Tag: Tariffs

Turning Headwinds Into Wins: How Brands Can Navigate Price, Share, and Visibility Amid Tariff Disruption
Disruption Is Now the Baseline

Tariffs can spike landed costs overnight, regulations rewrite labelling rules, and competitors slash prices before your team finishes its daily stand-up. And yet, some consumer brands thrive.

The winning brands see changes early, decide quickly, and execute flawlessly across the digital shelf. This post blends three decades of pricing and merchandising expertise with timely digital shelf insights from DataWeave, offering a clear path forward for brands navigating today’s volatile retail environment.

From Cost Shock to Chronic Uncertainty

Tariffs are no longer just one-off headlines; they’ve become an unpredictable, ongoing variable in the global marketplace. The true challenge isn’t always the duty rate itself, but the constant whiplash of not knowing if, when, or how much that duty will change. This pervasive uncertainty is having a tangible impact:
- Market Uncertainty: Tariff talk alone disrupts planning and fuels market instability.
- Operational cost inflation: Shifting trade rules raise expenses across sourcing, freight, and distribution.
- Compromised SKU-level Margin: The profitability of individual products is under constant threat.
- Shrinkflation: Brands shrink product quantities to mask rising costs, risking consumer trust.
Unpredictable Competitive Response: Delaying price moves while watching competitors can erode margins as much as tariffs.

To stay ahead, pricing decisions must be stress-tested against multiple tariff scenarios and aligned with likely competitor reactions. Timing matters as much as accuracy, move too soon or too late, and margins suffer either way.

The Tariff Math No One Can Afford to Get Wrong

When it comes to tariff disruption, the difference between profit and loss often hinges on a precise understanding of a three-step process. Get any part of this chain wrong, and the financial ripple effect can undermine pricing and promotions. The duty you pay, therefore, is the direct result of the following three critical steps:

Step 1: Harmonized System (HS) Code
- What it is: A six- to ten-digit classifier that drills down to product sub-types.
- Why it matters: A single digit change can shift an item into a higher-tariff bracket.
Step 2: Country of Origin
- What it is: The nation in which the imported item was made.
- Why it matters: Mis-tagging the origin can lead to mis-pricing and inaccurate margin calculations.
Step 3: Trade-Agreement Overlay
- What it is: Differentiation between the World Trade Organization (WTO) baseline tariffs and special trade agreements (e.g., USMCAUnited States-Mexico-Canada Agreement).
- Why it matters: The same HS code can result in significantly different duties, up to a 10% swing, depending on the originating country (see the example below).
This isn’t just about paying the correct duty; it’s about safeguarding your bottom line in a global marketplace where every digit and every designation carries substantial weight.

The wrong origin, the wrong rule, the wrong margin.

Hard Numbers: Where Prices Are Already Climbing

DataWeave’s latest digital shelf analysis shows import-driven price inflation diverging sharply by source country.

The intricate dance of HS codes, country of origin, and trade agreements directly translates into the prices consumers see. And the data doesn’t lie. Below, we delve into the hard numbers: where prices are already climbing, as illuminated by DataWeave’s latest digital shelf monitoring, showing significant import-driven price inflation by source country.
- China: Products sourced from China are up almost 14%. This is largely attributable to the numerous tariffs currently imposed on Chinese goods.
- Mexico: Prices for products from Mexico have risen by 11%.
- United States: Interestingly, even U.S.-sourced products show a 10% increase.
This rise in U.S. product prices might seem counterintuitive if tariffs are solely focused on imports. However, the reality lies in the global supply chain for many products.

Consider guacamole as an example: While the final product might be “Made in the USA,” its components often come from various international sources. Avocados might be imported from Mexico, lime juice from Central America, and seasonings from India or China. Even packaging could originate in Asia. Each of these imported components can be subject to tariffs. Therefore, even if an item is assembled in the U.S., the tariffs on its constituent parts contribute to an overall price increase, explaining the rising rates for U.S.-sourced goods.

Action step: Map tariff exposure at both finished-goods and component-level to avoid “Made in USA” blind spots.

Timing Is a Competitive Weapon

With duty tables and competitor reactions changing fast, the question is: move first or follow? Early movers recoup cost fastest but risk overshooting if tariffs ease; laggards may enjoy a brief price advantage but suffer sudden margin compression.

The Strategic Dilemma

The table below illustrates this strategic choice and its potential outcomes:

Shrinkflation: Margin Patch or Trust Erosion?

Beyond direct price adjustments, many brands are turning to shrinkflation to manage tariff-driven cost pressure, shaving net weight instead of hiking prices. DataWeave’s analysis reveals an average package reduction of 5 – 6%, with extreme cases reaching 15 – 25%, sometimes even coupled with a shelf-price increase.

