competitive. They urgently need new ways to drive online sales and incur fewer costs. Let’s see why brand leaders are using data insights to optimize their e-commerce decisions and profitability.

Brands find new growth opportunities

Over the past year, e-commerce has gotten more crowded. Now brands seek proven ways to differentiate their offerings and consistently deliver an alluring online experience. That’s because a recent study found 42% of consumers cite less trust in online shopping due to poor experiences, such as inconsistent pricing and out-of-stock merchandise.⁶ In response, these e-commerce best practices can help brands improve the customer journey and top line sales.

To help consumers find their products online with ease, brands can use data insights for superior product discovery. Insights help brands know exactly which keywords shoppers search for to earn high visibility rankings among consumers’ online search results. Data analytics direct brands to the most relevant keywords, which they can use in marketing, including product descriptions, for effective online discovery.⁷

Brands also face increased pressure to keep up with rivals’ real-time pricing changes across retailers’ e-commerce sites, online marketplaces and social media. Insights help brands price competitively across channels by monitoring and promptly adapting to competitors’ online pricing moves. Brands can even use data to ensure merchants consistently respect pricing policies.

Data analytics also help brands measure their marketing effectiveness and popularity across e-commerce

websites, and how they compare to their rivals. Brands can improve how they promote their products by using targeted digital content that resonates. For instance, they can publish unique content on each channel tailored to the platform’s unique algorithm and use data to discover patterns among their top performing campaigns. Also, brands can determine when to use their own social media channels or pay for sponsored ads to drive more sales.

As we saw last March, in-stock merchandise is essential to maximize online sales. Data analytics help brands track their stock status to ensure products are available across all their digital channels for reliable service that sparks more sales.

Brands find new efficiencies

Cost effectiveness is also vital and these e-commerce best practices help brands boost their online efficiencies.

Brands use insights to pinpoint and keep sharing content that effectively resonates with and enages their target audience. They can use data insights to see where to allocate their marketing spend for online promotions and either revitalize or drop underperforming online promotions. Brands can also track whether their online promotions align with rivals’ promotions to stay competitive and agile.

Likewise, measuring a brand’s popularity through consumer reviews reveals which underperforming products to downplay to conserve marketing resources for the specific products and bundles that perform best in their categories. For instance, PepsiCo’s and Kraft Heinz’s new online shops offer only large items or bundles for basket sizes large enough to offset shipment costs.⁸

To reduce the high cost of product returns, brands can use data insights to prioritize bestselling products rather than items consumers are more likely to send back. Using clear, up-to-date content, including product descriptions with accurate dimensions, can also help online consumers know exactly what they’re buying to minimize returns.

How brands and consumers profit

When brands use insights to make better e-commerce decisions, they can compensate for ballooning expenses. Analytics help brands connect the dots among their online visibility, promotions, performance and reviews. These best practices can give brands an edge by uncovering how to be more aggressive with revenue-earning and cost-cutting opportunities. Brands find effective ways to acquire more online customers to improve their top line and offset e-commerce expenses with new efficiencies. Data-driven digital marketing decisions help brands improve their e-commerce effectiveness to stay profitable and competitive.

Meanwhile, consumers also win by having an inviting, smooth and reliable online shopping experience. They find the products they want with greater ease, and feel confident enough to buy based on information like a brand’s pricing, promotions and product availability.

^{1 Arora, Arun, Hamza Khan. Sajal Kohli and Caroline Tufft. DTC e-commerce: How consumer brands can get it right. McKinsey & Company. November 30, 2020.
2 Ali, Fareeha. US ecommerce grows 44.0% in 2020. Digital Commerce 360. January 29, 2021.
3 Arora, Arun, Hamza Khan. Sajal Kohli and Caroline Tufft. DTC e-commerce: How consumer brands can get it right. McKinsey & Company. November 30, 2020.
4 Jansen, Caroline, Cara Salpini and Maria Monteros. 8 DTC trends to watch in 2021. Retail Dive. February 3, 2021.
5 Haber, John. Logistics Costs Challenge E-Commerce Profit Margins. Parcel Industry. October 9, 2020.
6 O’Carroll, Derek. 5 Hidden Trends That Will Shape E-Commerce in 2021. Total Retail. February 4, 2020.
7 Leong, Brandon. COVID-19 strategy: Use the power of your digital sell sheet. Digital Commerce 360. August 23, 2020.
8 Arora, Arun, Hamza Khan. Sajal Kohli and Caroline Tufft. DTC e-commerce: How consumer brands can get it right. McKinsey & Company. November 30, 2020.}

February 17, 2021
How E-commerce Brands Build Customer Trust | DataWeave
Brands that build consumer trust will win big as online shopping explodes this year. As the COVID-19 pandemic propels more shoppers online, an astounding $5 trillion (30%) of annual global retail sales is up for grabs as the market shifts to e-commerce, according to Boston Consulting Group.^[1]

Notably, e-commerce has changed brands’ retail processes. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, the digital shelf is where brands manage their company and products among online shoppers, influencing what they browse and buy.

Rather than stocking merchandise through retailers’ physical stores, brands can now manage their online products by working with logistics experts like Fulfillment by Amazon. Instead of merchandising in stores with planograms and endcap displays, brands promote their digital assortment with targeted product content that resonates and keeps them coming back.^[2] The evolution of retail can help brands save time and effort, and increase their agility and effectiveness.

Gaining high visibility on the digital shelf can help brands boost their reach, brand awareness and sales. That’s why more brands are now investing in proven e-commerce best practices to increase consumer confidence by offering reliable products, relevant marketing and a smooth online experience. Now that the 2020 holiday sales season is underway, it’s the perfect time to see how leading brands compete in the increasingly crowded online market by demonstrating credibility and consistency.

