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Tag: Digital Shelf

Bridging the Gap: How Digital Shelf Analytics Empowers Marketing Mix Modelling for Smarter Brand Decisions
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) has been a cornerstone of marketing analytics for decades: first as a service offered by large consultancies like Nielsen and IRI, and later as software solutions from NielsenIQ and Ekimetrics. By 2024, some 64% of senior marketing leaders had already adopted and used MMM solutions.

However, despite this widespread adoption, MMM faces significant limitations in our fast-moving digital marketplace. According to Gartner, opaque pricing models and siloed data integration remain substantial barriers to actionable insights from these tools. Most critically, traditional MMM often misses vital variables influencing consumer behavior, such as:
- Competitor price drops and promotions
- Product availability issues and stockouts
- Negative review trends and sentiment shifts
- Search ranking fluctuations
These blind spots must be addressed to unlock the full value of MMM investments and make truly informed marketing decisions.

The Critical Data Gap In Traditional MMM

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

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

MMM tools also typically overlook external market factors that can dramatically impact performance. In today’s retail landscape, where market conditions change rapidly, being blind to real-time competitive dynamics creates significant vulnerability. Key external factors that traditional MMMs fail to capture include:
- Competitor moves: Price changes, promotions, content updates
- Consumer sentiment: Review trends, ratings, social engagement
- Market dynamics: Stockouts, search ranking shifts, category growth
How Digital Shelf Analytics Completes The Picture

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

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

A comprehensive DSA solution like DataWeave provides granular, actionable data on critical external variables such as:
- Daily or weekly competitor pricing movements and promotional activity
- Product content standardization and optimization across retailers
- Review sentiment trends and potential reputation issues
- Share of search/shelf performance relative to competitors
When merged with established MMM capabilities, DSA creates a complete picture that fills the blind spots holding marketing teams back from maximizing ROI.

The DSA + MMM Advantage in Retail Media

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

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

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

How DSA Enhances Retail Media Optimization

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

Integrating digital shelf analytics into marketing mix models enables brands to:
- Allocate ad spend more intelligently using real-time competitive insights
- Identify timely campaign activation opportunities in response to market changes
- Monitor organic ranking trends to strategically time paid promotional activities
- Measure true campaign impact on digital shelf performance metrics
For example, when a competitor launches an aggressive price drop in your category, DSA provides visibility into this change. This intelligence can trigger recommended campaign adjustments, such as increased sponsored ad bidding in affected categories. Traditional MMM alone cannot deliver this level of responsive optimization.

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

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

Step 1: Map DSA Variables to MMM Inputs

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

This integration is crucial because traditional MMM models rely exclusively on historical data for forecasting. Adding real-time inputs delivers several benefits:
- More accurate elasticity curves reflecting current market conditions
- Better understanding of root causes behind demand shifts
- Prevention of misattributing sales changes to your marketing activities when external factors may be responsible
At DataWeave, our comprehensive coverage spans 500+ billion data points, 400,000 brands, and 1,500+ websites, ensuring brands never miss a competitor move and maintain complete visibility across the connected e-commerce landscape.

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

Next, integrate critical digital shelf metrics into your MMM framework:
- Review and sentiment scores and trends
- Content quality measurements
- Competitive positioning data
- Price gap analytics
- Search ranking performance
DataWeave employs a rigorous data accuracy validation process to ensure teams work with the cleanest, most reliable data possible. Our sophisticated processing pipeline removes anomalies and standardizes information across retailers, providing the consistent, high-integrity data foundation that robust marketing mix modeling demands.

Step 3: Validate and Iterate

A powerful DSA solution helps measure whether your marketing efforts achieved their intended impact on the digital shelf. Use your DSA platform to assess campaigns’ actual effect on key performance indicators:
- Do promo-driven sales lifts correlate with improved search rankings?
- How do content improvements impact conversion rates?
- What is the relationship between paid media and organic visibility?
DataWeave enables users to correlate metrics across the entire consumer journey, from awareness through post-purchase. Rather than focusing solely on short-term spikes, brands can measure lasting impacts on digital shelf health. This end-to-end visibility empowers teams to make increasingly informed decisions with each campaign cycle.

Executive Decision Support in Uncertain Times

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

By integrating DSA with MMM, companies gain early warning signals about market shifts, enabling smarter resource allocation during budget constraints. This integration helps organizations move from tactical execution to strategic direction by:
- Providing cross-channel impact analysis to understand the full marketing ecosystem
- Equipping category managers with tactical optimization tools that support broader strategic objectives
- Identifying competitive threats before they impact sales
- Forecasting potential ROI impacts across various spending scenarios
These capabilities help prevent wasted ad spend, missed opportunities, and lost sales.

Future-Proofing with DSA-Driven MMM

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

At DataWeave, we’ve seen our digital shelf analytics customers significantly improve their organic search rankings because of better-sponsored ad campaigns. What makes our approach to DSA-MMM integration uniquely powerful? Our platform is specifically designed to address the challenges of modern marketing mix modeling:
- Superior data refresh rates ensure timely insights when they matter most
- Unmatched marketplace coverage across more than 1,500 eCommerce sites globally
- Advanced data normalization that standardizes metrics across disparate categories and retailers
- API-first architecture enabling flexible data access and utilization
Conclusion – From Hindsight to Foresight

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

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

Ready to transform your marketing mix modeling from hindsight to foresight? Contact us today to discover how our Digital Shelf Analytics can enhance your existing MMM investments and drive measurable business results.
April 30, 2025
Mastering Retail Media Metrics: A Deep Dive into Share of Media
Brands are investing millions of dollars in digital retail media to make their products stand out amid unrelenting competition.

The ad spend on digital retail media worldwide was estimated at USD 114.4 billion in 2022, and the current projections indicate that it will grow to USD 176 billion by 2028. This amounts to a 54% increase in just six years.

