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3 Things to Consider While Writing Product Descriptions

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Do you remember when you had to visit the nearest retail store (Kirana-wala) and check out the product’s qualities by reading its description? We still have an audience that does the same as their preferred choice. Product description in an e-marketplace, like Amazon or BigBasket displayed after clicking on a product listing. It is much more than the standard description written on a product’s label. It signifies the product’s audience, benefits or features, suitability criteria, and more. The question that ecommerce marketers come across while writing a compelling description is ‘How to make the product description convincing to potential customers?’. A convincing description would increase the buyer’s interest in purchasing and re-purchasing the same product while simultaneously increasing interest in exploring more about it. Here are the 3 things to consider for writing a great product description Leave No Room for Doubts If you have ever visited a clothing outlet in a shopping mall, you must have been greeted by a salesperson who can assist you in searching for a section or finding the product for you. The salesperson leaves no room for doubt and helps you out with every possible detail. Also, create a user-centric content product description that provide answers to all possible questions that a customer may have about the product Understand customer needs Evaluate customer reviews and Q&As Address every possible customer concern in description This would not just increase customer’s interest in purchasing the product but will give the existing shoppers a loud and clear message, ‘we are hearing your voice’. It also leaves no doubt in the minds of the buyers. Include All Essentials Convincing a customer to buy a product takes more than stating the benefits or features of a product. It demands showing off humbly. It requires stating the obvious and the not-so-obvious factors. The product description should have sufficient room for all the qualities, which also helps in removing repetition. Keep it precise and informative Use Story telling style – engage with facts and benefits Include all essentials that customer seeks For example, people searching for hiking backpacks would want to know its capacity, whether it is waterproof, materials, and ‘unsuitable for’ criteria. But, ensuring that everything the product offers is mentioned requires knowing the aspects mentioned in similar listings of your competitor. Sometimes, you may not regard a feature as desirable, but the competitor might use it to scale up sales of similar products. Our eCom Competitive Analytics solutihelps brands analyze product descriptions and discover the critical aspects through a word cloud. The most mentioned words often appear the largest and using them in their description helps in page optimization. Use high performing keywords for your brand Writing a similar description for almost similar products gives a wrong impression to the online shopper. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for regular buyers to distinguish between the products and makes buying decisions easier. So, it’s a slippery slope for ecommerce marketers whenever the demand for new product descriptions arises for similar listings. Keywords play a significant role in product discoverability on ecommerce marketplaces. An ecommerce marketer writing a one-paragraph description could include 2-3 keywords at the most. However, deciding the right keywords becomes essential as it can place similar listings together or under different search results. The best way to find the correct keywords would be to look at competitors’ listings. Doing so helps to know the approach they are following for similar listings of their products. Our solution, mScanIt, shows the top keywords used by your competitors along with your keywords. The analysis through mScanIt helps to know their most used keywords and measure whether their keywords have been used in your description or not. Conclusion A powerful product description can increase an online shopper’s interest in the product and convince them to buy it. Ecommerce marketers know that descriptions should be crisp, enriched with keywords, and scannable. However, eCom marketers should also include customers’ interests, all the ‘need-to-know’ aspects and know competitor’s keywords. Doing so would help to make a much better product description. Ecommerce Competitive Intelligence Solution helps brands to evaluate the differences between their product descriptions against their competitors. The analysis helps brand marketers to achieve their description goals and optimize their content for search engines.

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ecommerce-intelligence

Why Do Rating Matter to eCom Brands?

