Monitoring your Digital Shelf: Knowing what aspects matter

Xtract.io
5 min readDec 8, 2020

Ecommerce platforms are witnessing a massive surge in customers due to the pandemic. The industry experts predict that this trend will continue, even when the world returns to normalcy. Neilsen states a 95% increase in customers choosing click-and-collect option and a 39% hike in people choosing home delivery options after it has become unsafe visiting retail stores.

Irrespective of what you have to offer to your buyers, you can’t forget that buyers have several platforms to choose from, making your competition tougher than usual. How will you sustain such competition? What aspects should you keep watching to play a winning game? What should you do to retain major profits?

While every brand tries to pose itself as the best, buyers go by the first rankings and impressions. Undoubtedly, the higher you rank on Google or Amazon, the better your chances of beating your competitors.

How can you get a competitive advantage over other players on intelligent product pricing, multi-channel data consistency, product content optimization, product visibility and positive brand reputation? This is where monitoring your Digital Shelf with a robust and agile ecommerce analytics platform comes in.

Your Digital Shelf

The key Digital Shelf (channel) of your products or brand is the search results page. For instance, if your buyers are looking for sneakers, they would see it on a product page on a retailer site other than yours, on a marketplace like Amazon, on their mobile apps, or on the brand’s website itself.

All of these make your Digital Shelf and you have to optimize each one of them. People tend to look for reviews, ratings, and descriptions before they finally buy from your online store. It sounds like a lot of work to optimize each of these for every selling point, but if your buyers can’t find you online then you don’t make sales at all.

Compare product pricing

Comparing product prices across all marketplaces is a major advantage that online shopping gives its customers. And when it comes to competitively pricing your products as per the market demand or the change in trends, pricing intelligence is what helps you make more profits. 80% of adults prioritize price as an important factor.

However, monitoring even hundreds of products across very few platforms is tedious. Digital Shelf platforms like DigiSense360 help you stay aware of how your competitors price their products, alert you when a product is sold less than the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), and also helps identify unauthorized sellers.

Ensure multi-channel data consistency

73% of buyers look for a detailed and accurate product description. But while working with huge volumes of data, gathering information from multiple sources and distributing them accurately according to different channel guidelines will be tough, and could result in incorrect product information.

However, an ecommerce tracking platform reduces your workload of gathering product content from various silos, and stores it in a unified repository. It distributes content to multiple portfolios accurately and enhances content to suit varied channel guidelines.

Optimize your product content

While buyers search for products, accurate and personalized content is the key factor influencing conversion. Rich product content not only helps sales, it also tells your customers why they should trust and choose your brand time and again. Boring or inaccurate content is a major threat to conversion and could have a negative impact on your brand reputation too. It is not surprising to know that 85% of the consumers prefer to buy products with detailed and correct information.

Yet, managing product data accuracy across all platforms for millions of products could seem like a never-ending task. For this reason, it is wise to choose an ecommerce analytics platform that enhances your portfolio with real-time conversion optimization by monitoring your product content with personalized key performance indicators.

Increase product visibility

Your digital shelf is entirely different and more powerful than your physical or retail store. Your online visibility matters the most here and you get less than 10 seconds to catch the buyer’s attention. Hence, ranking your products on top for search-specific keywords is crucial. According to research more than half of the people click the search results displayed on the very first page.

A digital shelf analytics software enhances product content with keywords infused titles, to boost your product search performance, visibility in the first page, and click-through rate across various channels.

Ensure a positive brand reputation

What people comment and review about your brand on the internet could make or break your brand reputation. It is important to note that over 60% of buyers consider positive and negative reviews before making a buying decision. People respond positively when a brand is easily reachable to their needs. Monitoring reviews helps you fix glitches instantly and create new opportunities to interact with your buyers.

Drive your sales and profit with Digital Shelf Analytics

Digital Shelf Analytics platforms have become essential in the ecommerce race for tracking, reporting, helping your brand gain a good search appearance and achieving conversions. There are a lot of great players out in the market. I would recommend DigiSense360, an ecommerce platform from Xtract.io, that can build a custom solution based on your requirements and comes with AI based insights. Give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments.

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Originally published at https://xtract.io/blog/monitoring-your-digital-shelf-knowing-what-aspects-matter/. Check out our blog to read more articles and follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

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