Digital Shelf Analytics

Discount, sale, promotion, lightning deal, offer, etc., are some of the few words the ecommerce consumers often encounter, and it certainly catches their attention. Discounts and coupons drive 41% of purchase decisions of online users. Although the primary reasons for giving discounts across ecommerce platforms are boosting sales and acquiring a larger customer base, it is not limited to it. Brands might offer discounts if they plan to launch a new or improved product version, clear stocks, nearby expiry date, selling season, occasion, increased subscription, etc. For example, at times, brands might offer products as add-ons, freebies, or gifts as part of their promotion or discounting strategy. Doing so also makes new and existing users on ecommerce platforms about the brand’s products and their existence. Why Should Brands Analyze Discounts Across eCommerce Marketplaces? “It is imperative for brands to understand their competitor’s discounting strategy.” – Ankush Arora, Vertical Head, mScanIt. Regularly analyzing discounts through competitive intelligence solutions like mScanIt aligns your brand with the ongoing market trends. Knowing the discounting trends of the competition has often proven advantageous for brands as it signifies the maximum and minimum discount percentage competitions might offer for their product listings. Comparing your brand’s discount percentage with the competition during festive seasons or occasions could help redefine the marketing and advertising strategies for acquiring a bigger customer base and revenue. For example, after analyzing discount percentages and deep-diving into the analytics, your brand could discover options for product bundling while keeping the brand reputation intact. Similarly, your brand could promote SKU-based discounts if the analytics reveal similar offerings by the competition, as it states that the consumers are engaging with such promotions. Moreover, captivating discounts regularly reveal if a competitor has launched a variant-based discount and states the exact moment of the price war on the ecommerce platform. Using e-commerce competitive analysis helps brands to detect specific variants with high discounts. Here is an example: In this example, Fire-Boltt was already advertising its 1.69″ model, and Noise began selling a similar screen size model at a higher discount, causing a price war on Amazon. 3 Reasons for Analyzing Discounts Through mScanIt Identifying Discount Trends The advertising analytics of an ecommerce platform could give you a glance at the discount campaigns’ performance if you used an advertisement. However, evaluating performance only by lowering the product listing price can become challenging to monitor regularly and doesn’t define the ongoing promotional trends used by the competition. mScanIt, a.k.a., eCom Competitive Analytics, resolves these issues through discounting analysis, which explores competition practices across ecommerce stores. It even compares the percentage of discounts offered for product listings using filters like category, platform, variant, SKU, etc., which gives a clearer understanding of the campaigns. Monitoring the Competition Optimizing sales through discounts requires carefully understanding the industry and platform-based strategies. Traditional or common discounting methods might not provide the desired output to your brand. During seasonal or occasional sales, knowing the sold units, discount percentages, most sold variants, discount range share, etc., of the competition can help your brand boost sales/revenue. Similarly, knowing the discount percentage of the competition on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis while comparing it with your product listings can offer more insights and help in finding new strategies for growth. Mapping the competition helps to discover the highest/lowest discount across platforms of the competition, find discount margins, and create new revenue/sale/pricing opportunities. Additionally, regularly monitoring the competition discount percentage would help your brand know the most favored or preferred discount type, such as sequential, one-time, subscription, etc. So, even without the sales figure of the competition, you can still acquire a larger share of the market revenue and reach a wider audience net through close monitoring using mScanIt. Location-Wise Mapping Discounts might vary based on zone, city, or pin code, as the demand and supply of products vary across locations. Your brand and competition understand this fact and discount mapping of the competition based on this criteria offers multiple advantages. Primarily, it enables brands to manage their discounting strategies based on regions, channel advertising budgets, manage product prices based on data, etc. For instance, in pin code 122017, Brand A offers a discount of 10%, and Brand B, C, and D give 12, 15, and 17 percent off for similar product listings. Under this instance, Brand A would likely create discounting strategies that match the competition a bit closer. Additionally, knowing the change in percentage of the discount every month would help brands decide the percentage figure while keeping other factors in mind. Alternatively, Brand A could bundle the product to offer a higher discount percentage and clear out of stock. Conclusion Discount analysis helps brands make marketing/advertising decisions, get an edge over the competition, acquire a higher customer base, and make more sales/revenue. Moreover, monitoring the competition is essential to learn about the ongoing trends, which can get incorporated into the business. eCom Competitive Analytics helps brands achieve discount analysis at a brand, SKU, variant, sub-brand, and sub-category level across eCom platforms and using multiple filters. Moreover, the solution offers complete discount analysis on a single dashboard with deep-diving results. For more information on the advantages of mScanIt, connect with us through email or leave us a comment.