In today’s e-commerce era, the most challenging task is to grab a customer’s attention who is
searching, researching and buying products online. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the battle of
making space on digital shelf has become more tough for retailers since almost 24 million
online stores have emerged battling for the same customer’s attention. No matter how unique
or special your product qualities are, you must plan smarter strategies to stand out uniquely in
customer’s eyes and win the digital marketplace. Such smarter technology could be Digital Shelf
Analytics.
What is Digital Shelf Analytics
Digital Shelf Analytics, technically abbreviated as DSA is an advance software solution that
assists retailers by keeping track of competitors, monitoring and analyzing e-commerce
performance data. It is not a as easy to analyze all the digital shelf data since it is immensely
broad. This is where DSA is used to focus primarily on performance metrics. Brands and
retailers find it confusing to decide where to invest their time, talent and money but many of
them have switched to DSA for effective evaluation. Below are some factors why one should
opt for DSA.
Evaluating your digital performance – DSA assists you in knowing who’s leading the
search engines, about variation of your products' specification on different sites and
controlling the traffic send to each seller.
Finding opportunities that can’t be seen by your competitors – Online sites use DSA to
measure data points and gaining a competitive advantage using that data such as
prompting your product when a similar product is unavailable or has received low
rating.
Increasing visibility of your product – The biggest benefit of using DSA is that it
determines what’s leading in search engines and accordingly making products
discoverable that enhances your online performance.
Strengthening the integrity of your brand – DSA helps you in monitoring inconsistencies
of your products that can in any way lead to negative impacts on your conversion rates.
Some brands and retailers still believe that they don’t need a DSA to optimize their digital shelf
to stand online. The brand’s digital shelf visibility can be affected by many factors such as
Inaccurate product description
Poor customer reviews and ratings
Out of stock products
Higher priced products
Unclear images of your products
Role of Competitor Price Tracking
To stand out visibly and optimize your digital shelf technology, competitor price tracking
through DSA is performed. This is also performed in order to attain a balance between your
product, customers and your competitors. There are two ways for competitor price monitoring
i.e. manual and automated.
Manual competitor price tracking – To gather and monitor complete range of prices of
products that other competitors sell is called manual competitor price tracking method.
But this method is not practiced for larger data sets since it requires a lot of time, effort
and labor.
Automated competitor price tracking – unlike manual tracking, automated tracking is
performed through professionally developed software to secure and privatize data.
Moreover, it can keep track of unlimited products and competitors.
Use of such smarter technologies can lead to your optimized digital shelf so that you may
stand out online.
