Effective product arrangement is the prime factor for e-commerce stores to increase product sales and conversions.
While shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, sometimes consumers are not sure what to buy or straight away looking for specific items. They go through sections or ask for assistance to compare the products before buying. Arranging the products on the shelf in an effective manner helps to influence the customer and their buying decisions.
Sententiously, in the world of online shopping arranging the products properly in the display is inevitable. Nowadays businesses utilize digital shelf to transform consumer’s online shopping journey. The marketing team uses digital shelf analytics to find out how they can boost sales, enhance customer experience, and optimize your store to stay ahead of the competition.
Creating and arranging the digital shelf covers important factors such as, how your shelf appears in the search engine, how consumers can navigate to your web presence, how they discover products, and how to buy products.
But the question here is, how shoppers will find your products online? How digital shelf analytics can be useful? And, how digital shelf differs from brick-and-mortar shelves.
Here in this article, we will explore how DSA assists in getting your product notified and enhances customer experience.
What is a Digital Shelf?
In simple terms, the digital shelf is a bunch of digital assets used by shoppers to find products, and prices, read reviews, and buy products. Based on the search term Google or retailer displays products that match with buyer’s needs.
E-commerce digital shelf covers elements such as product images, descriptions, prices, customer reviews, availability, shipping details, and return policies. Retailers can use these elements to analyze and create a positive shopping experience to boost sales.
What is Digital Shelf Analytics?
Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) is the process of analyzing varied data points that unveil how consumers find your products and what process they have done. DSA assists e-tailers in optimizing their products to increase search visibility, conversions and enhance consumer shopping experience. Businesses can make decisions on aspects such as price, brand, product reviews, and more.
Online retailers can stock up virtual shelves with multiple products so the right product can appear in the suggestions to the customers at the perfect time. With digital shelf analytics tools, retailers can have a clear picture related to data used by customers, products added to the cart, products left in the cart, and other interactions. E-tailers need to focus on the vital four Ps of digital shelf where brick-and-mortar stores pay attention.
Product: Make sure your product is presented to the shoppers in the best possible manner.
Pricing: Make product price competitive to boost sales.
Placement: Invest time to optimize the product placement to get the best rank for high-performance search queries.
Promotion: Enhance advertising tactics to improve the product’s online visibility and customer experience.
Why Digital Shelf Analytics is Important
In the competitive world of online product selling, having well-optimized product pages is very important. These pages help customers navigate across the digital shelf. These pages can be at reseller platforms, search platforms, varied marketplaces, social media, own platform, and more. With those pages, the customer makes a journey to find, learn, compare, and purchase hence it becomes vital to keep pages up-to-date.
Digital shelf analytics assists PIM solutions in making effective data syndication on pages. DSA helping address:
Poor Product Search
There might be a possibility that the absence of a single keyword can remove your product from search results. Broken links or Google algorithm changes can reduce product visibility. With the help of digital shelf analytics, online retailers can find out these types of issues and resolve them in real time by making required changes.
Losing Customer Trust
Selling products with mismatched details results in higher return rates. The customer provides negative reviews for the product, which affects the product sales. False product information and unreal images result in losing the trustworthiness of the brand amongst customers and they can easily turn to your competitors. Find out these issues with digital shelf analytics to save the brand reputation and keep customer trust intact.
Runout With Stocks
Online shoppers always get frustrated by seeing the “out-of-stock” label on their favorite products. Running out of stock during the pick or festive season can hurt the business’s profit. Digital shelf analytics provides early notification when product stock comes to the lower level. Getting an early warning will provide ample time to re-fill the product stack.
How Does Digital Shelf Analytics Work?
Digital shelf analytics uses advanced technological algorithms and front-line technologies to process huge amounts of data collected from multiple eCommerce platforms. DSA collects data such as product listings, titles, descriptions, pricing, images, reviews, availability, etc.
With close monitoring and thorough analysis of the collected data, retail brands can find valuable information on how their products are performing in comparison to competitors. The data analysis result enables businesses to identify market gaps and areas of improvement and help to build effective strategies to boost online presence.
