Have you seen companies disrupt the marketplaces? Have you wondered how did the business pull it off? While there may be many reasons for the brand to unleash its full potential. One of the top reasons is gaining a holistic analysis of the market and the product category where you operate in. Today’s fierce market provides the platform for companies to strike a balance between branding and driving competition. More so, retail analytics can also help you with driving long-term sustainable solutions and have hyperbolic access to gauge their performance.
Getting access to data can either help you a great deal or whelm you so much that focus can shift away from noticing important data points. Analysis paralysis can occur in companies that are interwoven with data. Hence, getting on board with a retail analytics provider like 42Signals can help you answer questions like ‘why sales are low or ‘why product x is performing better than product y’. The key is to strike a balance between using data to know how the market is performing. Talking to your stakeholders to implement the most appropriate and apt business strategies.
Ways to gain a competitive advantage
To truly understand how you are stacked up against your competitors, knowing what questions to ask is the most important and basic criterion that has to be met. Rather, our team and eCommerce insights platform, 42Signals is driven by the idea of ‘Asking the right questions’, it simply invokes people to think. Along with this, focusing on your consumer needs and the value you are bringing to them, can help you maintain a sustainable competitive environment. A business must introspect on questions like how consumers feel about the brand and product offerings. What unique value can be provided to the consumer? Competitor analysis questions like what is driving their sales strategy and how are they digitally placed will help you to position yourself in a niche line. It also lets you perform a SWOT or PESTLE analysis to get a holistic view. Let’s read further to understand two important ways of analyzing the competition.
Price analytics
This feature helps you to analyze profitability on price points and drive basket conversion. Performing pricing analysis lets you compete with competitor product offerings and create winning price placement strategies. The built-in AI operating in the tool automatically crawls through different datasets, and it sends out alerts on price changes at SKU levels and discounted offerings.
Category benchmarking
This feature helps you to analyze product behavior and boost digital shelf placement for better product visibility. Benchmarking as a process lets to determine strategies and techniques to achieve business goals. The metrics in the category benchmarking space give you a detailed report on product descriptions, campaigns, processes, and revenue intel.
Importance of Digital Shelf Analytics
When the products are placed in the marketplaces, many time-sensitive decisions are made on the type of tools, resources, and tech to use. Using an eCommerce analytics tool will let your products afloat and visible, leading to a purchase. Every eCommerce site comes with its own ecosystem where sellers and brands compete within categories. Tracking who’s winning the share of the search can help you find opportunities in the market. Set up triggers when competitor products go out of stock or receive a poor rating. So that you can elevate this opportunity to show up as the next best alternative, it simply gives you a competitive edge.
Zeroing in on the competition
In this fast-paced and largely growing digital world, using tools to accelerate retail sales and growth is the way to achieve the milestones you set out for the business. Analyzing competition lets you identify opportunities in sales, and filter by retailers, categories, and brands to take action. Further deep dive into understanding user ratings and reviews to uncover details of the brand.
Conducting thorough digital shelf analytics lets you zero in on the competition by gaining a competitive edge and optimizing your product performance. It is mostly used by online retailers to track inconsistencies and mitigate risks like price parity. You can also get insights into product sales during peak hours. It usually takes time for the products to organically position itself, making it really hard to track all the products, due to the lack of digital audit.
Conclusion
To make use of digital shelf analytics, retailers need to automate the data collection process and dedicate a team to develop a strategy. This can be incredibly useful if you have thousands of SKUs and multiple sellers. Tools like 42Signals can help you see through process gaps. It collects recurring data from categories and catalogs across online retail marketplaces. You can get data points on product titles, descriptions, images, ratings, the number of sellers, stock status, and traffic. A deep dive into these insights lets you calculate cart conversion and abandonment rate as well.
