Main>Blog>Guide>Step-by-Step Guide to Digital Shelf Analysis for Online Stores
Guide
9.06.2023
874
Step-by-Step Guide to Digital Shelf Analysis for Online Stores
Analyzing competitors’ digital shelves is a standard practice in e-commerce because competitor intelligence provides valuable insights for category managers. Based on data from a digital shelf analysis of competitors, you can identify what attracts customers, offer unique advantages, and understand how to improve your online merchandising.
In this article, you will learn about key parameters to focus on during competitor digital shelf analysis and how to evaluate them.
Regularly analyzing the price index within a category helps you understand how your positioning aligns with competitors’ prices.
If your prices are higher than those of your competitors and you know that customers in this category are price-sensitive, it’s a signal to consider adjusting your pricing strategy. This will make your offerings more accessible to customers.
Methodology: Compare the prices of your assortment with the prices of similar items offered by competitors.
To conduct price comparisons, the category manager should have accurate and up-to-date competitor data. Parsing competitors’ prices using Pricer24 can save you time when collecting this information. Here’s how you will be able to analyze the data you gather:
Price Comparison report displaying in a pie chart the number and percentage of market offerings whose prices are lower than yours
In the Price Comparison report, you can easily get an overall understanding of the market’s price positioning in terms of your price and competitors’ prices on your products with just a few clicks. Statistics for specific stores allow you to quickly identify how many products in your store are sold at higher, lower, or the same prices compared to other online retailers.
Table showing the Price Comparison report
Next, you can display a list of positions with prices higher than yours and see the differences in percentages and absolute numbers.
List of your products with prices higher than competitors’
By regularly analyzing the price index in the category compared to competitors, the category manager can make informed pricing decisions, optimize profitability, and maintain a competitive advantage.
Analyzing competitors’ assortments in a specific category helps you gain insights into market trends, identify gaps, and identify opportunities for improving your own assortment and representation.
Understanding market positioning
By studying the assortment of products offered by competitors, category managers can identify their unique selling propositions. This knowledge allows for improving your own assortment strategy and identifying areas of competitive advantage.
Identifying product gaps and opportunities
By exploring competitors’ assortments, category managers can identify segments where competitors do not meet market demand. These gaps represent opportunities. By filling them with your own products, you can attract customers who are looking for specific products that competitors may not offer.
Optimizing assortment and product diversity
Analyzing competitors’ assortments helps you determine whether your own assortment is too narrow or too broad to make informed decisions on expanding or consolidating your offerings.
Tracking market trends and innovations
Monitoring competitors’ assortments provides category managers with insights into new market trends. They can identify new product categories, brands, segments, or items offered by competitors to meet customer needs. This information allows for timely adjustments to your own assortment strategy.
Methodology: Compare assortment (category width) and detailed availability data vis-à-vis competitors.
In Pricer24, it works as follows: You provide your catalog and a list of competitors for monitoring. After matching, our platform starts regularly collecting all necessary information. The service can gather data not only on your catalog but also on competitors’ catalogs, allowing you to see the entire market.
In this report, you can quickly find answers to questions such as:
How many items have the status out of stock or not found both for you and your competitors?
Which competitors have a better representation of products from your assortment?
What’s interesting on competitors’ digital shelves, and what new products are on the market?
Using tags and filters, you can create separate reports to monitor the availability of top-selling and other important products.
You can not only analyze the current situation but also track changes in the market assortment: the total number of items, how many items are currently in stock, and how much has gone out of stock (daily or over a specific period) to timely notice shortages or surpluses with the help of Pricer24’s Dynamics of assortment changes report.
By analyzing competitors’ assortments in a given category, managers can understand the market landscape, identify strategic opportunities, and optimize their own assortment strategy.
3. Promotional activities
Analyze promotional campaigns and compare your advertising strategy with the market. By studying types of promotional activities, discount levels, and mechanics used by competitors, you can assess the competitiveness and effectiveness of your own promotional campaigns.
Methodology: Evaluate the level of promotional activities in a given category, a given segment, or by specific SKUs.