The current surge in digital retail media advertising has led brands to find an effective way to monitor the efficacy of their ad spend. While Share of Search has long been used to measure brand visibility effectively, the metrics often missed tracking ads on retail sites.

DataWeave’s Share of Media solution helps solve this problem.

What is the Share of Media?

At DataWeave, Share of Media is a metric used to measure a brand’s presence in sponsored listings and banner ads on eCommerce platforms. It captures how often a brand appears in paid promotions compared to competitors, offering insights into advertising visibility and effectiveness.

These days most marketplaces seamlessly blend banner ads and sponsored listings into organic search results. Let’s take a closer look.

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising strategically places creative banners across websites—often at the top, bottom, or sides. Some eCommerce platforms also integrate these banners into product search listings.

What makes banner ads so special is the unique ability to allow marketers to use various types of media in a single ad, such as images, auto-play videos, and animations. Brands can also present curated collections of products. This flexibility provides marketers with creative opportunities to differentiate from competitors, capture customer interest, and encourage conversions.

Sponsored Listings

Sponsored listings are paid placements within search engine results or eCommerce platforms. They are usually marked as ‘sponsored’ or ‘ad,’ and they often appear at the top of search results and alongside organic product listing results.

Unlike organic search results, sponsored listings are prioritized based on the advertiser’s bid amount and relevance to users’ search queries.

Sponsored listings offer a strategic advantage by enabling businesses to connect directly with consumers who are actively searching for their products. This targeted approach ensures that marketing efforts are focused on individuals with high intent of making a purchase, maximizing the potential return on investment.

The Power of Banner Ads and Sponsored Listings

Banner ads and sponsored listings are great choices for boosting customer engagement and product sales. Here are four key advantages they offer:
- Enhanced Visibility: Digital retail media strategically places your brand where it will stand out—outshining competitors and grabbing the attention of high-purchase-intent consumers.
- Precision in Reach: These ads target specific keywords or categories, allowing for highly focused advertising based on demographics and search intent.
- Minimal Conversion Friction: Smooth transitions from ads to a brand’s native store or product listing on the marketplace keep conversion friction to a minimum.
- Brand Awareness and Recall: Consistent exposure to your brand through banner ads and sponsored product listings can leave lasting impressions and build brand recognition.
The bottom line is that it’s increasingly important for brands to monitor their Share of Media.

How to Monitor Your Brand’s Share of Media

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) platform extends beyond the traditional Share of Search metrics and provides robust support for monitoring the Share of Media.

DataWeave monitors the Share of Media in two ways: keywords and product categories. Users can view Share of Media insights through aggregated views, trend charts, and detailed tables. The views are designed to show brand visibility and the overall competitive landscape. For example, the screenshot below, taken from DataWeave’s dashboard, showcases the Share of Media across keywords, categories, and retailers.

Share of Media by Keyword

The Share of Media metric captures a brand’s advertising presence within search listings for a designated keyword. This provides a comprehensive view of a brand’s visibility and promotional efforts across retail platforms, helping brands validate and gauge the effectiveness of their ad spend.

For example, the screenshot below shows the trend of manufacturer’s Share of Media by keyword—‘baby food.’

Share of Media by Category

The Share of Media metric measures the presence of brands’ banner ads and sponsored listings across product categories on retail sites. This helps brands see which product categories require more investment, making it easier for them to spend their ad budget wisely.

The screenshot below illustrates manufacturers’ Share of Media by category across retailers.

Share of Media: An Essential Ecommerce Metric

As retail media continues to evolve, our analytics must follow—after all, knowledge is a competitive advantage. In the dynamic world of eCommerce, where competition is fierce and consumer attention is scarce, understanding your share of media is crucial.

Analyzing the Share of Media can give brands a competitive edge. By regularly monitoring and analyzing this metric, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your brand’s visibility, attract more customers, and ultimately drive sales growth. With a deeper understanding of their target audience and market dynamics, brands can refine promotional efforts to drive more effective results and optimize return on ad spend (ROAS).

For more information on how Digital Shelf Analytics can enhance your brand’s digital shelf presence, request a demo or contact us at contact@dataweave.com.
October 14, 2024
A Guide to Digital Shelf Metrics for Consumer Brands
Our world is increasingly going online. We work online, socialize online, and shop online every day. As a consumer brand, you need to ensure complete awareness of your brand’s online presence across eCommerce platforms, search engines, and media.

Only by deeply understanding the customer journey can you ensure that your product is reaching your ideal customers and maximizing your brand’s market share. You need data to intrinsically understand your customer journey and make changes where you’re lacking.

As the old adage goes: ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure.’

You need digital shelf metrics to measure and start benchmarking your buyer’s journey. To find several of these types of key performance indicators (KPIs), you need a digital shelf analytics solution. These platforms allow you to track various metrics along the path to purchase from the awareness stage to the post-purchase phase across the entire internet, helping to inform online and offline sales strategies.

Digital shelf analytics will help you gain insights into how your brand is doing versus the competition, which areas are lagging behind in historical performance, and what activities are driving sales. There are innumerable ways in which you can leverage these valuable insights. But how do you know which KPIs to start tracking with your digital shelf analytics solution?

Here, we’ve summarized the top metric types your peers report, track and base their decisions on.

With these KPIs in hand, consumer brands like yours can ensure that their products are consistently visible and appealing to their target audience across online marketplaces, ultimately enhancing conversion rates, market share, and profitability.

Read this guide to learn more about the top digital shelf metrics consumer brands are tracking and how to use them in your own strategy.

1. Share of Search

Share of Search (SoS) is a KPI in digital shelf analytics that measures how frequently a consumer brand’s products appear in search results on eCommerce platforms relative to the competition for specific keywords. A good digital shelf analytics solution will be able to show this metric across all the top marketplaces and retailers, such as Amazon and Walmart, but also more niche marketplaces for industry-specific selling.

