Horses for courses – What sells more on Blinkit, might not get the same response on Zepto. On the same pin code, three different dark stores may have different product availability and more orders of particular brands as compared to others. Pricing and bundling of products also vary from one quick commerce platform as compared to others. Therefore, building a strategy for e-commerce and quick commerce marketplaces demands insights and analysis covering different platforms, geographies, dark stores, and trends versus competition.
Let’s explore what it takes to build a strategy for e-commerce marketplaces and what brands need to stay competitive in a fast-paced evolving digital commerce ecosystem.
Matching the pace of evolving needs of E-commerce marketplaces
Gone are the days when e-commerce marketplaces were limited to metros. The e-commerce horizons are expanding to tier-2, tier-3 cities, and beyond. Ease of payment and swift internet has led to a new revolution. This scenario is not limited to a single country, but global e-commerce is picking up pace with Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia (AMESA) region leading the charge.
The global eCommerce online sales reached $5.8 Trillion in 2023 and are expected to grow to $6.3 trillion globally in 2024
The astronomical rise in e-commerce sales and competitive landscape spicing up has opened multiple sales avenues from e-commerce brands in the digital commerce landscape which include E-commerce, Q-com marketplaces, D2C platforms and social commerce with massive role of influencers driving sales.
Building strategy with marketplace intelligence and insights can help scale business, identify market gaps, target new unexplored geographies, and target demographics.
Data Driven Intelligence for e-com growth
E-commerce growth requires strategies that can leverage data and insights to boost brand presence at pin-code levels across multiple marketplaces. Monitoring brand performance versus competition in the digital space is the key to staying ahead and staying competitive. Big brands with massive SKUs venturing into multiple categories, sub-categories, and product variants need comprehensive insights along with monitoring their sellers versus competition. Optimizing delivery turn-around time and identifying pricing violations are the key challenges. For Quick commerce, availability becomes a key factor.
To identify gaps in strategies, tracking market trends along with varying requirements of different platforms requires high-quality digital shelf monitoring.
Comparatively smaller brands looking to go head-on with established well-known global brands require insights into what set them apart and identify the market gaps and opportunities at the micro-level. ecommerce competitive analysis and actionable insights can help them identify their audience and white spaces in the market. This could enable say, a local indigenous toothpaste brand in Southeast Asia to compete with brands like Pepsodent or Colgate. May be not at all sub-categories but on say, 100gm pack at some region on Lazada or Shopee.
Every brand has different needs that require a solution that can be customized to suit their needs on different e-commerce platforms.
Protecting Your Brand Integrity on E-commerce Marketplaces
The e-commerce strategies for brands on digital marketplaces should not be limited to just digital commerce intelligence. Both on and off-platform activities must be in sync to boost brand reputation on the platform. Therefore, here are some things brands need to elevate performance on e-commerce platforms.
E-commerce perfect page analysis:
On every platform and geography brands’ products may have different competition. To make this battle more interesting all platforms require a different strategy. Therefore, platform-level analysis or perfect page analysis across platforms is required to ensure consistency and brand presence across the digital commerce landscape.
Analytics for its Sellers:
Sellers on e-commerce platforms also need to upswing their process with Digital Shelf monitoring, Marketing Automation, and Automated Cataloguing. This can help simplify the process, and boost sales with more buy box wins.
Platform-Level Intelligence:
The rise of digital commerce has revolutionized the customer behavior. Options are plenty for shoppers to pick the shopping platforms and products, this makes the online shopping ecosystem more competitive. Monitoring, identifying white spaces and real-time actionable insights are strategic intelligence required to optimize performance across platforms.
Final Thought
Intelligence drives performance on e-commerce platforms. E-commerce strategy must cover platform-level intelligence, seller analysis, and competitive insights on KPIs like pricing, availability, keyword share, product page content, delivery turnaround time, and more. Every brand faces its own set of challenges on different e-commerce platforms and geographies, identifying the gaps, exploring new opportunities, and enabling a brand to optimize performance across categories, sub-categories, and product variants requires a data-driven strategy.
Get in touch to learn more about leveraging digital commerce intelligence to build e-commerce strategies.