Digital Shelf Analytics software works in the following manner:
Data Collection: The DSA tool extracts and collects data across the online platforms where you listed your products. It also gathers data from multiple types of online marketplaces where you sell your products.
Data Analysis: DSA software processes the collected data with deep data analysis and distinguishes data patterns and trends. For this process, the DSA tool uses machine learning algorithms.
Competitive Monitoring: Make a comparison of your brand’s performance with targeted competitors to know the scope of improvement and avoid fallbacks.
Actionable Insights: Get useful insights from data that cover recommendations to optimize the listing, adjust prices, and marketing campaigns, and improve content.
Key Components of Digital Shelf Analytics
Product Content
The digital shelf is the online version of a store shelf. It needs to be visually appealing and have competitive prices and information so that buyers will notice it. Digital Shelf eCommerce Analytics helps retailers understand how their products are doing on the digital shelf compared to their competitors. This information can improve the digital shelf strategy and make more sales.
DSA platforms can track how often products search results, how often people buy them after searching, and how often people leave a page without buying. This data helps retailers see which products are making more money and which products are not selling well. The DSA platform can also suggest ways to make products more visible to shoppers.
Competitive Intelligence
Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) helps online businesses track and compare their competitor’s prices and product performance. This helps them stay competitive and profitable, even when product prices change. DSA also provides insights into which products are selling better than others, so businesses can differentiate their products and be more successful.
By understanding how your competitors are selling their products online, you can find ways to improve your digital shelf presence. Digital shelf monitoring is an ongoing process for retailers to make sure their prices are competitive across all channels.
Feedback Analysis
The customer can come from many places, and so is the feedback and ratings. Sources like retailer search engines, social media, and e-commerce platforms help understand what customers are saying about the brand. Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) collects and analyzes all of this feedback, including reviews, ratings, and comments. DSA uses algorithms to find important themes and trends in the feedback, which helps businesses improve their strategies and shopping experiences.
Digital shelf monitoring helps businesses understand purchase patterns, interactions, and reasons for cart abandonment. This information can be used to improve the online shopping experience and increase sales and customer satisfaction.
Traffic Sources
Retailers sell their products on many websites because shoppers find products from many places. Businesses need to know how customers are finding their products online. Digital shelf analytics tracks the source and what drives the customer. The sources can be organic search, paid search, social media, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and direct marketing.
If most customers are finding your products through search engines, you can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) to make your products more visible. Based on the results, you can increase your budget for paid search ads. A DSA platform can help you create targeted marketing campaigns and recommend products to customers based on their search history.
How to Optimize Digital Shelf to Boost Product Sales
Understanding the Target Market
Customers are more demanding and the purchase process is not predictable anymore. Businesses need to know how to personalize, market, and sell a product while providing a seamless shopping experience. This means making it easy for customers to find and learn about products and to buy them quickly and conveniently. Your digital shelf strategy needs to evolve with the changing customer behavior.
Optimize Product for Better Search Ranking
The majority of online shoppers perform research before buying a product and most of them make a decision without going to the second page. It is very important to rank on the first page of search results to increase or keep intact the sale. To stay on the first page, optimize product listing with high-performing keywords for better organic results and create effective paid ads.
High-Quality Product Information
High-quality product information plays an important role in enhancing digital shelf visibility. Minor changes in the content leave big impact on the product’s visibility and listing. Before buying any product, customers always go through product specifications and other details to decide whether the product meets their needs or not.
Low-quality content makes customers think that the product is not worthy. Half-hearted information increases the return ratio and negative reviews which results in sales decline and brand reputation.
To optimize product listing content, follow the below checklist.
- Is your product title expressive?
- Is all the important keywords included in the content?
- Make sure your listing contains all vital sections such as bullet points, content videos, FAQs, reviews, etc.
Get More Positive Reviews and Monitor
Customer reviews on products are indicators showcasing what customers are thinking. The majority of buyers go through the reviews to decide whether to buy a product or not. Reviews and ratings are key ingredients for sales and search engine rankings of your digital shelf. Having more positive reviews and high ratings indicates that your product is performing well and satisfying customer requirements.