This metric provides brands with a quantifiable way to measure how frequently their products are being “served up” to customers on online marketplaces. Essentially, it measures visibility and discoverability.

With Share of Search on DataWeave, you can slice and dice your data in innumerable ways. These are a few important views you can see:
- Aggregated SoS
- Organic and Sponsored SoS scores
- SoS scores across brands, retailers, keywords, cities
- Historical SoS score trends
Once you have benchmarked your SoS and category presence relative to your competition, you need to start interpreting the data. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help interpret your findings:
- Which of my key categories have the lowest SoS score?
- Which products feature low on search results because they are out of stock?
- Are my competitors’ products faring better due to sponsored searches?
- Is my SoS low due to poor content quality?
With insights in hand, you will know which actions to take to drive the biggest impact. For example, you could increase sponsored search results or improve organic reach by optimizing product pages.

Understanding your SoS is essential to maximizing the awareness phase of your customer journey. It will help you improve your brand visibility and increase product conversions through better search and category presence.

2. Share of Media

Share of Media (SoM) is a KPI that is just as impactful, if not more so, than the SoS metric. However, only a limited number of brands track it or use it to drive strategic action. This makes it a perfect opportunity for brands looking to get an edge on the competition.

But what is SoM in digital shelf analytics? Essentially, it’s a way of measuring retail media advertising activities like brand-sponsored banners, listings, videos, ads, and promotions that sometimes blend into search results. The main types of retail media advertising exist in two categories: banner advertising and sponsored listings.

Banner advertising involves strategically placing designed banners within websites and search listings. These banners raise brand awareness and drive traffic to online storefronts.

Sponsored listings are paid placements within search results on search engines or eCommerce platforms. They are prioritized based on the total bid amount and the product’s relevance. These paid listings are marked with “sponsored” or “ad.”

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

These listings serve to enhance your brand’s overall visibility, help you gain more precise reach, increase conversions, and drive better brand awareness and recall with your customers.

These efforts aren’t free, however, so measuring their effectiveness is critical not only to gain all the listed benefits but to also not waste your valuable marketing budget. The SoM KPI can help a consumer brand answer questions like:
- Where are the opportunities to increase paid ads?
- Which categories could benefit from a promotional boost or a strategic and streamlined allocation of ad spend?
- Which of my competitors have active banners and what is their share of media by keyword?
- How has my ad spend trended historically in comparison to my competitor?
DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics (DSA) is among the first providers to offer Share of Media KPI tracking and analysis. This is because it requires advanced, multi-modal AI to gather, view, and aggregate listings that encompass text, images, and video. With Share of Media tracking facilitated by DataWeave, consumer brands can track and analyze the effectiveness of their own promotional investments as well as those of their competitors.

3. Content Quality

The content quality metric measures how well your product content adheres to the retailer’s specific guidelines, which are in place to steer traffic and sales on their sites.

With the help of a DSA platform’s AI and ML capabilities, you can measure different elements of your product detail pages (PDPs), such as titles, descriptions, images, videos, and even customer reviews. You need to know which elements are missing, where they are missing, and which ones are negatively affecting sales so you can take corrective action.

Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%? The quality of your content can significantly impact this number. Ensuring that your content is high-quality will help influence product discoverability, customer engagement, and conversion rates. It will also help position you ahead of the competition. If your content quality is poor, you may find yourself with lower search rankings, a higher return rate, and more abandoned carts.

Here are some questions you can answer with the help of the content quality digital shelf metric:
- Is my product content at a retail site exactly what was syndicated?
- Are there any retailer initiated changes to my product content?
- Are my product content updates reflected on the retailer platforms?
- How well does my product content comply with the retailer guidelines?
- How do I optimize my product content for enhanced discoverability and conversion?
DataWeave’s content quality digital shelf analysis helps consumer brands ensure that product content on eCommerce platforms is high-quality and benchmark their product listings against the competition. It does this through a combination of AI-driven quality analysis and by presenting brands with actionable recommendations. These optimized suggestions are based on the top-performing products so you can focus your valuable time on the areas that will drive the biggest impact.

4. Pricing & Promotions

Your customers can easily shop around to find the best price for the product you’re selling. If your competitor is selling it cheaper, you’ll lose that sale.

That’s why it’s essential to understand the pricing and promotional landscape for each of your products and categories. This can be a challenge, especially if it’s a common product or comes in multiple pack sizes or variants.

It’s equally important to track pricing and promotions even at individual, physical stores. Doing so will allow you to remain competitive and responsive to local market dynamics by tailoring your pricing strategies based on regional competition. You don’t want your products to be overpriced (lost sales) or underpriced (lost profit) in specific markets.

Harmonizing insights when operating an omnichannel consumer brand is extremely difficult without the aid of a digital shelf analytics solution. Insights need to be aggregated between desktop sites, mobile sites, and mobile applications, as well as from physical storefronts.

Questions you can answer with the help of the pricing & promotions digital shelf metric include:
- How do my product prices and promotions compare to my competitors?
- How consistent is my product pricing across retail websites?
- How does my product pricing vary across regions, ZIPs, and stores?
- How do price changes influence my sales numbers?
- Are there regional differences in pricing and promotion effectiveness?
DataWeave’s digital shelf analytics platform stands out with its sophisticated location-aware capabilities, which enable the aggregation and analysis of localized pricing and promotions. The platform defines locations based on a range of identifiers, such as latitudes and longitudes, regions, states, ZIP codes, or specific store numbers.

The platform can also extract promotional information, such as credit card-based or volume-based promotions. You can see variances across retailers, split by price groups, brands, and competitors. DataWeave specializes in enabling brands to conduct in-depth analyses across a wide array of attributes so you can answer just about any pricing or promotional question you have.