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Online shoppers judge a product through its ratings and impact purchase decisions The first and only way to know about customer experience in an eCommerce marketplace is through ratings. They are eye-openers. Product reviews and rating can make the customer interested in buying the product or scroll until a better product becomes visible. The importance of ratings is undermined by reviews, as they offer ‘textual’ feedback from online shoppers. However, many reviewers only submit product ratings and don’t write about their experiences. Brands have to incentivize customers to submit their feedback through offers, scratch cards, gifts, etc. Such customer experiences are also biased, as many brands clearly state, “give a 5-star rating and write a few words” in their lingo. Brands also run campaigns to acquire customer feedback on their products. They approach influencers to submit feedback on eCommerce marketplaces in text or video format along with the ratings. Moreover, they also ask influencers to create unboxing videos or product feedback for their Product Display Page (PDP). Implications of Ratings on eCom Products Customer’s Interest in the Product Let’s say an online shopper searches for ‘best smartphones under Rs 10,000.’ The top search results have a rating between three to five stars. Which one do you think the customer would likely prefer? While this is an open-ended and subjective choice, as it would also account for the brand, price, image, and other crucial aspects, the product’s rating will undoubtedly change the decision to visit the product page. The next step in a customer’s journey after searching for a product now depends on the ratings shown on the digital shelf. The product ratings are also displayed at the top of the PDP on most eCommerce marketplaces. It’s a signal to re-affirm the experience of online shoppers. Online Shopper’s Decision to Read Reviews If a product’s ratings are below three stars, an online shopper may not be interested in buying or even looking at the product. However, if it is between three and five stars, the decision to explore more about the online shoppers’ experience through reviews would substantially increase. Therefore, ratings have the power to impact an online shopper’s decision in two extreme directions. The need to have a positive rating is always a priority for eCommerce marketers. Online shoppers read more about the product if a product has a neutral or positive rating. It makes them more interested in the features or qualities of the product. It also removes their distrust of the brand, especially if they buy a product for the first time. Helps to Make Product Judgements A three-star-rated product informs online shoppers that the buyers could face problems and should not expect the best results. A four-star product rating states that ‘it’s almost up to the expectations given in the PDP.’ Now, it’s easy to know what to expect from a one, two, or five-star-rated product. Right? Online shoppers start judging the credibility of a product based on the rating. In most instances, people would always go for a four to five-star-rated product. (If you disagree, please comment and let us know your reasons). The eCommerce search algorithm understands that the highest-rated products under a category would interest a higher number of buyers. Therefore, most top search results include the best-rated products, which generally don’t go below three stars. Wrapping Up A product’s rating has a wide range of implications. They can either build an online shopper’s association with a brand or disassociate existing loyalists to competitive products. The need to have a positive rating for all eCommerce listings has become essential, as slight differences can alter customer buying decisions. Moreover, product ratings are a window into the customer experience. Poor ratings keep the customer’s interest in the product at bay, and good ratings uplift their enthusiasm to know more about the product. Our digital commerce Intelligence, mScanIt, enables brands to track their product ratings in real-time and measure their performance with the top competitors. The solution can also set alerts in case there is a sudden surge in ratings. Using the alerts helps brands to notify eCommerce managers to take swift action against an issue or find out the reason for positive publicity by checking the PDP.

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online-sentiment-analysis

How Reviews and Rating Impact eCom Sales?