While this can cushion immediate margin, it comes at a significant cost: brand credibility. Savvy shoppers quickly spot these changes, sharing “before-and-after” photos online and fueling consumer frustration. What begins as a margin patch can rapidly erode trust and damage long-term loyalty.

Ultimately, navigating this volatile environment requires dynamic intelligence and a holistic pricing strategy that balances profitability with market share and, crucially, consumer trust.

Price Hikes May be Inevitable, But You Can Still Run Your Digital Shelf

Tariff‑driven cost pressure can force list‑price increases, but it does not dictate how well your products show up, sell through, or satisfy shoppers online. Those outcomes still hinge on five levers that live entirely inside your control. Master them and you cushion margin hits while protecting (or even expanding) share.

The Five Levers of Digital‑Shelf Control
- Inventory Depth – Maintain online in‑stock rates above 95 percent for high‑velocity SKUs and flag substitute logic when unavoidable out‑of‑stocks occur.
- Content Quality & Accuracy – Keep titles keyword‑rich, imagery crisp, and attributes complete so search filters never bury you.
- Ratings & Reviews Cadence – Proactively request fresh reviews to earn retailer search boosts and reassure value‑conscious shoppers.
- Retail‑Media Precision – Bid where pages are healthy and in‑stock; pause spend on broken listings that leak conversion and ROAS.
- Fulfillment Excellence – Monitor pick‑pack accuracy, on‑time delivery, and substitution rates; each one influences retailer algorithmic visibility.
Content Hygiene Keeps You Visible, Compliant, and Conversion-Ready

Missing or incorrect product attributes (e.g., “gluten-free,” “caffeine content”) can swiftly jeopardize both regulatory compliance and your product’s fundamental search visibility. Simply put, if it’s not labeled right, it won’t be found.

This impact plays out in two crucial areas:
1. Retailer Search Visibility: Filter logic on major e-commerce platforms like Target.com, Walmart.com, and Instacart is increasingly driven by precise attribute tags (e.g., “gluten-free,” “BPA-free,” “0g added sugar”). Fail to provide or correctly format these claims, and your product will simply never appear when shoppers apply these critical search filters. You become invisible to a motivated audience.
2. Regulatory Compliance: Global regulatory bodies, including the U.S. FDA and EU authorities, now treat online product detail pages as officially regulated labeling space. This means that a single missing allergen statement or an inaccurate nutritional claim can trigger severe consequences, from product takedowns and hefty fines to a devastating “straight-to-zero” share of search. Non-compliance isn’t just a legal risk; it’s a direct threat to your market presence (see example below).
The Hygiene Playbook: Audit → Score → Fix → Grow

Your Product Detail Pages (PDPs) are your digital storefronts, and they need to be impeccable. Modern content-intelligence tools are like vigilant auditors, constantly scanning, structuring, and scoring every PDP across your retail network.

Tools like DataWeave do the heavy lifting by:
- Surfacing critical gaps: They’ll pinpoint issues like blurry images, inaccurate titles, or missing nutrition information.
- Optimizing for search: They ensure your product attributes align with live search filters, turning claims into clicks.
- Flagging compliance risks: You’ll know about potential issues before regulators or retail partners ever do.
- Quantifying your impact: Get a clear Content Quality Score that your teams can own and improve, week after week.
When you execute this well, it’s not just about tidying up; it’s a powerful growth engine. This proactive approach fuels every step of the digital customer journey – from getting found, to winning the click, converting the cart, and ultimately, capturing reviews that boost your search rankings.

A Case Study: Bush’s Beans Converts Visibility into Revenue

Before Bush’s Beans achieved rapid success with their “audit → scorecard → rapid-fix” approach, they confronted a significant hurdle. Here’s how they overcame it to drive impressive revenue growth.

The Challenge

Bush’s Beans saw its e-commerce contribution stall at just 1.5 percent while competition in canned goods intensified. A quick audit revealed three root causes:
1. Dipping online sales that signalled slipping visibility and conversion.
2. Fragmented product content across major retailer sites as images, titles, and claims were inconsistent or missing altogether.
3. Heavier category competition making it harder to hold first-page search positions.
The Fix

The brand adopted DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics to create a single source of truth for every PDP. A lean internal team then:
- Ran content audits across priority retailers to surface incomplete or non-compliant attributes.
- Prioritized quick wins focusing on high-velocity SKUs where simple edits (e.g., adding pack-size keywords or allergy statements) would unlock search filters.
- Tracked progress weekly using an automated scorecard to keep everyone focused on the next set of fixes.
The Win

Twelve months later the numbers told the story:

Bush’s Beans transformed their product data into a strategic asset, significantly improving online visibility, safeguarding brand reputation, and driving sustained revenue growth. Accurate and complete product pages ensured compliance and boosted search rankings, directly increasing sales. While you can’t control external factors like tariffs, you can control the quality and compliance of your product pages and that control directly translates margin pressure into market share gains.