5. Availability

The availability KPI in digital shelf analytics measures the in-stock and availability rates for a brand’s products across eCommerce and physical locations. Similar to the pricing and promotions metric, it relies heavily on location awareness, down to individual stores. Measuring both online availability and offline in-stock rates will help you understand the big picture and take more informed replenishment action.

When you start leveraging the availability KPI with the help of digital shelf analytics, you can improve inventory management, boost product discoverability, increase the frequency with which your online product listings convert, and generally drive more sales. This KPI is essential for ensuring your customers can always find and buy the products they want.

With the availability KPI, you can start answering questions like:
- What is my overall in-stock rate?
- Which of my products frequently go out of stock?
- How does product availability vary across different regions and stores?
- What is the impact of availability on my conversion rates?
- Are there any seasonal trends in product availability that I need to address?
- How quickly are we resolving stockout issues across different locations?
- What are my biggest opportunities to reduce stockouts?
DataWeave enables consumer brands to track their product availability metric through automated data collection from various eCommerce platforms in conjunction with physical in-stock rates. The platform provides granular, store-level insights so you can understand regional stock variations and optimize inventory distribution. By tracking historical availability data, you can identify seasonal patterns and predict future demand to pre-empt stockout issues. All of this can be configured with automatic notifications to alert you when there has been a stockout event or when a low stock threshold has been passed, facilitating timely replenishment.

6. Ratings & Reviews

The final KPI in our guide is the ratings & reviews digital shelf metric. Consumers rely heavily on genuine feedback from their peers and refer to star ratings, posted comments, and uploaded pictures to inform their buying decisions. This KPI analyzes the impact of customer feedback and reviews on your products’ performance across eCommerce platforms so you can measure overall brand perception and isolate areas of opportunity.

This metric does something other digital shelf metrics don’t; it can inform your product strategy. It can help you identify repeat complaints that your product team can address with the manufacturer or use for the design of future products.

Some questions you can answer with this powerful KPI include:
- What is the overall customer sentiment towards my products based on ratings and reviews?
- Which product features are frequently mentioned positively or negatively by customers?
- How do my product ratings and reviews compare to those of my competitors?
- Are there common issues or complaints that need to be addressed to improve customer satisfaction?
- Which products have the highest and lowest ratings, and why?
With DataWeave’s digital ratings and reviews feature, you can keep a pulse on customer sentiment to take short-term action as well as decide long-term strategy. You can leverage reviews to influence product perception, refine products, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Metrics

Each one of these metrics is interconnected and collectively influences a brand’s success. For instance, improving content quality and earning higher ratings can significantly enhance your product’s visibility in search results, thereby boosting the Share of Search digital shelf metric. By focusing on a comprehensive approach that integrates these metrics, brands can ensure their products are consistently visible, competitively priced, well-reviewed, and readily available.

DataWeave gives consumer brands the means to execute a holistic digital shelf strategy. From a single portal, track and improve digital shelf metrics like Share of Search, Share of Media, Pricing and promotions, Availability, and Ratings and Reviews.

Our solutions help audit and optimize the most critical KPIs that drive sales and market share for brands so you can stay competitive in a dynamic digital landscape and foster long-term customer satisfaction.

Ready to get started? Schedule a call with a specialist to see how it can work for your brand.
August 21, 2024
Why Localized, Store-Specific Pricing and Availability Insights is Critical for Consumer Brands
Brands are becoming increasingly proficient in monitoring and refining their presence on online marketplaces, utilizing Digital Shelf Analytics to gather and analyze data on their online performance. These tools offer invaluable insights into enhancing visibility, adjusting pricing strategies, and improving content quality on eCommerce sites.

Yet, as the retail landscape shifts towards a more integrated omnichannel approach, it’s crucial for brands, particularly those in CPG, to apply similar strategies to their offline channels. For brands that count physical stores among their primary sales channels, gaining localized insights is key to boosting in-store sales performance.

Collecting shelf data from offline channels presents more challenges than online. Traditional methods, such as physical store visits, often fall short in reliability, timeliness, scale, and level of coverage.

However, the world of eCommerce provides a solution. As part of the effort to facilitate options like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) for shoppers, major retailers make store-specific product details available online. Consumers often go online and select their nearest store to make purchases digitally before choosing a fulfillment option like picking up at the store or direct delivery. Aggregating this store-level information offers brands critical insights into pricing and inventory across a vast network of stores, enabling them to make informed decisions that improve pricing strategies and supply chain efficiency, thus minimizing stockouts in crucial markets.

Further, as consumers increasingly seek flexibility in how they receive their purchases—be it through in-store pickup, delivery, or shipping—brands need to adeptly monitor pricing and availability for these different fulfilment options. Such granular insight empowers brands to adapt swiftly and maintain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic retail environment.

Why does monitoring pricing and availability data across stores matter to brands?
- Hyperlocal Competitive Strategy: This allows brands to adjust their pricing strategies based on regional competition. By understanding the local market, brands can decide whether to position themselves as cost leaders or premium offerings. In particular, this is indispensable for Net Revenue Management (NRM) teams.
- Targeted Marketing Initiatives: Understanding regional price and availability enables brands to customize their marketing efforts for specific markets. By aligning their strategies with local demand trends and inventory levels, brands can more effectively engage their target audiences.
- Efficient Inventory Management: By keeping a close eye on store-level data, brands can better manage their stock, ensuring high-demand products are readily available while minimizing the risk of overstocking or running out of stock.
- Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Monitoring: While brands cannot directly control retail pricing, staying updated on pricing trends helps them adjust their MAP to reflect the competitive landscape, consumer expectations, cost considerations, and regional differences. A strategic approach to MAP management supports brand competitiveness and profitability in a fluctuating market.
DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solutions equip brands with the necessary data and insights to do all of the above.