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According to a study, products with at least five reviews have a 270% higher chance of a sale.  The number of stars in the rating and shoppers feedback are vital for every eCommerce marketplace be it Amazon, BigBasket, Flipkart or any other. The heating up race to grab attention of buyers via multiple images, attractive prices, product comparisons, reviews & ratings are helping buyer to make more and more informed decisions. The customers feedback & reviews help buyers learn more about the product quality, brand, seller, features, benefits, etc. The sentiments and personal experience shared by the buyers makes reviews worth reading. According to research, about 91% of online shoppers read reviews before making a buying decision. The online shoppers want to know pros and cons of a product before deciding to buy. The negative feedbacks help judge the authenticity of the product, the core problems, irregularities, and more. On the other hand, positive reviews help build brand or product trust & credibility by stating the best features and clearing doubts about value for money. Why businesses need to assess customers sentiment? Reviews and ratings also influence marketing decisions. Brands often analyze the product with the worst feedback to find customers’ most problematic areas. Addressing customer concerns often helps brands to convert overall negative sentiment into positive or at least turn them into neutral. As a result, the new buyer decisions also get influenced in a positive way. The regular monitoring of reviews can help brands enhance their customer experience and develop new ideas or features. An evaluation of your brand vis-a-vis the competition can help to identify the most used words by customers for similar products on an ecommerce marketplace. This analysis helps in optimizing the marketing strategies. Brands need such analysis for optimizing the marketing strategies. Our solution mScanIt can even provide real-time alerts if the sentiment intensity is moving towards the extreme, keeping a tab on customer sentiment. Replying to customers reviews & ratings in real-time often results in a higher conversion rate. Impact of online reviews Boosts SEO and Product Discoverability Ease of finding the product listing on an eCommerce marketplace is crucial to product discoverability. Discoverability is directly proportional to Share of Shelf (SOS). So, when the keywords targeted by the brand appear higher, it enhances the share of Shelf. Most eCommerce marketplaces’ algorithm includes reviews and ratings to find out how relevant and popular the product is, before displaying the results to the online shopper. The targeted brand keywords used in the reviews also boost SEO. For example, a Bluetooth headset review would contain words like best Bluetooth, wireless, hands-free, etc., as part of the feedback. As these words are the SEO keywords, it might help the product become more visible in the top page listings. The product may also appear in the duplicate listing under organic search results of hands-free and wireless because these have been mentioned in the reviews. eCommerce marketplaces understand the importance of reviews and display them before the product price in search results. Products with reviews on the digital shelf listings often achieve higher conversion rates, depending upon the price parameters of the buyers. Products with good reviews and ratings on online shopping stores often boost their organic SERP on web browsers which leads to higher visits to the product display page, conversion rate, and sales. Additionally, they alter the Share-of-Voice of brands on Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines. Even if the product is new to the online shopping platform, lack of review will affect its sales unless it is of a well-known brand or much anticipated product. The businesses continuously engage in campaigns for acquiring product reviews as in most instances, people want to see the customer experiences of the same product from other online shoppers before deciding to purchase the product. Build customer trust and loyalty Products with reviews and ratings instill trust in a brand or eCommerce seller. The likelihood of purchasing an item from an online shopping store increases as the customer trusts the brand’s reliability and resolutions. Brands use eCommerce competitive analytic solutions like mScanIt for monitoring positive and negative sentiments with such tool they can evaluate customer reviews in their marketplace dashboard and send instant responses. Brands that proactively respond to customer reviews often witness higher conversion rates and sales. Simultaneously, they may boost customer loyalty and trust of potential buyers on the products, as they can see the resolution offered by the brand to resolve customer problems. The subjective view and understanding of the product usability also resolve frequent queries of the potential buyers, which once again impacts loyalty, trust, and the final buying decision. Help customers make final buying decision Many marketers believe that people spending a long time on a product page are probably checking the specifications, measuring pros & cons, and matching them with their needs before making the final buying decision. Reviews and ratings are opinions or comments given by product buyers and influencers which often include the brand name. The increasing number of brands mentions indeed impacts the algorithm of the eCommerce marketplace, especially while curating the best results for its buyers to boost sales. When the viewer read about other customer experiences, and name dropping of brands in reviews build a subjective opinion about the brand or product. Do you recall when ‘Realme was first introduced into the market, and people slowly forgot about ‘Redmi? Brands also use reviews for showcasing customer experiences to potential buyers or target audiences. You might have come across shopping ads on social media and search engines. Did you scroll past a new brand after seeing the reviews, or did you check out its product page? The length of reviews and ratings goes beyond the eCommerce sphere. Many websites have full-page articles and videos on products offered in online shopping stores. The brands also highlight ratings in product images to boost page time on their product page. Buyers sentiment matters! Reviews and rating could be a great tool to understand

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Why is Seller Analysis Important for eCom Brands?

