3 key concerns to be aware of on the digital shelf

3 key concerns to be aware of on the digital shelf, and how inriver Evaluate quickly can help mitigate those – and in the opposite, boost your sales.

We as consumers are more sensitive today to things that go wrong on the digital shelf compared to what we have ever been in stores in the past.

We quickly choose another product from a competitor brand or drop the cart if we can not find the product we look for, if it's out of stock or if the valuable content is missing, incomplete or if we find that it's miss-matching.

In the latter scenario, as many as 79% of us shoppers get angry. And that’s dangerous when we sit with our mobile phones in our hands and quickly can write a review or post something unfavorable about a brand or a reseller on social media.

Essentially there are 3 main areas to focus on to secure your position on the digital shelf, to sell more, and avoid upsetting consumers where digital shelf analytics is a key to success.

1. A product that can’t be seen cannot be sold – so it's key to secure your visibility and discoverability for all your products, at each one of your resellers.
   
   The digital shelves are overfilled with wide assortments where it is difficult and equally important to stand out, so your products always are the ones showing up at the top of the shelves on the search and within each category to be able to sell. Also, it is frequently happening that product pages (sc. PDPs) silently disappear in this landscape. And when that happens, the lost sales are a fact.
   
   inriver Evaluate helps you to track each one of your SKUs and report directly back into the PIM with insights about product pages that are missing, and where your opportunities are to increase your discoverability on search and taxonomy.
   
   
2. A consumer that doesn't know about, or trust your product, will not buy it – so it's key to secure that your valuable content as you have invested so heavily in, lands how and where it shall and can be compared across all touchpoints.
   
   We find new products with missing content, lack of key components, or miss-matching elements every day. Sometimes it shows to be hard to get the right content to a reseller at the first point, which means that it lands wrong from the start, and sometimes the content gets messed up after a while at a Marketplace or at your resellers. Regardless of why or when it happens, it is important to get this corrected as soon as possible before the lost sales are a fact.
   
   inriver Evaluate helps you to track that your content from the PIM (Images, Titles, Descriptions, USPs, Specifications, and Videos) correctly lands and stays in place everywhere, and as soon as we find something going wrong, we alert back into your PIM on what needs to be fixed and where.
   
   
3. A product that can’t be supplied will not be sold – so it's key to quickly get your products back in stock at each reseller as soon as any unknown shortage shows.
   
   The global out-of-stock rate has skyrocketed in the last years based on the past and present supply challenges, and at the same time, we as consumers have gotten used to quickly choosing a similar product from another brand when your product happens to be out of stock and your competitor is available which can have an exponential impact on your market-share.
   
   inriver Evaluate helps you to track each one of your SKUs daily for availability and alert back into your PIM with every stock shortage found so that those can be actioned quickly.

This way we can help you to be on top of everything that happens across your digital shelves in real-time. Please reach out to me or your Account Manager to discuss more about inriver Evaluate and what we can do to help you grow your sales online.

Upwards and onwards,

Joakim Gavelin
VP Global Account Management