Digital shelf analysis: The secret weapon for brands this golden quarter
As brands begin to feel the effects of the lucrative ‘golden quarter’, digital inventory has never been more vital to maximise marketing and sales strategies. Toby Stupples, Client Delivery Director at Gekko Group, discusses how brands can remain competitive in the tough retail landscape.
In Britain, 67% of consumers plan to spend the same or more than last year during the 2024 golden quarter1 so brands will need to pull out all the stops to get their slice of the pie, particularly when it comes to sales and marketing strategies.
With huge retail events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday on the horizon, plus the flurry of activity surrounding Christmas gifting, having clear visibility of online activities and transaction success has never been more crucial for brands and retailers.
Smart shelf analysis with Gekko’s GWS
Maintaining a clear overview of inventory online has become harder due to capacity and sheer volume of points of sale. Online, data analytics is transforming the ways brands monitor data about both their own products and the others on the shelf, providing insights that help improve performance and the overall customer experience.
Digital shelf analysis is a secret weapon in helping brands understand what’s working, and what’s not. New tools and enhancements like GWS from retail experts Gekko provides brands with clearer visibility of metrics from retailers such as share of voice, pricing, stock availability plus ratings and reviews, providing visual and actionable insights to enable brands to maintain market share and execute strategic marketing objectives.
GWS helps brands to monitor, manage and review e-commerce performance across selected retail platforms, gathering digital shelf data from specific retailers and presenting it back in an easy to digest dashboard. In turn, this data helps brands to understand their performance against the competition, including monitoring and reporting on sponsored positions to understand which brands are investing with which retail partners, providing crucial information to better manage strategies, partners and product listings.
By monitoring how products are presented, these tools also help to enhance the customer purchasing experience online, as it allows brands to ensure that descriptions, images and positioning is consistent across third-party retail sites. Additionally, with customer reviews and star ratings of products being some of the biggest factors in converting sales online, web-scraping assists in constantly checking and maintaining the display of this information to enhance the purchase experience, and ultimately help to gain market share over competitors.
Maintaining the competitive edge
Despite Black Friday maintaining its position as the most anticipated retail event of the year, it is becoming more diluted than ever before. Coupled with high inflation and the continuing cost-of-living crisis, brands need to secure a competitive edge.
As many consumers are now making split-second purchasing decisions based on price rather than brand preference, retailers also need to consider how they respond. Unlike other web-scraping tools, GWS offers analysis of the full digital shelf, allowing brands to track real-time competitor activity and establish a strategy to maintain competitiveness, particularly at this time of year, when costs fluctuate so frequently.
Price monitoring via e-commerce platforms can provide last minute insights for brands to track prices and share of shelf against competitors to ensure they are offering the most compelling deals and packages; a clear advantage amid the deals battles of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and across the omnichannel strategy.
Analysing the full spectrum of shelf availability provides a great overview of stock requirements in line with demand. Additionally, it provides clear and precise predictions many months in advance of seasonal discount days, like Amazon Prime Days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas gifting season.
Stamping out the competition for success
With this in mind, the best way to get ahead is to plan ahead. Having a full view of a product’s retail landscape and that of its competition provides brands with the information needed to negotiate with retailers for better pricing and placement throughout the year – but it is vital during the golden quarter.
Competition from other retailers and brands limits how successful traditional calendar events like Black Friday can be. So, brands need to get a leg up on the competition by taking a holistic view of the entire shelf, and adjusting their activity and pricing accordingly. This way, they can secure a higher return on investment, along with a wider understanding of consumer behaviours and the ever-changing market.
