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What is the Digital Shelf?
The digital shelf is made up of any digital touchpoint a consumer can find, learn about, and purchase a product online. The customer journey is made up of all the experiences a consumer has when interacting with products online.
The journey itself is happening all the time and the path taken is often random and inconsistent. As such, it is more important than ever for brands to present their products consistently and accurately across the digital shelf, at all times.
What are Digital Shelf Analytics?
Ideally, branded manufacturers would be able to syndicate their products across every digital touchpoint with a single, accurate view of product data.
In reality, changes in retailer requirements, code, APIs, search algorithms, consumer behavior, and trends create a disjointed or inconsistent view of product data, resulting in lost sale opportunities.
When products lack visibility, availability, and accurate product content, it causes consumers to lose trust and interest quickly.
Consumers are presented with a variety of alternative products that match their needs, and as a result, are much more impatient with product discrepancies on the digital shelf.
With the vast and ever-changing environment of the digital shelf, manually auditing third party websites for these discrepancies is impossible.
Branded manufacturers must guess what is working and what is not and are often too late to react before missing out on an abundance of sales opportunities.
In order to combat this, companies utilize Digital Shelf Analytics, which is the automated and continuous auditing of their products throughout the entire e-commerce landscape.
What can you do with a DSA solution?
With a Digital Shelf Analytics solution in place, companies can consume the data delivered and take corrective action to minimize lost sales opportunities, strategize around the insights to increase brand presence, and increase revenue while decreasing cost.
What should you be looking for on the digital shelf?
- Visibility - Are all your products visible?
- Product Ranking - Are all your products ranking properly?
- Content Compliance - Are all your products displayed correctly?
- Ratings & Review - Are ratings and reviews in place?
- Stock - Are all your products in stock?
- Price - How are your products being priced?
How does Evaluate deliver this information?
Evaluate’s proprietary AI powered technology enables the custom and continuous auditing of product content throughout the entire digital shelf. Custom spiders scrape each digital touchpoint and extract the data through the eyes of the online shopper, highlighting consumer behavior trends, content discrepancies, and strategic opportunities to allow you to limit lost sales and increase conversions.
The data is delivered to a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard. The dashboard is broken down into three main categories, which correlate to the Three Fundamental Pillars of Lost Sales. Each category has corresponding sub-metrics relating to the discoverability, trustworthiness, and availability of your products. The Three Fundamental Pillars of Lost Sales, categories and sub-metrics are broken down in the following section.
Why should you be tracking this information?
1st Fundamental Pillar of Lost Sales: A product that can’t be seen, can’t be sold.
Display: The discoverability of your products
Visibility - Broken links (URLs), changing algorithms, updated requirements, and coding mistakes can render your products invisible to the consumer on the digital shelf. Up to 40% of URL links are or will go, missing on the Digital Shelf.
Product Ranking - Poor search ranking, low share of shelf, or incorrect categorization by resellers result in substantial lost sales. 78% of product searches do not include a brand name. Nearly 50% of consumers don’t scroll passed the second page of search results. 96% of sales conversions happen on the first page of search results.
2nd Fundamental Pillar of Lost Sales: A product that a consumer does not trust, will not be sold.
Inspire: The trustworthiness of your products
Content Compliance - Whether it's titles, images, descriptions, or specifications, approximately 20% of all products we track are found with missing or incorrect content. 83% of online shoppers said product information is either an essential or important factor in their purchasing decision. 86% of shoppers were either always or sometimes likely to switch websites if product information was incorrect or missing.
Ratings & Reviews - Missing, unanswered, or poor ratings & reviews directly correlate to lost sales. 93% of customers read online reviews before buying a product. 95% of unsatisfied customers will return to a company if it manages to solve their issues quickly and efficiently.
3rd Fundamental Pillar of Lost Sales: A product that cannot be supplied, cannot be sold.
Convert: The availability of your products
Stock - The global out of stock rate is higher than 20%. When products are out of stock, consumers switch to an alternative product or brand 58% of the time.
Price - Understanding consumer behavior toward price is crucial to winning on the digital shelf. 90% of consumers invest their time to hunt for the best deals online. 60% of consumers consider pricing as their top criteria on their buying decision. 67% of consumers will buy from a different site to get the best deal on your product.
What can you do with this information?
Guided Actions: Something is missing or incorrect and needs to be fixed.