Market fragmentation increases brand complexity

Selling across multiple online touchpoints means brands have more e-commerce websites and digital shelves to monitor to ensure compliance with brand guidelines to ensuring a consistent customer experience. To engage online shoppers, brands’ marketing strategies must now diligently manage their digital shelf across diverse online shopping arenas, including:
- Direct-to-consumer (DTC) sites: More brand manufacturers are shortening the supply chain by bypassing retailers and selling directly to consumers, including sales through their own e-commerce websites.eMarketer predicts that U.S. DTC e-commerce sales will grow by 24% to reach nearly $18 billion in 2020.^[3]
- Retailers’ e-commerce sites: Brands are also migrating online because the retailers who sell their merchandise moved online this yearto adapt to the pandemic and survive shuttered storefronts. As of April 21, e-commerce grew 129% year-over-yearin U.S. and Canadian orders and U.S. e-commerce sales are on track to hit nearly $710 billion this year.^[4] More than ever, sharing timely, accurate product information with retail partners is essential for success.
- Online marketplaces: A growing number of brands are investing in digital advertising and content to stand out on popular, high-traffic online marketplaces. Global e-commerce leaders Amazon, eBay and China’s Alibaba and JD, are mostly search-based sites, as users know what they want and search for it, which makes product description pages and ads important marketing tools. Conversely, China’s Pinduoduo platform involves group-buying and interactive games to boost brand awareness and sales by entertaining online consumers and inspiring flattering word-of-mouth.^[5] Among online marketplaces, digital content fuels brand discovery and sales.
- Last-mile delivery channels: Brands can also sell in collaboration with their last-mile partners. Last-mile experts like Peapod, Instacart, Uber and Shipt offer online advertising opportunities for brands to reach new audiences. For instance, Instacart launched a self-serve advertising platform that lets brands promote their products in search results. Brands can choose the products to promote, set a budget and pay when users engage with those products.^{^[6]}
- Social media: To reach and influence consumers where they already spend their time, more brands are investing in social media promotions and even embracing social commerce innovation. Social media matters to brands’ marketing effectiveness, as 52% of online brand discovery happens on social feeds.^{^[7]} Also, 92% of Instagram users say they’ve followed a brand, visited their website or made a purchase after seeing a product on Instagram.^{^[8]}
Brand promotions have evolved beyond Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns. Now promotions include digital content and ads across all of these digital touchpoints, which increases the scope of brand marketing efforts to reach online consumers.

How brands transform digital shelf complexity into clarity

To earn online shoppers’ trust across e-commerce arenas, more leading companies are turning to a common solution: data.

Too often, online shoppers abandon their cart due to concerns that they will unwittingly buy inauthentic products from fraudulent sellers. To protect their brands, manufacturers use data insights to pinpoint and prevent unauthorized sellers, counterfeit products and minimum advertised price (MAP) violations to demonstrate authenticity, accountability and price parity.

“Digital is the new normal”
~ Nike CEO John Donahoe^{^[9]}

To invigorate underperforming online promotions, brands rely on analytics to connect the dots among their online promotions, marketing performance and share of voice. Insights on advertising, keywords and consumer reviews help brands make better marketing decisions faster. These insights help brands stand out from competitors and build relationships with shoppers by ensuring their promotions resonate and drive more sales online.

To overcome low online traffic and sales, more brands apply data insights to improve their digital presence, visibility and sell-through rates. Brand analytics measure their popularity on e-commerce websites and track their stock status to improve accessibility, optimize digital shelf velocity and deliver a reliable customer experience that builds trust.

Watch over your brand: To stay competitive and earn consumer trust, more brands now rely on data insights to make fast, effective decisions that enhance their reputation and boost online sales.

As e-commerce explodes, more leading brands are collaborating with DataWeave for actionable brand analytics to protect their digital shelves, decrease complexity and boost consumer trust. These accurate, trusted insights help brands gain clarity to make smarter e-commerce decisions faster. Making data-driven brand management, promotional and digital marketing decisions helps brands prove their authenticity, improve marketing effectiveness and boost online sales. To see how DataWeave helps brands stand out, sell more and stay competitive, visit www.dataweave.com.

_^[1] Taylor, Lauren, Chris Biggs, Ben Eppler, Henry Fovargue and Gaby Barrios. How Retailers Can Capture $5 Trillion of Shifting Demand. Boston Consulting Group. August 31, 2020.

^[2] Gibbons, David. Ecommerce and content: How retailers have shifted strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital Commerce 360. August 18, 2020.

^[3] US Direct-to-Consumer Ecommerce Sales Will Rise to Nearly $18 Billion in 2020. eMarketer. April 1, 2020.

^[4] Wertz, Jia. 3 Emerging E-Commerce Growth Trends To Leverage In 2020. Forbes. August 1, 2020.

^[5] Lee, Emma. The incredible rise of Pinduoduo, China’s newest force in e-commerce. TechCrunch. July 26, 2018.

^[6] Goyal, Vivek. Browsing e-commerce: An untapped $250B+ opportunity. Medium. September 27, 2020.

^[7] Cooper, Paige. 43 Social Media Advertising Statistics that Matter to Marketers in 2020. Hootsuite. April 23, 2020.

^[8] Cooper, Paige. 43 Social Media Advertising Statistics that Matter to Marketers in 2020. Hootsuite. April 23, 2020.

^[9] Grill-Goodman, Jamie. ‘Digital is the New Normal,’ Nike CEO Says. RIS News. September 23, 2020.
November 11, 2020