Digital Shelf Analytics: The Ultimate Guide

For any smaller CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) company, which depends on online selling, partnering with any larger online retailer like Amazon, Walmart, or eBay for showing your products might offer you higher visibility. When you grow, you would require to get partnered with regional-specific retailers for penetrating their domestic markets (see Figure 1).

(Figure 1: Best retail websites slowed by online traffic, Statista)

The problem arises when a product range, a partnership, and factors of interest for monitoring, increase to the point where it is next to impossible to physically keep track of.

In this blog, we would go through different perceptions of DSA (Digital Shelf Analytics) as a solution to the problem, which works by restructuring the collection as well as visualization of data you require to analyze product performance on digital shelves of different platforms. However, before we do it, let’s explain some fundamentals.

Being a CPG manufacturer, you might pay some commission to any retail shop for having your products shown on the passage shelves.

The electric version of the phenomenon is a digital shelf, a scenario in which you pay any online retailer or e-commerce platform owner for having your products shown on the website.

You put different items on the retailers’ shelves for getting consumers’ attention. Apprehending that attention is the factor about:

• Tagging every item with current price tags
• Ensuring that the prices you’ve tagged become competitive
• Ensuring that packaging is appealing and graphics are appealingly pleasing
• Deliberately shelf-positioning products (i.e. in case, you are marketing for kids, you might need to position them to lower so that they will reach it)
• And concentrating on showing the most popular as well as best-selling items
• Shelf analytics is a procedure of constantly monitoring the components as well as working on insights that you’ve increased

Digital shelf analytics covers these things etc. with the exclusion that you just can’t go along physically that walkways to observe in case, these variables are well-optimized. So, you’d need assistance.

You can go on every retailer’s site, which you are associating with as well as copy-pasting data on prices, customer reviews, or sales amounts onto the spreadsheet. However, that could be time-consuming, particularly if you are showing products on various websites as well as in various global markets. Besides that, every minute that you are scrawling down notes, all those (see Figure 2) are concurrently happening online that might move the pointer around the numbers, which you’d written.

(Figure 2: All 60 seconds observe an extra $1.6M in the online expenditure, Statista)

To achieve data collection, different businesses could leverage data scrapers, tools that target particular websites, scrape relevant data, and send that to users in a designated format.

There are features that you have to frequently check to operate an effective e-commerce campaign, as there are features that you have to continuously watch while showing goods on the physical shelves.

You would provide useful data from digital shelf analytics for:

Sales Breakdown

Sales data is amongst the kinds of data you can have from a data scraper. Here are some objectives for which data could be broken down:

• Observing the sales amount for every product
• Observing which markets as well as to which demographics you have appealed (this is if users have agreed to provide personal data)
• Observing which of the items are over-performing or under-performing
• Observing which retail websites your products would be sold on the most

Suggestion: The data you have at this point could assist you in directing your marketing efforts. For instance, you can remove underperforming goods from the products line to concentrate all the sources on those doing well. Or, in case only one age unit is purchasing from you, then you could try to work out why others aren’t.

As people cannot inspect the product online physically, they depend on the user experiences of others.

According to Local Bright, 87% of online shoppers read client reviews, with merely 48% of them going through with the purchase from any seller having less than four-star ratings.

It implies that “reviews” are one of the initial places people are looking for assurance about the purchase and that the suitability with which clients can access different vendors having only some additional mouse clicks has increased their prospects to a new height.

Suggestion: Collecting customer reviews from different platforms are among the DSA features. It will help you address negative ones and improve positive ones directly. Consequently, your brand reputation would get preserved. Moreover, 30% of all customer reviews could be fake. You could report them as well.

In the last point, we have touched on easy accessibility for different sellers. Whenever we search for a coffee mug, a search engine shows yours however, other sellers’ related offerings also. Therefore, we do not even need to type something new. We click on the next items.

Suggestion: Particularly if you are working in a dynamic market, you need to lose or gain customers having borderline price differences. And that is why it is important to understand how different the pricing is from competitors’. DSA would keep you updated having price fluctuations in the market, allowing you to assume a dynamic price strategy.

SEO is the key factor in how noticeable the products are online as well as in the search engines. According to HubSpot, 75% of the users certainly do not go past the first result pages. For example, promising online reviews, for example, are among the factors which would push your rankings higher. Additional variables comprise:

(See Figure 3 for the demo about how a web scraper offers you the data)

Suggestion: DSA would continuously offer you details in the product list so you can ensure that they are reliable across the board and that there is no missing data. You should also ensure that you have offered the customers all the data they could factor in before selecting between you and your competitors.

We have discussed all the points in this guide, but if you want to know more about Digital Shelf Analytics, contact Digital Shelf Analytics Provider and ask for a free quote!