Collecting data on competitors’ promotions can also be automated. In Pricer24, this information is displayed in the Market Analysis report.
Example of the Market Analysis report
You can easily create a list of current promos for SKUs and explore them in detail.
4. Positions in product listings
Analyze the top positions in competitors’ product listings and gather information about competitors’ bestsellers to identify market trends.
Methodology: Check what products appear at the top of online stores search results of competitors’ product listings.
Compare it with your shelf, create hypotheses, and, if necessary, transform your product listings to align with your competitors’ (for instance, to optimize the sales structure).
5. Product ratings
Assess customer preferences in your category: Which features, attributes, and advantages make a product popular?
Methodology: Analyze which products have the highest number of reviews and ratings in competitors’ catalogs.
If possible, work with these products and evaluate the results.
6. Content in product cards
Descriptions, photos, and videos determine the quality of product presentation on the digital shelf. By carefully examining these elements on competitors’ websites, you can assist the content department in prioritizing tasks.
Methodology: Analyze how product cards are presented, compare them with your own, and identify areas for improvement.
With the help of Pricer24, you can quickly see:
Whether descriptions are available for specific products on competitors’ websites
The number of photos and videos in competitors’ product cards
With this data, you can compare your catalog with competitors’ and understand where content improvements are needed: adding descriptions, photos, and videos.
How Pricer24 helps analyze the digital shelf
Analyzing the digital shelf is crucial for category managers, but it can be a time-consuming and complex process. Thankfully, automated solutions can simplify the process and provide valuable insights.
With Pricer24, a category manager can create and test hypotheses on:
How to improve pricing by setting market prices better than competitors
How to expand their catalog (if it’s not a niche store) and maximize product assortment using specific positions
How to make promotional campaigns more attractive than those of competitors
How to identify potential growth opportunities through popular products
Summary
To achieve profitability goals or increase market share, category managers need to regularly analyze competitors’ digital shelves. To make this analysis fast and effective, you can automate the time-consuming task of data collection. Make informed decisions to enhance your retail competitiveness while Pricer24 handles all the routine work.
Request a demo to see how Pricer24 can meet your needs
Privacy policy
Your privacy is very important to us. We want your work on the Internet to be as pleasant and useful as possible, and you quite calmly used the broadest range of information, tools and opportunities that the Internet offers.
The personal information of the Members collected at the time of registration (or at any other time) is mainly used to prepare the Products or Services in accordance with your needs. Your information will not be transferred or sold to third parties. However, we may partially disclose personal information in special cases described in the “Consent with the mailing”
What data is collected on the site
At voluntary registration on reception of dispatch you send the Name and E-mail through the registration form.
What is the purpose of this data?
The name is used to contact you personally, and your e-mail for sending you mailings of newsletters, news, useful materials, commercial offers.
Your name and e-mail are not transferred to third parties, under any circumstances, except for cases related to the compliance with the requirements of the law.
You can refuse to receive mailing letters and remove your contact information from the database at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link present in each letter.
How this data is used
With the help of these data, information on the actions of visitors on the site is collected in order to improve its content, improve the functionality of the site and, as a result, create high-quality content and services for visitors.
You can change your browser settings at any time so that the browser blocks all files or notifies you about sending these files. Note at the same time that some functions and services will not be able to work properly.
How this data is protected
To protect your personal information, we use a variety of administrative, management and technical security measures. Our Company adheres to various international control standards aimed at transactions with personal information, which include certain control measures to protect information collected on the Internet.
Our employees are trained to understand and follow these control measures, they are familiarized with our Privacy Notice, regulations and instructions.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that we are trying to protect your personal information, you too must take measures to protect it.
We strongly recommend that you take all possible precautions while on the Internet. The services and websites that we organize include measures to protect against leakage, unauthorized use and alteration of the information we control. Despite the fact that we are doing everything possible to ensure the integrity and security of our network and systems, we can not guarantee that our security measures will prevent illegal access to this information by hackers from outside organizations.
If this privacy policy is changed, you will be able to read about these changes on this page or, in special cases, receive a notification on your e-mail.
