As ecommerce grows in complexity, brands need new ways to grow sales and market share. Right now, brands face urgent market pressures like out-of-stocks, an influx of new competitors and rising inflation, all of which erode profitability. As online marketplaces mature, more brands need to make daily changes to their digital marketing strategies in response to these market pressures, shifts in demand, and competitive trends.

Digital Shelf Analytics Breakthrough

eMarketer forecasts that 2021 U.S. ecommerce will rise nearly 18 percent year-over-year (vs. 6.3 percent for brick and mortar), led by apparel and accessories, furniture, food and beverage, and health and personal care. The ecommerce industry is also undergoing fundamental changes with newer, emerging solutions and traditional business models evolving to adapt to the changing environment. For example, sales for delivery intermediaries such as Doordash, Instacart, Shipt, and Uber have gone from $8.8 billion in 2019 to an estimated $35.3 billion by the end of 2021. Similarly, many brands have established or are building out a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) model so they can fully own and control their customer’s experiences.

In response, DataWeave has launched the next generation Digital Shelf Analytics suite to help brands across retail categories directly address today’s costly market risks to drive ecommerce growth and gain a competitive advantage. Shelf Analytics offers valuable insights and competitive advantages. Karthik Bettadapura, CEO and co-founder of DataWeave explains, “Our new enhancements help brands improve online search rank visibility and quantify the impact of digital investments – especially in time for the busy holiday season.\” The solution is designed to:

• Make products easily discoverable across retail platforms.
• Efficiently invest marketing spends with access to market share insights
• Increase sales and market share by monitoring market share changes alongside Digital Shelf key performance indicators.
• Drive profitable growth with the right marketing and content strategies.

The new product enhancements provide brands access to tailored dashboard views that track KPI achievements and trigger actionable alerts to improve online search rank visibility, protect product availability and optimize share of search 24/7. DataWeave’s platform works seamlessly across all forms of ecommerce platforms/models: marketplaces, D2C websites and delivery intermediaries.

Dashboard for Multiple Functions

While all brands share a common objective of increasing sales and market share, their internal teams are often challenged to communicate and collaborate, given differing needs for competitive and performance data across varying job functions. As a result, teams face pressure to quickly grasp market trends and identify what’s holding their brands back.

DataWeave understands these pain points and has developed executive-level and customized scorecard views, tailored to each user’s job function with the ability to measure and assess marketplace changes across a growing list of online retail channels for metrics that matter most to each user. This enhancement enables data democratization and internal alignment to support goal achievement, such as boosting share of category and content effectiveness. The KPIs show aggregated trends, plus granular reasons that help to explain why and where brands can improve. Brands gain versatile insights that serve users ranging from executives to analysts and brand and customer managers.

Prioritized, Actionable Insights

As brands digitize more of their ecommerce and digital marketing processes, they accumulate an abundance of data that needs to be analyzed to uncover actionable insights. This deluge of data makes it a challenge for brands to know exactly where to begin, create a strategy and determine the right KPIs to set to measure goal accomplishment. Bettadapura states, “Brands need an integrated view of how to improve their discoverability and share of search by considering all touchpoints in the digital commerce ecosystem.\”

DataWeave’s tool enables brands to effectively build a competitive online growth strategy. To boost online discoverability (Share of Search), brands can define their own product taxonomies across billions of data points aggregated across thousands of retailer websites. Dataweave can also create customized KPIs that track progress toward goal accomplishment, with the added capability of seeing recommended courses of action to take via email alerts when brands need to adjust their ecommerce plans for agility.

Of vital importance, amid today’s global supply chain challenges, brands gain detailed analysis on product inventory and availability, as well as specific insights and alerts that prompt them to solve out-of-stocks faster, which Deloitte reports is a growing concern of consumers (75 percent are worried about out-of-stocks) this holiday season. User and system generated alerts provide clarity to actionable steps to take to improve ecommerce effectiveness. For example, you have visibility to store-level product availability, and are alerted to recurring out-of-stock experiences.