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics is location-aware

DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics platform stands out with its sophisticated location-aware capabilities, enabling the aggregation and analysis of localized pricing, promotions, and availability data. Our platform defines locations using a range of identifiers, including latitudes and longitudes, ZIP codes, or specific stores, and can aggregate this data for particular states or regions.

The strength of the platform lies in its robust data collection and processing framework, which operates seamlessly across thousands of stores and regions. This system is designed to operate at configurable intervals—daily, weekly, or monthly—allowing brands to keep a vigilant eye on product availability, pricing strategies, and delivery timelines based on the selected fulfillment option.

Unlike many other providers, who may provide limited insights from a sample of stores, our solution delivers exhaustive analytics from every storefront. This comprehensive approach grants brands a strategic edge, facilitating efficient inventory tracking, precise pricing adjustments, and rapid responses to fluctuating market dynamics. It cultivates brand consistency and loyalty by enabling brands to adapt proactively to the changing landscape.

Aggregated store-level digital shelf insights via DataWeave

In the summarized view shown above, a brand can track how its various products are positioned across stores and retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Meijer, and others in the US.

Using DataWeave, brands can easily see important metrics like availability levels, prices, and other metrics across these stores gaining immediate visibility without having to physically audit them. the brand can track the same metrics for products across competitor brands and inform its own pricing, stock, and assortment decisions.

Store-level availability insights

We provide a comprehensive view of product availability, highlighting the distribution of out-of-stock (OOS) scenarios across various retailers and pinpointing the availability status throughout a brand’s network of stores. This capability enables swift identification of widespread availability issues, offering a bird’s-eye view of where shortages are most pronounced. By simply hovering over a specific location, detailed information about stock status and pricing for individual stores becomes accessible.

Such insights are crucial for brands to adapt their strategies, mitigate risks, and ensure they meet consumer needs despite the ever-changing retail ecosystem.

Store-level pricing insights

Retailers often adopt different pricing strategies to deal with margin pressure, local competition, and surplus stock. Grasping these pricing dynamics at a hyperlocal level enables brands to tailor their strategies effectively to maintain a competitive edge.

Our platform offers an in-depth look at how prices vary among retailers, across different stores, and throughout various regions. This analysis reveals the nuanced pricing tactics employed by retailers on a regional scale.

For example, brands might see that some retailers, like Kroger and Walmart in the chart below, maintain consistent pricing across their outlets, demonstrating a uniform pricing strategy. In contrast, others, such as Meijer and Shoprite, might adjust their prices to match local market conditions, indicating a more localized approach to pricing.

With DataWeave, brands can dive deeper into the pricing landscape of a specific retailer, examining a price map that provides detailed information on pricing at the store level upon hovering over a given location.

By presenting a historical analysis of average selling prices across different retailers, we equip brands with the insights needed to understand past pricing strategies and anticipate future trends, helping them to strategize more effectively in an ever-evolving market.

Digital Shelf Analytics that work for both eCommerce and brick-and-mortar store data

While established brands have made strides in gathering online pricing and availability data through Digital Shelf Analytics solutions, integrating comprehensive insights from both brick-and-mortar and eCommerce channels often remains a challenge.

DataWeave stands out for its capacity to collect data across diverse digital platforms, including desktop sites, mobile sites, and mobile applications. This capability ensures that omnichannel brands can have a holistic view of their pricing, promotional, and inventory strategies across all locations and digital landscapes.

Leveraging localized Digital Shelf Analytics to understand the intricacies of pricing and availability at the store level allows brands to fine-tune their approaches, swiftly adapt to local market shifts, and uphold a unified brand presence across the digital and offline spheres. This strategic agility places them in a favorable competitive position, enhancing customer satisfaction and trust, which are crucial for sustained success.

Know more about DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics here.

Schedule a call with a specialist to see how it can work for your brand.
April 3, 2024
Capturing and Analyzing Retail Mobile App Data for Digital Shelf Analytics: Are Brands Missing Out?
Consumer brands around the world increasingly recognize the vital role of tracking and optimizing their digital shelf KPIs, such as Content Quality, Share of Search, Availability, etc. These metrics play a crucial role in boosting eCommerce sales and securing a larger online market share. With the escalating requirements of brands, the sophistication of top Digital Shelf Analytics providers is also on the rise. Consequently, the adoption of digital shelf solutions has become an essential prerequisite for today’s leading brands.

As brands and vendors continue to delve further and deeper into the world of Digital Shelf Analytics, a significant and often overlooked aspect is the analysis of digital shelf data on mobile apps. The ability of solution providers to effectively track and analyze this mobile-specific data is crucial.

Why is this emphasis on mobile apps important?

Today, the battle for consumer attention unfolds not only on desktop web platforms but also within the palm of our hands – on mobile devices. As highlighted in a recent Insider Intelligence report, customers will buy more on mobile, exceeding 4 in 10 retail eCommerce dollars for the first time.

Moreover, thanks to the growth of delivery intermediaries like Instacart, DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc., shopping on mobile apps has received a tremendous organic boost. According to an eMarketer report, US grocery delivery intermediary sales are expected to reach $68.2 billion in 2025, from only $8.8 billion in 2019.

In essence, mobile is increasingly gaining share as the form factor of choice for consumers, especially in CPG. In fact, one of our customers, a leading multinational CPG company, revealed to us that it sees up to 70% of its online sales come through mobile apps. That’s a staggering number!

The surge in app usage reflects a fundamental change in consumer behavior, emphasizing the need for brands to adapt their digital shelf strategies accordingly.