Unified Insight: Turning Signals into Sustained Advantage

Imagine one living dashboard where every digital shelf signal like timely price moves, share-of-search shifts, retail media spend, on-shelf availability gaps, compliance flags, MAP breaches, plus content and review health flows together. With that single lens, the “whose numbers are right?” debate disappears and cross-functional teams can act in minutes rather than days.

A consolidated feed lets you:
- Build market awareness: Spot competitor price changes as they happen, understand who owns first-page search, and measure the true lift of retail media campaigns.
- Mitigate emerging risks: Surface impending out-of-stocks before rank erodes, catch claim or label errors ahead of audits, and receive instant alerts when a seller breaks MAP.
- Activate growth levers: Prioritize content edits that open search filters and use ratings and reviews trends to fine-tune messaging and assortment.
Brands that weave these signals into one workflow move faster than the disruption. That’s the connective tissue highlighted in our recent post on pairing Digital Shelf Analytics with Marketing-Mix Modelling: when granular shelf data sits beside strategic performance metrics, smarter decisions follow.

A platform like DataWeave brings the pieces together quietly ingesting millions of price checks, availability reads, and PDP audits each day, then presenting only the next best actions. The payoff is simple: sharper market awareness, lower operational risk, and growth that compounds with every iteration.

Keep Moving, Keep Winning

Tariffs, evolving regulations, and agile competitors are no longer storms; they are the climate. Brands that pair a clear, shared insight stream with rapid execution turn volatility into durable advantage. Keep your data united, keep iterating on the five digital-shelf levers, and every new headwind becomes another step ahead.
June 13, 2025
Preparing for Tariff Impact: A Retailer’s Guide to Price Intelligence

The power to impose tariffs on foreign countries is one of the most impactful measures a government has at their disposal. The government can use this power for various reasons: to punish rivals, equalize trade, give domestic products a comparative advantage, or collect more funds for the federal government.

Whatever the reason, tariffs have real-world impacts on brands and retailers selling in a global economy. They effectively make products more expensive for some and comparatively cheaper for others. Since tariffs can be added or removed at the drop of a hat, retail executives, category managers, and pricing teams trying to keep up have their work cut out for them.

You’ve come to the right place if you’re wondering how to prepare for and respond to potential tariffs. The answer lies in technology that will make you flexible when you need to react to policy changes. Establishing workflows and processes embedded with pricing intelligence can help you stay competitive even when global politics intercepts your business.

Understanding Tariff Impact

Before diving into tariffs’ implications on pricing strategies, we need to understand how tariffs work and the current economic environment. Tariffs are a government’s tax on products a foreign country sells to domestic buyers. You might remember President Trump’s expanded tariff policy in September 2018. It placed a 10% tax on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports for three months before raising to a rate of 25% in January 2019. At that time, an American buyer would pay the original price of the goods plus the tax to the American government. Many additional tariffs and counter-tariffs by other countries were enacted during Trump’s first term in office, including the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, resulting in a trade war.

Announcements of when, where, and on what new tariffs will be imposed are unpredictable. The only predictable thing is that this type of market volatility is here to stay. Pricing teams should adjust their mindsets to assume that volatility may always be on the horizon. This is because tariffs have many cost implications. Besides the flat rate imposed by the government on a certain product, tariffs have historically raised the price of all goods.

In economic terms, tariffs create a multiplier effect. Consider a tariff placed on gasoline imported from Canada. This measure may encourage American drilling but will have immediate ripple effects throughout the economy. Everything that relies on ground transportation will increase in price, at least in the short term.

This means that a fashion brand that sources and manufactures its entire line domestically will incur more costs since transportation will be more expensive. If fashion companies act like most companies, they will pass that added tax burden on to the consumer through higher prices. The company will make this decision based on how sensitive its consumers are to price increases, i.e., the elasticity of demand. These interwoven relationships extend across industries and products, affecting most retailers somehow.

Of course, category exposure varies by industry and sector. Tariffs are known to impact specific industries more than others. For example, steel, electronics, and agriculture products are at risk of price fluctuations based on their reliance on imported components. These have high category exposure. Some industries reliant on domestic production with stable input costs are less prone to category exposure. These include domestic power grids, natural gas, real estate, and handmade goods. No matter which industry you’re in, however, expect some spill over.

Preparation Strategies

Forward-thinking leaders can help position their teams for success in the face of pricing volatility brought on by tariffs. The key is to enable teams to sense disruptions quickly and provide a way to take corrective action that doesn’t diminish sales. Here are three strategies you can implement ahead of time that will help keep you competitive during tariff disruption.