Business needs to analyze negative reviews to find out issues with their products. Provide proper responses to the posted reviews to address the customer query and resolve their issues. Resolve the issues of your products to keep customer trust and your rankings intact.
Monitor customer reviews and ratings of your competitors to find out where they are lacking. This will provide you with an opportunity to make your product better and gain a competitive advantage.
Include High-Quality Images
Make your product listing attractive by adding relatively high-quality images. More than 80% of buyers make their decision by seeing the images. Real pictures of the product make a huge difference in the sales. With the help of the latest technologies, businesses can provide a 360-degree view of the product where customers can have a better idea about the product.
Implement Enhanced Brand Content
It is important to make your product distinguish from the competitors even if it has better visibility. EBC assists brands in making better connections with buyers. To make your product content more effective apply the following three formats.
- Focus on Brand
Businesses can highlight key factors related to the brand in the content. Highlighting important things in the content will help to distinguish the business brand and gain a competitive advantage.
- Focus on Product
Including key information related to product features, its usage, advantages, etc helps customers to get a better idea about what they are buying. For example, a manufacturing brand can showcase a small video on what are the various ways to use the tool.
- Focus on Product Category
Focusing on product category is very important to optimize digital shelf and boost customer flow. For example, a make-up product manufacturer can add a comparison chart for key products to highlight its advantages, usage, ingredients, and more. This will also help to redirect customers towards new products.
Maintain Stock Availability
Running out of stock can impact badly business reputation and brand image. The “Out of Stock” tag makes customers feel bad and they turn towards your competitors. It is advisable to monitor your product stock at regular intervals to avoid out-of-stock situations. Having enough stock at the time of season delivers a great shopping experience to buyers and they remain loyal to your brand.
It is also important to keep an eye on your competitor’s inventory. Know when their stock is going to run out and fill yours. This will allow you to build an effective business strategy where you can get the buyers of them.
Keep Price Competitive
Keeping prices competitive is very important in the digital shelf. The majority of buyers look around and compare the prices to get the best deal. Keeping prices very high can result in low sales and going with low prices can indicate that your product is of low quality.
With competitor price monitoring, keep an eye on competitors’ overall prices in real-time and alter your prices accordingly. Create and optimize effective pricing strategies to boost sales and get a competitive advantage.
How to Choose the Perfect Digital Shelf Analytics Solution
There are multiple options available in the market but selecting the right DSA tool is challenging. You need to go with the solution which can fulfill your business requirements. You can follow the below suggestions to find out perfect DSA solution.
Standalone DSA Solution
This solution will be perfect if you want to discover how your products are performing online. This solution allows to do product performance monitoring in a detailed manner. However, many standalone DSA do not provide closed-loop functionality which is necessary for online sellers.
Integrated Digital Shelf Analytics Solution
Another option is to select a solution that has integrated digital shelf analytics. Going with the PIM having in-built DSA gives product performance intelligence along with closed-loop functionality.
DSA + PIM
If you already have PIM in your business, this option is best for you.
Product information management solution gives the most complex data values with a single source. It helps business brands, manufacturers, and online retailers to provide the right information to the targeted audience at the perfect time.
Delivering the right data to the audience requires constant monitoring otherwise your product might miss out. Issues in product findability, out-of-stock, lack of content, etc. can make a negative impression on the buyers.
A combination of PIM + DSA will mitigate all the above headaches and let you manage your products from a single platform. PIM allows you to allocate optimized content and digital shelf analytics informs you how your product is performing. Retailers can close the loop by utilizing data intelligence and gain a competitive advantage.
Conclusion
In the competitive world of online shopping managing brand identity efficiently on digital shelf is inevitable. With the help of AI technologies businesses can collect data, perform analysis, and enhance overall product to gain better visibility, offer competitive prices, allocate A+ content, and provide great shopping experience to customers.
As an expert data solution company, X-Byte helps brands and manufacturers with effective digital shelf data analytics solutions. We empower online retailers to make data-driven business decisions to deliver better customer experience and stay ahead of the competitors.
Are you looking for Digital Analytics Services or need to know more? Contact our data experts and learn how DSA or PIM can help boost your business.