Why Brands Need To Look at Apps and Desktop Data Differently

Conventionally, brands that leverage digital shelf analytics rely on data harnessed from desktop sites of online marketplaces. This is because capturing data reliably and accurately from mobile apps is inherently complex. Data aggregation systems designed to scrape data from web applications cannot easily be repurposed to capture data on mobile apps. It requires dedicated effort and exceptional tech prowess to pull off in a meaningful and consistent way.

In reality, it is extremely important for brands to track and optimize their mobile digital shelf. Several digital shelf metrics vary significantly between desktop sites and mobile apps. These differences are natural outcomes of differences in user behavior between the two form factors.

One of these metrics that has a huge impact on a brand’s performance on retail mobile apps is their search discoverability. Ecommerce teams are well aware of the adverse impact of the loss of even a few ranks on search results.

Anyone can easily test this. Searching something as simple as “running shoes” on the Amazon website and doing the same on its mobile app shows at least a few differences in product listings among the top 20-25 ranks. There are other variances too, such as the number of sponsored listings at the top, as well as the products being sponsored. These variations often result in significant differences in a brand’s Share of Search between desktop and mobile.

Share of Search is the share of a brand’s products among the top 20 ranked products in a category or subcategory, providing insight into a brand’s visibility on online marketplaces.

Picture a scenario in which a brand heavily depends on desktop digital shelf data, confidently assuming it holds a robust Share of Search based on reports from its Digital Shelf Analytics partner. However, unbeknownst to the team, the Share of Search on mobile is notably lower, causing a detrimental effect on sales.

To fully understand the scale of these differences, we decided to run a small experiment using our proprietary data analysis and aggregation platform. We restricted our analysis to just Amazon.com and Amazon’s mobile app. However, we did cover over 13,000 SKUs across several shopping categories to ensure the sample size is strong.

Below, we provide details of our key findings.

Share of Search on The Digital Shelf – App Versus Desktop

Our analysis focused on three popular consumer categories – Electronics, CPG, and Health & Beauty.

In the electronics category, brands like Apple, Motorola, and Samsung, known for their mobile phones, earbuds, headphones, and more, have a higher Share of Search on the Amazon mobile app compared to the desktop.

Meanwhile, Laptop brands like Dell, Acer, and Lenovo, as well as other leading brands like Google have a higher Share of Search on the desktop site compared to the app. This is the scenario that brands need to be careful about. When their Share of Search on mobile apps is lower, they might miss the chance to take corrective measures since they lack the necessary data from their provider.

In the CPG category, Ramen brand Samyang, with a lot of popularity on Tiktok and Instagram, shows a higher Share of Search on Amazon’s mobile app. Speciality brands like 365 By Whole Foods, pasta and Italian food brands La Moderna, Divinia, and Bauducco too have a significantly higher Share of Search on the app.

Cheese and dessert brands like Happy Belly, Atlanta Cheesecake Company, among others, have a lower Share of Search on the mobile app. Ramen brand Sapporo is also more easily discovered on Amazon’s desktop site. Here, we see a difference of more than 5% in the Share of Search of some brands, which is likely to have a huge impact on the brand’s mobile eCommerce sales levels and overall performance.

Lastly, in the Health & Beauty category, Shampoos and hair care brands like Olaplex, Dove, and Tresemme exhibited a higher Share of Search on the mobile app compared to the desktop.

On the other hand, body care brands like Neutrogena and Hawaiian Tropic, as well as Beardcare brand Viking Revolution displayed a higher Share of Search on Amazon’s desktop site.

Based on our data, it is clear that there are several examples of brands that do better in either one of Amazon’s desktop sites or mobile apps. In many cases, the difference is stark.

So What Must Brands Do?

Our findings emphasize the imperative for brands to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to digital shelf analytics. The striking variations in Share of Search between mobile apps and desktops conclusively demonstrate that relying solely on desktop data for digital shelf optimization is inadequate.

If brands see that they’re falling behind on the mobile digital shelf, there are a few things they can do to help boost their performance:
- If a brand’s Share of Search is lower on the mobile app, they can divert their retail spend to mobile in order to inorganically compensate for this difference. This way, any short-term impact due to lower discoverability is mitigated. This is also likely to result in optimized budget allocation and ROAS.
- Brands also need to ensure their content is optimized for the mobile form factor, with images that are easy to view on smaller screens, and tailored product titles that are shorter than on desktops, highlighting the most important product attributes from the consumer’s perspective. Not only will this help brands gain more clicks from mobile shoppers, but this will also gradually lead to a boost in their organic Share of Search on mobile.
- CPG brands, specifically, need to optimize their digital shelf for delivery intermediary apps (along with marketplaces). The grocery delivery ecosystem is booming with companies like DoorDash, Delivery Hero, Uber Eats, Swiggy, etc. leading the way. Using Digital Shelf Analytics to optimize performance on delivery apps is quite an involved process with a lot of bells and whistles to consider. Read our recently published whitepaper that specifically details how brands can successfully boost their visibility and conversions on delivery apps.
But first, brands need to identify and work with a Digital Shelf Analytics partner that is able to capture and analyze mobile app data, enabling tailored optimization approaches for all eCommerce platforms.

DataWeave leads the way here, providing the world’s most comprehensive and sophisticated digital shelf analytics solution, rising above all other providers to provide digital shelf insights for both web applications and mobile apps. Our data aggregation platform successfully navigates the intricacies of capturing public data accurately and reliably from mobile apps, thereby delivering a comprehensive cross-device view of digital shelf KPIs to our brand customers.

So reach out to us today to find out more about our digital shelf solutions for mobile apps!
January 19, 2024
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
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.