Cost Monitoring

Start by getting a firm handle on internal and external costs. Understand and analyze fluctuations in the cost of raw materials, production, and supply chain for your business to operate. Make sure that your products are priced with pre-defined logic so changes in price on one SKU don’t create confusion with another. For example, faux leather costs rise while genuine leather stays the same. In that case, a leather version of a product should be raised to reflect the price increase in the pleather variation, not to devalue the perception of luxury.

Next, you will want to understand historical pricing trends as well as pricing indexes across your categories. These insights can help your teams anticipate cost fluctuations before they even arise and mitigate the risk that economic shifts create, even unexpected tariffs.

Competition Tracking

Tracking your competition is likely already a strategy you have in mind. But how well are your teams executing this important task? If they’re trying to watch for market shifts and adjust pricing in real time without the help of technology, things are likely slipping through the cracks.

Competitive intelligence solutions help retailers discover all competitive SKUs across the e-commerce market, monitor for real-time pricing shifts, and take action to mitigate risk. You need an “always-on” competitive pricing strategy now so that the second a tariff is announced, you can see how it’s affecting your market. This way, you can maintain price competitiveness and avoid margin erosion when competitors’ pricing changes in response to a tariff or other market shift.

Consumer Impact Assessment

The multiplier effect is felt throughout the supply chain when tariffs are implemented. The effect can affect consumers in a number of ways and cause them to become spending averse in certain areas. Often, during times of economic hardship, grocery items remain relatively inelastic. This is because consumers continue to purchase essentials regardless of price changes. Conversely, the price of eating out or home delivery becomes more elastic since consumers cut back on dining expenses when costs rise across their shopping basket.

You need to establish clear visibility into the results of your pricing changes. The goal should be to monitor progress and measure the ROI on specific and broad pricing changes across your assortment. Conducting market share impact analysis will also help you determine if you are losing out on potential customers or whether a decline in sales is being felt across your competition. Impact analysis tools can help your company check actual deployed price changes in real time.

Response Framework

Once you’ve prepared your team with strategies and technologies to set them up for success, it’s time to think about what to do once a tariff is announced or implemented. Here are three real-time decision-making strategies you should consider before your feet are to the fire. Having these in your back pocket will help you avoid financial disruption.

Price Adjustment Strategies

Think about how you strategically adjust prices. These could include percentage increases, flat rate increases, or absorbed via other strategies like bundling. You should also determine a cost increase threshold that you’re willing to absorb before raising prices. Think about the importance of remaining price attractive to consumers and weigh the risk of increasing prices past consumers’ ability or willingness to pay.

Promotion Planning

Folding increased costs into value-added offerings for consumers can be a good way to retain customer sentiment and sales volume without negatively affecting profit margins. You can leverage discounts, promotions, or bundling options to sell more of an item to a customer at a lower per-unit cost.

What you don’t want to do is panic-adjust prices in response to tariffs of competitor moves. Instead, you can use a tool competitor intelligence solutions to watch if your competition is holding prices steady or adjusting. With full information about pricing at your disposal, you can make better decisions on your promotional strategy and not undercut yourself or lose customer loyalty.

Alternative Sourcing

Let’s face it: putting all your eggs in one basket is bad for business. Instead of relying solely on a single supplier for production, you should have a diverse set of suppliers ready and able to shift production when tariffs are announced. If a tariff impacts Chinese exports, having a backup supplier in Vietnam can prevent added costs entirely. You can also consider strategies like bulk pricing, set pricing, or shifting entirely to domestic suppliers.

Forward Buying

Proactively stockpile inventory by purchasing large quantities of at-risk products before tariffs take effect. This strategy locks in lower costs and ensures supply continuity during disruptions. However, balance this with careful demand forecasting to avoid overstocking, which ties up cash flow and incurs storage costs. Use historical sales data and tariff implementation timelines to optimize order volumes—this is especially effective for products with stable demand or long shelf lives.

Market Intelligence Requirements

Preparing your pricing teams and giving them a framework upon which to act when tariffs are announced doesn’t have to be complicated. You can get access to the right data on costs, competitors, and consumer behavior with DataWeave’s pricing intelligence capability.

We provide retailers with insights on pricing trends, category exposure, and competitor adjustments. Our AI-powered competitor intelligence solutions allow you to get timely alerts whenever a significant change happens. This can include changes to competitor pricing and category-level shifts that you’d otherwise react to when it’s too late.

These automated insights can also help you track historical pricing trends, elasticity, and margin impact to construct a clear response framework in an emergency. Additionally, our analytics capabilities can help you identify patterns to power pre-emptive pricing and promotional strategies.

Getting the right pricing intelligence strategy in place now can prevent disaster later. Think through your preparedness strategy and how you want your teams to respond in the event of a new tariff, and consider how much easier reacting accurately would be with all the data needed at your fingertips. Reach out to us to know more.

April 10, 2025