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Guide
9.06.2023
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Step-by-Step Guide to Digital Shelf Analysis for Brands
In e-commerce, brand category managers are faced with optimizing the digital shelves of retail partners.
What is the product’s price positioning on different websites?
How accessible and visible are products to potential customers?
What can be improved in online merchandising (product representation, content, ratings and reviews, product search rankings, etc.)?
Most importantly, where to start? After all, there can be many tasks.
To find answers to all these questions, it is necessary to regularly conduct digital shelf analysis, assessing your brand’s online presence and product effectiveness.
This article will guide you through key metrics to focus on and provide tips on how to evaluate them.
Analyzing a product’s price positioning shows whether partners align with your pricing strategy. Understanding a product’s price across online retail platforms allows you to maintain consistency, achieve profitability, and build strong relationships with partners.
Methodology: Collect market data and compare it with the reference price across categories, segments, and products.
To efficiently acquire and assess this data, Pricer24 offers its Price Comparison report. With just a few clicks, you can gain an overall understanding of your brand’s price positioning in the market by comparing your reference (indicative) price with prices offered by partners for your products.
The Price Comparison report shows the number of market offers with prices below the reference price in a pie chart.
The most common tasks for brands related to price positioning are monitoring and controlling the recommended retail price. Let’s assume Pricer24 has detected and displayed 457 deviations from the recommended price. How can you understand where to start working on market updates and prioritize tasks?
With store-specific statistics, you can quickly identify problem areas and understand where to start.
To ensure the completeness of your product portfolio on partners’ digital shelves and increase your shelf share with specific retailers, it is essential to have data on:
Availability of product listings and their accessibility for purchase (statuses such as in stock, out of stock, and not found).
Market indicators, including competitors’ shelf share, representation of similar products, etc.
Based on this data, you can make decisions to improve online merchandising and partnership conditions. For instance, when a partner is selling a competitor’s product while yours is not prominently displayed and featured in the category.
Let’s consider an example.
Maria works as an online merchandiser for a smart home system manufacturer.
The executives have assigned the following KPIs:
1. Increase shelf share by X% through availability control.
2. Increase revenue by Y% by maintaining an up-to-date and complete catalog on all partner websites.
3. Expand market share by Z% through faster and more efficient availability monitoring.
Maria uses Pricer24 for ongoing monitoring. She has created a set of reports called Assortment Analysis and Dynamics of Assortment Changes and has displayed them on her dashboard to keep key metrics easily accessible.
Let’s briefly review the data from each report on Maria’s dashboard.
Dynamics of Assortment Changes
The Dynamics of Assortment Changes report enables tracking of brand assortment changes on partners’ digital shelves. It provides data on the total number of products and the number of items in stock or out of stock over specific days or a defined period.
Data displayed in the preview of the Dynamics of Assortment Changes report. Partners (contractors) are represented by different colors.
Assortment Analysis
The Assortment Analysis report shows Maria a list of stores based on the number of products in stock and out of stock, along with SKUs that are not yet available on partner websites.
Data displayed in the preview of the Assortment Analysis report on the dashboard. On the right side is a tabular view, and on the left side, the same data is presented in a chart for better visualization.
This is essentially the same report as Dynamics of Assortment Changes, but narrowed down to focus only on products that have gone out of stock. Maria can quickly check the store list for unavailable products (left) and further analyze which specific items were previously in stock but are now unavailable (right).
An Assortment Analysis report only for products that are out of stock
Using this data, category managers can:
Minimize the number of unavailable offers on partner websites
Create procurement proposals for partners
The report on out-of-stock products helps minimize the number of unavailable offers on partner websites. It looks similar to the Dynamics of Assortment Changes report but shows products with the not found status. Maria sees the total number of previews and a list of products to be added to partner catalogs. This report is particularly relevant when monitoring the addition of new products.
Thanks to Pricer24, managers always have up-to-date data, can analyze it and solve tasks:
Maximize catalog representation among partners.
Minimize the number of products with out of stock and not found statuses on partner websites.
Actively monitor the product’s reduction from the market.
Manage the addition of brand-new products to partner websites.
Compare your representation metrics with competitors’
Extensive analysis of digital shelves isn’t possible without understanding the share of your products in partner catalogs. With the help of Pricer24, you can quickly find answers to questions such as which categories your products are well-represented in and in which categories partners prefer other brands. You can then identify promising niches for growth, improve partnership conditions, and increase your market share and sales.
💼 Case study
How to Improve Market Presence and Price Positioning for a Brand: MSI and Pricer24 Case Study
Product descriptions, photos, and videos dictate the quality of your brand’s representation on the digital shelf. By carefully examining and optimizing these elements, you can improve product visibility.
Ensure that all items have descriptions and specifications.
Check how many photos have been added by partners to product listings.
Find out which items on partner websites have videos.
With the help of Pricer24, you can see with just a few clicks:
Which product listings on partners’ websites lack descriptions
Where important specifications are missing
The number of photos and videos in your product listings
Pricer24 provides a list of products and partners where content improvements are needed.
4. Ratings and reviews
Analyzing ratings and reviews is important, as they also affect a product’s success on the digital shelf.
Check average product ratings and compare them with the average ratings of similar items.
Pay attention to products that have no reviews.
Respond to any negative reviews.
The Market Analysis report in Pricer24 highlights which of your brand’s products have a low average rating.
Example of a Market Analysis report
Click on a red cell, and you will see a list with links to product cards on partner websites.
When analyzing ratings and reviews, it is important to pay special attention to product ratings on major online marketplaces. Customers often rely on these high-traffic e-commerce platforms as a search engine for reviews to help them make purchasing decisions.
Working with ratings can lead to increased conversion rates, while analyzing negative reviews can help you identify product shortcomings or weaknesses in partners’ services.
5. Product search rankings
The higher a product’s position in a partner’s catalog, the more likely customers are to focus on it.
If your brand occupies top positions, it means that customers are more likely to see your products before your competitors’, increasing the chances of a purchase and strengthening your competitive advantage. Therefore, it is important to analyze product search rankings, along with ratings and reviews, by comparing them to the same parameters for competitors’ similar products.
To handle this challenge, you can use the Pricer24 Analogs filter.
Example of a Market Analysis report for brand X product analogs
Comparing search positions for product listings and tracking their dynamics allows marketers to understand which e-commerce websites need improved content and which partners to engage with to boost top positions.
How Pricer24 helps with digital shelf analysis
Digital shelf analysis is crucial for category managers, as it provides valuable insights. However, this process can be time-consuming and complex. Fortunately, automated solutions can streamline digital shelf analysis, making it more efficient.
Pricer24 helps category managers analyze the digital shelf by:
Pricing: Providing real-time data on product prices across digital shelves. You can compare competitors’ prices and analyze price positioning.
Market: Tracking competitors’ analogous products and providing information about their market share on digital shelves, minimum partner prices, promotions and their conditions, average product ratings, and the number of reviews. You can analyze these parameters to improve online merchandising, motivate customers to leave more reviews, enrich product listings with additional photos and videos, work on improving positions in product listings on partner websites, etc.
Customizable dashboards: With Pricer24, you can create dashboards that display real-time data on dynamics such as price history and assortment analysis (before and after). This helps category managers quickly and easily visualize trends and identify areas for improvement.
Summary
To achieve profitability goals and increase market share, brands need to consistently analyze their partners’ digital shelves. To make this analysis fast and efficient, you should automate the most time-consuming operation: data collection. Make informed decisions to enhance product effectiveness in retail while relying on Pricer24 to handle the routine.
Request a demo to see how Pricer24 can meet your needs
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