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

August 23, 2022
2021 Cost-Push Inflationary Trends Ran Rampant, Impacting Holiday Discounts

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

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

Scarcity Becomes a Reality

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

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

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

Greater Discounts, Higher Prices?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fewer, but Deeper Discounts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021 Black Friday Price Increases?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Aftermath Post-2021 Cyber Weekend

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

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

A Sign of Things to Come

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

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

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

January 4, 2022
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
Prioritizing Brand Protection Before the Holiday Rush

Counterfeits pose a dangerous threat to any retail brand. Since every single sale is a pivotal branding opportunity, especially for young, burgeoning eCommerce brands, an online marketplace flooded with counterfeits can be particularly dangerous. One in five customers will boycott a brand after mistakenly purchasing a counterfeit product, and that’s not the kind of ratio that any retailer –– from the smallest Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) site to the behemoths like Amazon –– can afford to ignore.

In the age of online reviews, it’s especially dangerous to have counterfeits floating around. Customers that have a bad experience with a counterfeit can take to the internet to disparage your brand without ever actually interacting with your company or trying your product. That’s why consistent and thorough content audits are paramount to ensuring your brand’s authentic products are highly discoverable, and brand protection and governance processes are in place to safeguard brand integrity across all applicable eCommerce websites.

The Holiday Counterfeit Boom

The holidays are a time when customers search for gifts for their friends and family, which means exploring brands outside of their usual fare. Many consumers will be exposed to your brand’s Digital Shelf for the first time over the holiday season, creating an opportunity for brand growth. But if you don’t have eCommerce brand protection initiatives in place, the holidays can be detrimental to brand positioning, customer trust, and your bottom line.

As consumers boost their online spending and web traffic increases over the holidays, so does the likelihood of them purchasing counterfeit goods online. eMarketer predicts that retail eCommerce sales will comprise almost 20 percent of total holiday retail sales this year. As such, there will also be a surge in counterfeit inventory. So, this is an ideal time to invest in a brand protection solution to help you stay ahead of unauthorized sellers entering the marketplace.

Brand Integrity Helps Suppliers Save

Implementing a solution to mitigate the risks of counterfeit products should be at the top of every retailer’s “To-Do” list this year. However, for many retailers, this means manually reviewing numerous websites and third-party marketplaces for violations. Not only is manually reviewing content, images, and seller authenticity a time-consuming process, but it also leaves a lot of room for human error – making it possible for counterfeits to slip through the cracks and into the hands of unsuspecting customers. Not to mention your time should be spent fulfilling orders and increasing customer satisfaction during the high-traffic holiday season, not distracted by monitoring counterfeits.

Fortunately, that’s not the only way to identify counterfeits and protect your brand online. An effective content auditing tool can help you monitor, detect, and determine systems to identify and act on identified violations, saving time and labor hours normally spent on manual auditing processes. Content audit software also often contains helpful features to help you run your business more strategically by monitoring online hygiene factors like product titles and description. It works across all online channels by highlighting content gaps, which can then be remedied to improve product visibility and conversions. Through online content optimization, you can save money (in unnecessary labor costs), improve your Share of Search, and increase sales and share, with a modest up-front investment.

Brand Value Protection Boosts Consumer Confidence

Brand image protection doesn’t just protect retailers, it also protects customers from unintentionally buying dangerous counterfeit goods. Counterfeiting has skyrocketed during the pandemic. The International Chamber of Commerce reports that, by 2022, counterfeit goods will be a $4.2 trillion industry, and global damage from counterfeit goods is projected to exceed $323 billion. Studies show one in four customers has unknowingly purchased a counterfeit item online.

As counterfeits increase in number, so does the risk of counterfeit consumption by unwitting consumers. Counterfeit goods are as dangerous as they are ubiquitous. Customs and Border Patrol has found ingredients such as cadmium, arsenic, lead, and cyanide inside of counterfeit cosmetics. Consumers are aware of these risks. So, as a retailer, you need to be able to reassure customers that they can trust the authenticity of the goods they are purchasing at your online store.

A counterfeit detection tool can help you identify fakes and image replicas across multiple online marketplaces, so you can get fake products delisted. Automated counterfeit solutions can increase customer satisfaction in their purchasing experience, since they know they’re getting an authentic product right off the bat. This type of online brand protection creates increased brand loyalty over time, as well as more positive first-time product interactions.

Making a Measurable Impact: A Counterfeit Detection Case Study

Classic Accessories is a leading manufacturer of high-quality furnishings and accessories. The company’s investment in a counterfeit detection tool paid off in spades for their organization. After noticing a surge in counterfeit versions of their goods being sold via online, global marketplaces, they decided they needed to change their manual counterfeit and image violation detection process to an automated one to proactively respond to concerned activity in a timely manner.

Their goal was to achieve streamlined, actionable insights across all retail websites to account for varied violation submission processes, and to reduce the timespan in which insights were generated, ultimately eliminating the need to conduct daily, manual audits. They partnered with DataWeave, who built out a fully customized program to automate Classic Accessories’ content inventory management process, and identified SKU-level violations by matching names and images in diverse online marketplaces.

During the first three months of onboarding, Classic Accessories was able to detect more than 25,000 violations, submitting notices to each marketplace, and even achieved a 100% removal rate across all Amazon sources. Additionally, they also achieved their goal of saving time (22 hours per week) in automation processes, translating to a $68,000 savings opportunity in labor costs.

Closing Thoughts

Prioritizing your online brand protection strategy is imperative to growing your online presence and achieving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Fortunately, there are options like DataWeave’s brand protection tool available to help curate your online content, provide consistency across online channels, and improve consumer confidence by addressing and removing counterfeit violations. Implementing the right solution can help find counterfeit products in real-time to keep your brand safe –– and your reputation intact –– throughout the 2021 holiday season. The right brand protection software will provide both Brand Protection and Content Audits, so your brand is optimized from every possible angle for truly competitive results.

