Digital Shelf Analytics

Your Go-To Guide for E-commerce Competitive Intelligence – Part 1

2 part series to succeed in e-commerce business “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” – Otto Von Bismarck Competition keeps a business on its toes. From bringing in new product line categories to scouting for consumers (and engaging old customers), the idea is to become the go-to choice for your customers. Online shoppers are merciless beings (no offense) as they’re spoiled with a plethora of choices and offers. While shopping for their requirement, if the competition’s business appears before your business does, you tend to become a history for them. In today’s world of free-market and internet accessibility, e-commerce has become a lucrative choice for shoppers and businesses alike. No matter what product you offer, there will always be 20 other websites to offer similar products that are trying to woo customers with varied schemes and offers. The competition is pervasive and if you do not keep a close eye on your competition, there’s a good chance that your business will no longer be in the competition in times to come. The E-commerce business is in cut throat competition. Every business must have its eyes and ears everywhere, all at once. Understanding Ecommerce Competitive Intelligence Understanding the competitor is not quite an easy task as it may sound. Although every query is a click away, however, the idea is to first understand the kind of competition you face. Direct competitors are those businesses in the competition who sell the same products and services as your business does. Indirect competitors are businesses that do not sell similar products as your business but satisfy the same customer need. The sweet spot is to determine how your business offerings fare in comparison to theirs and what are the differences stand out. Ecommerce competitive intelligence, therefore, is a strategic understanding of your business in the marketing related to our competition. What’s your business like, who’s your competition, what are they selling and at what price, product availability, discount, and offers; there’s a wide range of intelligence that is gathered and the same information is put to use to outshine your competitors. Gathering effective competition intelligence in today’s barrage of marketing and avalanche of digital marketing techniques requires a dedicated team that will monitor and report data in real-time. The difficulty arises when such processes are done manually which is cumbersome and time taking. By the time all such data is gathered and analyzed, your competition might have already wooed your loyal customers making your business redundant. Automation is the key Processing massive chunks of data manually is nearly impossible. As you start scaling your business, processes become more dreadful with repetitive tasks. Taking care of product availability, vendor inventory, order dispatches, packaging, every task has to be on point all the while staying on top of customer service and reviews. Apart from managing your own business, it is also important to keep a close check on the competition to better position your services. None of this is practically possible by employing manual processes. That is where automated tools such as mScanIt offer optimized analytical support for your e-commerce business to succeed. It is imperative to analyze your e-commerce business through the right mix of relevant insights, including, competitor price and discount comparisons, RoI on ad-spends in marketplaces, automated reports. Not just this, such tools also help businesses in finding USP (which might be different than what the business thought), analyze your competition’s weaknesses, and explore possibilities to tap into untouched market segments.

PepsiCo’s D2c is a Big Sign of Digital Commerce Becoming Mainstream for Brands

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PepsiCo announced two new direct-to-consumer offerings to shop directly online. So far, the approach of brands that existed prior to the digital era has been lukewarm about digital platforms. It’s been more about feeling better to be there as well as feel the FOMO. However, the actual sales expectations have not been much. Typically, such businesses don’t sell more than 10% online and still depend heavily on brick-and-mortar retail. Well, they are not wrong in doing so. That is where the customer has been so far. For the online, the strategy has been to hook on some of the popular marketplaces with very soft objectives. It was more like just tick-marking one of the checklist items. The COVID-19 situation has made brands realize that irrespective of whatever penetration they have in the offline channel, online can bring a much-required and reliable direct connection with the customer. This has many advantages for a brand. The most important benefit at the moment is sales fulfillment. Brands come to know where the opportunities are in terms of demand and align everything at their disposal to fulfill that. Other advantages include building a direct connection with the customer, so learning a lot about them. Also, the supplies right up to the shelf level can be curated and connected with the demand. This way customers can be pampered more by exactly delivering what is being looked for. Whether the brand will continue to engage with aggregate marketplaces or not, is too early to debate. However, it appears they will continue to be present on these marketplaces and built upon a direct online presence as well. This is not the first journey for many brands. They have been digitally active primarily through social media platforms to engage directly with customers for their feedback, messaging, and communication. Now they are adding one more important layer of selling directly to the customer. This is going to disrupt the traditional channels where we have many layers of intermediaries. Disney, for example, has its Direct to Customer & International program which is redefining the business of entertainment content. Even if the production house would be the same, the content would always be location-driven and the libraries Disney would be having in the US are entirely different than what they have in India, as an example. Much of it is done with the distribution network in each country which pushes what they feel will sell rather than what consumers want. Going direct to the customer gives Disney the power to deliver content irrespective of any borders and actually sense the pulse of the customer, who is now a global citizen and wants no disparity between what could be consumed in India or the US. Brands will have to reach the right customers and know a lot about them and their preferences. These newcomers will have to take a lot more cautious approach while going directly online in terms of challenges like ad fraud and brand safety. The digital marketing learning curve has just begun for these traditional brands while the aggregate marketplaces are digital-only/digital-first organizations that have a much-evolved understanding of the complexities of the digital maze which is behind the application or service. PepsiCo and many other brands that will go Direct-to-Consumer in the next few weeks or at least months will have to proactively deal with ad fraud and brand safety. This is because their customer will come for a particular purpose on their platform, so discovering the right and genuine customer will hold the key to success. On aggregate marketplaces, the customer can still find many other products (reasons) to connect even if the primary hook did not meet the expectations. More so, the brands that are digitally evolved are losing anywhere between 25-35% on account of ad fraud, there are chances that newcomers will lose more.

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