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The eCommerce marketplaces have become hotspots for brands to ensure they capture the maximum market share through their omnichannel approach. To execute this, brands have two options, sell online directly or appoint authorized sellers. Unfortunately, there is one more category of sellers that are unauthorized or third-party (3P) sellers and they tap into the same eCommerce marketplaces and drive away the potential customer base towards their listings. The issue with third party sellers is that you can’t control them for the activities they are performing on the platform. To start with, they don’t necessarily provide genuine products of the brand. In fact, they continuously find ways to increase their financial base by enlisting counterfeit listings actively. Although the bigger issue with such sellers is that they continuously engage in Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) violations, which lead to many repercussions to brands, including damaged brand reputation, loss of genuine/authorized sellers, etc. The biggest disadvantage of MAP violations through unauthorized sellers is that it destroys the price parity of the brand and creates consumer distrust in the brand. Moreover, loyal consumers may ignore the brand’s product listings, opt for alternatives, or go to another store to find better products. When consumer’s product demand from authorized sellers is diverted on eCommerce marketplaces by 3P sellers, the demand and supply relationship between the brand and its sellers is also affected. This unexpected change in demand and supply often leads to overstocking, which is more dangerous in case of perishable products. Third party sellers also take the maximum benefit when brands run out of stock, and they scale their sales creating more damaging situation for brands. While these might seem concerning to you as a brand, the story doesn’t stop here. 3P sellers also engage in copyright and brand infringement by using images, content, or videos of genuine products to sell their counterfeits without the brand’s permission. The eCommerce marketplaces, like Amazon, Flipkart, Shopee, Lazada, etc., have also been flooded with sellers of lookalike products. What Should Brands Do to Monitor their eCom Platform Sellers? Monitoring sellers across eCommerce platforms to flag unauthorized sellers is challenging. To cater to this major issue of eCommerce players, we help them with our  Digital Commerce intelligence, mScanIt, to review seller activities in real-time. mScanIt has capabilities to perform Seller Analysis that reveals the stock availability of products across eCommerce platforms. Brands can use the list of sellers on each platform, the type of products they are selling, the stock availability of sellers, and more. Also, the solution can help brands in identifying which seller is winning the buy box. By reviewing these details in real-time, brands can detect unknown sellers and check out their activities on different eCommerce platforms. Simultaneously, a brand can view and compare the product availability of 3P seller’s vis-a-vis authorized sellers within a time frame. If the percentage of product available with authorized sellers is lower than the 3P sellers, consumers could opt for products from alternate sellers or even visit alternate stores. The scenario is persistently noticed in the FMCG industry, as grocery is an everyday need of consumers and is one of the categories with the highest demands since the launch of Quick Commerce (Q-Com) brands and apps. Brands can leverage mScanIt to inform their Key Account Managers or Category Managers to report 3P or unauthorized sellers. Doing so would diminish the chance of MAP violations and effectively maintain the product price of different variants under multiple categories. Moreover, brands can know the exact sellers of their products functioning on eCommerce platforms. It would likely avoid copyright, trademark, and content infringement. Conclusion Seller analysis is an important facet of E-Commerce Competitive Analytics. Brands need to analyze the activity of their sellers to check their stocking needs. Simultaneously, they need to know the sellers active across E-Commerce platforms like Amazon, Blinkit, Flipkart, and others. The seller analysis is also important for eliminating counterfeit, unauthorized, or 3P sellers from the eCommerce platforms, directly impacting the trust between a brand and its consumers. Schedule a demo with us to learn about the advantages of the eCommerce Competitive Analytics solution for your brand.

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ad-fraud

Are Your Digital Ad Campaigns Safe from Sophisticated Bots?