October 29, 2021
4 Hacks to improve your online Product Visibility

With online shopping becoming increasingly important for brands, the concept of ‘product visibility’ within this ecosystem has emerged as the most noteworthy path to generate sales & win the Digital Shelf. Research shows that on Amazon, the first 3 products garner 64% of business generated. And post-pandemic, more and more people are now shopping online, which means your ‘digital product visibility’ becomes as critical as your in-store product visibility. What’s more, this digital shopper loves to start their search for products directly at leading marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and the likes. As per the Shopper-First Retail report released by Salesforce almost 87% of shoppers begin product searches online. So, this is the window that brands have and this is where they need to hold their customer’s attention. But the primary question here is how to appear high up on your customer’s search?

Imagine the pages of an e-commerce marketplace as Digital Shelves and correlate that with the offline space. Will the customer sieve through a rack-full of products to reach for your brand, lying at the back of the shelf? No, they won’t. If they have to buy a personal care item, they will choose the brand that is visible to them at the front of the rack. In a similar vein, when they search for a product online on popular marketplaces, they will quickly click “add to cart” for the ones that come up top in the search.

Algorithms of popular e-commerce marketplaces are usually well-kept secrets, but here are 4 hacks brands can consider to increase product visibility on their Digital Shelf.

1. Optimize what you say about your products

Work on the product listing content

To ensure that your products are visible, you will have to work on the product listing content judiciously. And it’s all about using the right keywords. Here, you will have to tighten the strength of your content to ensure that both your listing text and titles are accurate, and include natural language search keywords that consumers normally use when searching for products. Ignore, jargon or business-heavy words, and think what a real consumer may use to search for a smartwatch – for instance. ‘Bluetooth watch’ or ‘Smart Watch’ or ‘Camera Watch’ etc. The product title below has it all covered. So no matter which of the 3 keywords a customer is searching for, this watch will come up in their search results.

Listing Text and Title enables Product Visibility

This aside, the title should highlight as much as possible about the product and the description should be pointed and readily related to the search one can use to look for it. For instance, in the below image Puracy, has not only used the word shampoo in its title, which normally the consumers will use to search, but has given all the major highlights as a part of the title. The consumer at a glance would get the whole picture inclusive of the quality, fragrance, quantity and the dispenser type.

Product features mentioned in Title ensures greater Product Visibility

Search engines take consumer’s natural language preferences into consideration, so a bad or incomplete product description or title will never help customers see your brand easily on the marketplaces listing. Here’s a listing, which does not work at all.

Bad or incomplete product description is bad for Product Searchability

Let’s look at the above example closely. If the customer is a diehard fan of Calvin Klein and is searching for a Calvin Klein sweater, then this product will definitely show up in their search results, but what if he was looking to buy full sleeve polos or wanted a full sleeve sweater, or a navy blue sweater – even though this product fits the bill completely for all the searches, but it may not show up in his search results only because the right content/ keywords have not been used to describe the product. And that is why it is important to use common keywords in your product content that consumers normally use when searching for your product.

In fact, according to a recent Forrester survey 45% of online shoppers do not complete a purchase if they cannot find what they are looking for, and insufficient product information adds to the cause. If you want to audit your current e-commerce content, DataWeave can help!

2. Improve product ranking through the right reviews

Good Reviews and Ratings boost product page rankings

Marketplace search engines prioritize products with good reviews and ratings and show them higher up in search. This prompts product visibility and assures your brand of organic discoverability. So, it is important to fetch as many honest reviews and ratings for your products, in order to gain marketplace visibility.

Research shows that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 72% of consumers are inspired to trust a brand based on the positive reviews it receives. Moreover, millennials, trust user-generated content 50% more than other media. Even though bad reviews are part and parcel of any business, a brand’s focus should be on ‘honest’ reviews. Real user-based reviews have the power to generate customer trust. When customers begin to trust your product and in your brand, they are more willing to add that product to their cart and finalize their purchase. Good product reviews will certainly make your Digital Shelf a lot more attractive & boost your product sales. Learn how DataWeave can helps brands monitor & stay on top of their Reviews & Ratings

3. Give importance to pricing and attain the sweet spot with product ranking

The right Product Pricing leads to higher rankings in Searches

Intelligent pricing, which is not too low or too high should be your weapon to make your brand gain ample visibility among its competitors. Moreover, if the cost of your products is ominously dissimilar from other products it is competing with, it is bound to impact your position in search results. To achieve great results, either you can consider your competitors and analyse the pricing to reach a perfect mid-ground or choose a dynamic pricing strategy. This strategy will allow your products to cost less than the competition, marginally.

Amazon is pretty sophisticated in this department and reprices top-selling items 3 or 4 times per day and the same can be repriced up to 12 times daily. Following in line, McKinsey reports that multichannel leaders are also changing the prices on 10 to 20 percent for their online assortment daily.At DataWeave, we can help brands track prices on a daily or even every few hours during sale season, when prices are the most sensitive. Learn more here.

4. Invest in paid advertising to improve your listing

Paid ads on Online Retail sites can boost product visibility and Sales

Investing money in paid promotion at e-commerce marketplaces will help you gain visibility and push your products on top of the first page of your category listing. Today, e-commerce platforms allow you to pay for promoted listings that are displayed near organic search results. In fact, a paid Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign will allow you to build up your sales volume and brand awareness, which will in turn assure your brand of long-term organic search placement.

The idea of sponsored ads is getting well-received all across and Amazon’s accelerating ad revenue growth is a living proof of this. In the fourth quarter of 2020, Amazon’s ad revenue reached $7.95 billion, up 66% over the previous year.

The e-commerce marketplace is expanding and in 2020, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 4.28 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022. To be able to make the most of this growing market, make sure your brand is winning the Digital Shelf, starting by winning the appropriate ‘Share of Search’. Want to learn how DataWeave can help you win the Digital Shelf? Sign up for a demo with our team to know more.

October 5, 2021