Imagine a physical store and how each product is placed on shelves from top to bottom based on their demand and availability. That’s the share of shelf of each product in a particular store.
Similar is the concept of digital share of shelf. It is a metric that measures online visibility of a brand or a product across ecommerce and quick commerce platforms. It also measures how often your product shows up whenever a consumer searches using a product keyword against your competitors.
Here are a few factors that impact the digital shelf visibility:
Keyword visibility
Search visibility
Content quality across PDPs
Stock availability
Pricing strategies
Customer ratings and reviews
SKU health, etc
However, the tricky part is that marketplace rankings never sit still. Pricing shifts, competitors make moves, customers behave differently from one week to the next. So, this isn't something you check once and file away. It needs regular tracking through share-of-shelf and digital shelf analytics.
How to Track and Improve Digital Share-of-Shelf
Monitor Your Share-of-Shelf
Keep an eye on where you stand, across your branded keywords, the generic ones, and the terms your competitors are fighting over too.
Maintain Brand Compliance
Make sure your listings stay accurate, and don't lose sight of unauthorized sellers, pricing that's drifted out of line, or counterfeits creeping into the mix. Staying on top of this is what keeps customer trust intact and protects the brand you've spent years building.
Respond to Customer Feedback
Reviews and Q&A sections are where the real concerns surface. Deal with them quickly and you'll find buyers trust you more, and that trust shows up in how you perform on the marketplace as well.
Optimize Your Product Detail Pages (PDPs)
Work high-intent keywords into your titles, descriptions, bullet points, and A+ content. A well-built PDP simply gets found more often in the searches that count.
3 Things to Consider While Evaluating eCom Share of Shelf
Total Share of Shelf
Measuring the overall presence of a brand’s product across eCom stores gives a simplified view of the market positioning based on select keywords. Brands with high SOS percentages have successfully eased the consumer’s discoverability journey.
Such listings acquire higher reach and enhanced visibility, witness more add-to-cart actions and ultimately acquire more revenue. Comparing the percentages every month provides insights into the change in SOS performance of your and competitor brands while displaying the change in performance. Such insights play a crucial role in creating brand strategies and marketing spending decisions across eCom platforms and require continuous monitoring.
Reviewing product SOS across stores would also help understand the highest performing eCom platforms, distinguish between the share of sponsored, competitor, and organic keywords, etc.
mFilterIt's eCom Competitive Analytics conducts a deep scan of e-commerce platforms to analyze drivers of sales. Moreover, it helps brands compare their platform coverage with competitors and find the top performers for product/brand searches, SKU ranges, and variants. The overall share of digital shelf is calculated and displayed on a single dashboard portraying a score based on these categories.
SOS by Category
Brands use categories for product listings on eCom stores which significantly impacts discoverability. For example, Amazon enlists “press” under “dry iron, steam iron, iron, and other categories. Brands add keywords on their product and company page of the eCom platform that match the categorical search results.
Evaluating category-wise share of digital shelf can offer promising deliverables. For example, brands can learn the category with the highest SOS and decide to change the categories of their products. The eCom competitive analysis of categorical SOS displays the share acquired by the brand and its competitors.
Therefore, brands can decide to enlist products under categories with higher chances of discoverability, visibility, and consumer reachability to boost add-to-cart actions and conversions. Moreover, the brand understands its categorical presence across eCom platforms.
Another advantage of using keywords based on categorical segregation is ranking on the bestseller page. Brands often evaluate their and competitor’s SOS percentages on bestseller pages under different departments/categories.
However, the full scale of SOS results by category can be derived by evaluating visibility based on brand, sub-brand, pin codes, variants, and SKU range.
mFilterIt’s eCommerce analytics solution uses these categories to provide an in-depth view of the SOS. Moreover, solution informs brands of any KPI deviations. Therefore, you stay updated about product health and data. As a result, you always keep an eye out for KPIs and don’t lose hold of market trends unless you change your marketing or advertising strategies.
Top Results of Products by Searching Specific Keywords
Measuring the share of a product under a category on an eCom platform is valuable, but so is knowing the page rank of the products using various keywords. As per our research, consumers are more likely to see products, add them to a cart, and even successfully place an order if the product is listed in the top ten results or on the first page.
For example, if a consumer searches for the keyword “Shampoo”, the brand with the highest ranking and visibility on the first three pages will most likely achieve consumer interactions. mScanIt beholds the capability of finding the keyword-level share of brands based on rankings.
Another research stated that many consumers might even decide the product’s traits, such as features, options, etc., based on the listings visible to them ahead of the line. Therefore, brands that will enlist their products on the eCom store or already have listings present on the e-commerce platforms would use this to their advantage by adding keywords of such listings on their product/company pages of the eCom platform.
The consumer sentiment of product ranking based on the most researched keywords changes the playing field of eCom store brands. Acquiring a higher ranking on search pages has become a competitive game and requires careful analysis using a solution that recognizes consumer behavior based on search results.
Most brands also spend on promoted/ sponsored listings which keep their product listings at a desirable position on the search page. However, winning the search rank organically is what brands strive for since that gives them relatively permanent space in the eyes of the buyer.
Most shoppers don't scroll far. They stop at the first few results and pick from there. Therefore, if you're not working on your share-of-shelf, you're leaving long-term ecommerce growth sitting on the table.
Conclusion
SOS calculation should become biased or limited through rankings only. Instead, brands should analyze SOS by evaluating brand/sub-brand/variant SKU ranges and most search keywords. Measuring the product ranking and the share of the brand related to it is also equally important.
Moreover, the SOS overview solution should deliver results across multiple eCom platforms.
mFilterIt’s ecommerce intelligence solution offers such capabilities and diminishes the task of manual evaluation with errors. Simultaneously, it enables brands to optimize their SOS analytics with an accurate overview based on the brand-preferred customizations.
Ecommerce intelligence provides results usable for the brand based on the KPI. Brands receive alerts for deviations in the KPI and track data in real time. D2C brands can use the platform to optimize the offline market share of products and variants.