Visibility – Every day your product’s link is broken, multiplied by the average units of that product sold per day on this website, multiplied by the price of the product, is the loss of revenue your business is experiencing due to this issue. Every product link that is broken on the digital shelf will result in losing out on 100% in sales. Period.
The person in your organization that owns the relationship with your channel partners should:
- Alert them of the issue that needs to be resolved to minimize lost revenue
- Develop standard practices with a channel partner to resolve future issues efficiently
- Work with a channel partner to determine the root cause of issues to prevent them from happening in the future
Content Compliance – Missing, incorrect, or disjointed product content will cause consumers to lose trust in your product and purchase a competitor’s product. 20% of your products having content issues on the digital shelf can result in losing out on 69% in sales.
The person in your organization that owns the relationship with your channel partners should:
- Review product content within their PIM to confirm the issue does not start there
- After confirming product content in PIM is correct, review channel partner requirements for syndication to confirm all necessary steps have been followed accordingly
- If product content in PIM is correct and all syndication processes have been followed, alert the channel partner of the issue that needs to be resolved to minimize lost revenue
- Develop standard practices with a channel partner to resolve future issues efficiently
- Work with a channel partner to determine the root cause of issues to prevent them from happening in the future
Stock – Every day your product is out of stock, multiplied by the average units of that product sold per day on this website, multiplied by the price of the product, is the loss of revenue your business is experiencing due to this issue. 15% of your products being out of stock on the digital shelf can result in losing out on 70% of sales.
The person in your organization that owns the relationship with your channel partners should:
- Alert them of the item that is out of stock and replenish inventory to minimize lost revenue
- Develop standard stock replenishment practices with a channel partner to minimize the time frame of stock outs in the future
- Work with channel partner to determine optimal order size and cadence to prevent stock outs from happening in the future
Summary:
Guided actions are opportunities for your organization to enhance your relationship with your channel partners from transactional, to collaborative, to transformative.
Oftentimes, your channel partners are unaware of these issues. By proactively approaching them with data driven insight to minimize your own lost sales opportunities, you are also helping them identify the root cause of these issues so they can prevent them from continuing to happen throughout their site, minimizing their lost sales opportunities.
If done correctly, each instance should result in a mutually beneficial outcome for you and your channel partner.
Data Driven Insights: Information your organization can leverage to increase brand presence, performance, and ownership of the digital shelf.
Share of Shelf – Understanding your products' search and categorical ranking is an integral part of winning on the digital shelf, but the keyword research and content strategy you implement to optimize your product pages for search engines throughout the digital landscape is what will bring sustainable success.
The people in your organization responsible for SEO should consider the following when optimizing content for search engines:
- Keyword mapping
- User intent
- Topic structure
- Backlinking
- Website Optimization
- Meta Descriptions
- Organic SEO Benchmarks
Ratings & Reviews: Customers on the digital shelf don’t hold back when letting you know about their experience through ratings and reviews. What your organization does with that information is what will separate you from your competition on the digital shelf. Analyzing both positive and negative reviews will give you unique insight as to where you are meeting expectations, where you are falling short, and areas of opportunity to improve the customer journey.
Business units, such as product teams/owners and customer service specialists should consider the following when analyzing ratings & reviews:
- Common trends in negative reviews
- Common questions on review pages to enrich product content
- Implementing a process to respond to negative reviews and resolve the issue
- Utilizing positive reviews as user generated content
Price: Whether you are enforcing a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy or understanding which retailers are selling above or below your Suggested Retail Price (SRP), there are many benefits to tracking the price fluctuations of your products on the digital shelf.
People in your organization working in sales or finance should consider the following actions when consuming price data:
- Historical pricing trends to forecast demand on a future price, promotion, and product launch strategy
- Seasonal pricing data to collaborate with the marketing department’s content strategy
- Leverage data points as supporting evidence for retails to adhere to SRP recommendations
- Identify and enforce MAP violations
Summary:
Data driven insight is valuable information all business units of your organization can leverage to make informed business decisions on future strategy.
The data delivered through these sub-metrics are unique, in that there is not a clear path to achieving the results defined within your organization. Rather, they are an additional stream of data points that allow your team to create a new list of questions from a different perspective. Answering these questions over time will lead to an increase of your brand’s presence on the digital shelf.
The impact from the actions you implement based on this information will not be seen overnight but will be substantial.
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