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The digital world is evolving rapidly, and marketers are moving from traditional platforms to digital platforms. But in this growing digital ecosystem, someone is hiding behind the screens to disrupt your growth. Behind all the pros of digital advertising, a manipulated truth is that marketers are unaware of who is coming to see their ad campaigns. To throw light on this, ad fraud solution providers have come into the limelight to validate how much invalid traffic is coming to the ad campaigns. However, just when the marketers were ready to combat ad fraud, cybercriminals expanded their fraud zone with sophisticated bots. Unlike the general bots, the sophisticated bots can replicate human behavior and hide easily behind the cloak of genuine traffic resulting in manipulated data. This again makes the marketer’s ad campaigns vulnerable to ad fraud. What is the solution?  Advanced Problems Need Advanced Solutions Once a sophisticated bot penetrates your digital ad campaign, it will not just impact one KPI but also manipulate your entire sales funnel and manipulate the data. For example, if you’re running an impressions campaign then first it will inflate the number of impressions with bot traffic. And once that is done, they will impact your hard KPIs like lead, conversion, or install. The result is that you not only waste your ad spend on invalid traffic but also open the gateway to your brand assets for the sophisticated bot army to attack and destroy. Thus, it is important to get a full-funnel ad fraud detection tool instead of a solution that covers just one KPI. Know in detail about the different types of sophisticated bots that are hard to detect on the web and app. And for the advanced solution, stick with us till the end of this blog. Sophisticated Web Fraud Techniques That Are Hard to Detect Imperceptible Window To improve the CTR of the site, the  fraudsters open the advertiser’s landing page to a zero-sized pixel. However, the end-user is unaware of this and when they visit the website it is registered as a click in google ads platform. The advertiser ends up paying for these clicks/visits which were not even seen by the user. Example of Page View Fraud In the above case, the user didn’t click on the advertisement, but a click has been registered. As the window size is imperceptible for the user, they are unaware of this case. Generally, it is difficult to detect these anomalies without the help of advanced data analytics capabilities. Cookie Stuffing Cookie stuffing is organic theft where a website drops one or more third-party cookies onto a user’s web browser. An Iframe of ‘0x0’ pixel is used to dropping a cookie to hijack the organic user. These malicious cookies thus incorrectly attribute the organic traffic to the fraudulent affiliate. In the above example, we have incorporated a mFilterIt pixel which drops a randomly generated cookie whenever a user visits the advertiser’s website for the first time. Upon the return of that user, the same cookie value indicates the return of the same user. We also observed that despite faking or rotating the IP, the bot device is returning the same cookie within a gap of a few minutes. Bot User Fake users or Bot emulated users usually don’t have any mouse movement or touch interactions. They are also programmed in a way where they don’t react to the advertiser’s landing page. In this case, where there is no user interaction, we use the capabilities of Machine learning algorithms combined with captured values like configurations, plugins, device settings, canvas fingerprinting, etc. This helps to analyze the bot patterns and cases where the clicks bots are happening at a high probability. With the help of AI, ML, and data science, we detected approximately 32k such cases just in the pilot phase. Sophisticated App Fraud Techniques That Are Hard to Detect Click Spam Click spamming starts when a user downloads an infected app on their device – or visits an infected mobile website. These infected apps are usually downloaded outside the walled gardens of the Play Store and IOS app store. The infected app has built-in code which is programmed to create clicks on ads or allow external devices to click within the app. The app works normally on the user’s device, except for the tiny code running click-spam activities in the background. This fraud technique generates click spamming from the user’s device without their knowledge. And the advertisers are under an impression that the clicks are generated by real users. Example of Click Spam In this case, clicks and installs are high whereas the conversion rate is as low as 0.01%. This is a clear case of click spamming. These clicks were generated in a time period of 9 days from Thailand. Surprisingly, the total clicks are equivalent to the population of the country. This kind of CTIT curve is often overlooked by the attribution platforms due to the clicks being refreshed in the background. At mFilterIt, we track the click patterns in case of click generating from the same device ID. Event Spoofing Event spoofing is one of the advanced fraud techniques used by fraudsters to manipulate the install data of advertisers. In this case, the fraudsters programmed bots that can fire fake clicks in the background to capture the events. This eventually leads to an event being spoofed and attributed without a legitimate install. This results in the advertiser believing that a legitimate install happened. However, in reality, no event has occurred. The events like bookings, purchases, signup, registration, etc. are required to be analyzed thoroughly to identify in-app fraud. Example of Event Spoofing In this case, the CTIT is distributed within a few minutes, which is unusual. The normal traffic pattern is spread over as the conversion time is usually not in the control of the publisher. mFilterIt’s Full-Funnel Model – Our Advanced Solution How We Protected a Global Pharma Player Across the Funnel A premium pharma company noticed that their impressions were high, but the number

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ecommerce-competitive-analysis

Amazon Best Seller: What it Takes to Get This Badge?