Scalable Insights: From Bird’s Eye to Granular Views

DataWeave’s solution allows brands to achieve data accuracy at scale, including reliable insights from a top-down and bottom-up perspective. Brands can access flexible insights, ranging from strategic overviews to finer details explaining performance results. Many brands struggle with an inability to scale from a hyper-local ecommerce strategy to a global strategy. Most tools available on the market solve for one or the other, addressing opportunities at either a store-level basis or top-down basis – but not both.

According to research by Boston Consulting Group and Google, advanced analytics and AI can drive more than 10 percent of sales growth for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, of which 5 percent comes directly from marketing. With DataWeave’s advanced analytics, AI and scalable insights, brands can set and follow global strategies while executing changes at a hyper-local level, using root-cause analysis to drill deeper into problems to find out why they are occurring.

As more brands embrace ecommerce and many retailers localize their online assortment strategies, the need for analytical flexibility and granular visibility to insights becomes increasingly important. Google reports that search terms “near me” and “where to buy” have increased by more than 200 percent among mobile users in the last few years, as consumers seek to buy online locally.

eRetailers are now fine-tuning merchandising and promotional strategies at a hyper-local level based on differences seen in consumer’s localized search preferences, and DataWeave’s solution provides brands visibility to retailer execution changes in near real-time.

Competitive Benchmarking

Brand leaders cannot make sound decisions without considering external factors in the competitive landscape, including rival brands’ pricing, promotion, content, availability, ratings and reviews, and retailer assortment. DataWeave’s solution allows you to monitor share of search, search rankings and compare content (assessing attributes like number of images, presence of video, image resolution, etc.) across all competitors, which helps brands make more informed marketing decisions.

DataWeave also gives brands visibility into competitive insights at a granular level, allowing them to make actionable changes to their strategies to stay ahead of competitors’ moves. A new module called ‘Sales and Share’ now enables brands to benchmark sales performance alongside rivals’ and measure market share changes over time to evaluate and improve competitive positioning. Brands can monitor competitive activity, spot emerging threats and immediately see how their performance compares to all rivals’, targeting ways to outmaneuver the competition.

Sales and Market Share Estimates Correlated with Digital Shelf KPIs

In a brick-and-mortar world, brands often use point of sale (POS) based measurement solutions from third-party providers, such as Nielsen, to estimate market share. In the digital world, it is extremely difficult to get such estimates given the number of ways online orders are fulfilled by retailers and obtained by consumers. DataWeave’s Digital Shelf Analytics solution now provides sales and market share estimates via customer defined taxonomy, for large retailers like Amazon. Competitive sales and market share estimates can also be obtained at a SKU level so brands can easily benchmark their performance results.

Additionally, sales and market share data can also be correlated with digital shelf KPIs. This gives an easy way for brands to check the effect of changes made to attributes, such as content and/or product availability, and how the changes impact sales and market share. Similarly, brands can see how modified search efforts, both organic and sponsored, correspond to changes in sales and market share estimates.

Take Your Digital Shelf Growth to the Next Level

The importance of accessing flexible, actionable insights and responding in real-time is growing exponentially as online is poised to account for an increasing proportion of brands’ total sales. With 24/7 digital shelf accessibility among consumers comes 24/7 visibility and the responsibility for brands to address sales and digital marketing opportunities in real-time to attract and serve online shoppers around the clock.

Brands are turning to data analytics to address these new business opportunities, enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, drive growth and gain a competitive advantage. Companies that adopt data-driven marketing strategies are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year, and DataWeave is here to help your organization adopt these practices. To capitalize on the global online shopping boom, brands must invest in a digital shelf analytics solution now to effectively build their growth strategies and track measurable KPIs.

DataWeave’s next-gen enhancements now further a brand’s ability to monitor, analyze, and determine systems that enable faster and smarter decision-making and sales performance optimization. The results delight consumers by helping them find products they’re searching for, which boosts brand trust.

Check out dashboard examples here and connect with us to learn how we can scale with your brand’s analytical needs. No project or region is too big or small, and we can start where you want and scale up to help you stay agile and competitive.

DataWeave is part of The Robin Report Innovators Network.