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Most online shoppers searching for a product on Amazon consider the best seller as the most reliable product in terms of quality and usage. The shopper believes such products would have the highest positive reviews and ratings and would match the expectations mentioned on the product page. The best seller badge on Amazon is given to a product with the highest sales volume in a certain time period.  The badge is often given to new products every hour. The best seller badge further helps to achieve higher sales more easily. In addition, the product appears in the top ten search results and, therefore, acquires higher visibility than its competitors. Getting the best seller badge would require increasing the visibility of products so that more customers can find and purchase the product. The product discoverability and position on the search rank can get enhanced by optimizing the page title, images, and description. They play a crucial role in convincing the shopper that the product is worth it’s price. The story doesn’t finish here. Amazon also has a Best Seller page, wherein the top selling products under a category are shown along with their ranking. The product with the highest rank often appears more times than others on the organic and sponsored search results of Amazon. Sometimes, the products from this list also become visible on unrelated keyword search results as well. Therefore, achieving the best seller badge is often a priority of ecommerce managers and retailers, as it helps to boost sales. How to Get the Amazon Best Seller Badge? Rank Higher on Organic Search and Sponsored Keywords Product visibility on ecommerce marketplaces influences buying decisions. The product with the highest search rank on organic and sponsored keyword search results would appear before its competitors. Most customers often go for a product appearing in the top ten results. Achieving a position in the top search results would require keyword optimization, title enrichment, and more. Measuring your product’s performance against the top competitors in the ecommerce marketplace helps to find new areas of improvement and, ultimately, achieve the goal. For example, if you measure the performance of a product’s title with its top competitors and find that their title performance is higher than yours. Now, your ecommerce brand marketers could look at the competitors’ page titles and find factors influencing the performance. Our ecommerce competitive analysis, helps brands to find areas for improvement. Brand marketers use the insights to enrich the product page title and increase the search rank on keyword search results. Find the Category in Which Your Product Can Give Tough Competition A product on Amazon can be a part of multiple categories and choosing the best one makes all the difference in the world. At times, you might be tempted to enlist the product under an irrelevant category because they offer the lowest competition. Enlisting a product in such a manner can signal wrong message to the online shopper and make them disinterested in it. As such, the best way to get the best seller badge is to find a relevant sub-category or niche offering the lowest competition. Your sales might slightly get affected, but the chances of shoppers bouncing off your product page would significantly decrease. Moreover, you could keep the best seller badge for a longer duration under the chosen category. But seasonal products like gift items, come under an exception to this guideline, as their sales don’t depend on category. Sometimes, sellers can achieve high sales and the best seller badge by placing seasonal products under an irrelevant category. Set up Promotions for the Product that You Want to Sell the Most Deciding the product that you want to sell the most on Amazon is not an easy choice for eCommerce managers. However, once the decision is made, the next step is to set up promotional campaigns such as ads, discounts, deals, etc., to boost sales. Display ads on eCommerce marketplaces grab the attention of even the browsers and turn a few of them into customers. Similarly, discounts or limited-time deals entice online shoppers to buy the product. Eventually, the increase in sales through the promotions helps the product get the best seller badge. We would also suggest you run promotions under categories wherein Amazon’s private label brand has the least competition, as they undoubtedly have the upper hand otherwise. Getting the best seller badge would become much easier under such categories. Our solution, mScanIt, also enables global brands to achieve real-time actionable insights on product promotions at category, platform, and other levels. Finding the ongoing product promotions of the competition becomes much simpler with our solution. Implementing mScanIt’s actionable insights into the campaigns has also enabled brands to achieve higher sales. Conclusion It’s easy to say that all it takes to achieve the best seller badge is high sales volume, but attaining higher sales requires a lot of effort. Keyword optimization on product pages and finding the correct category are just a few methods for increasing visibility and sales volume. As the best seller badge is given to new products every hour, it has become essential to have a solution that can find tracks metrics affecting eCommerce marketplaces. mScanIt, powered by mFilterIt, is a new-age technology that helps brands to track product prices, product page scores, etc. Evaluating the results of own brand’s products versus the top competitor’s listings helps brand marketers take measures that can enhance the search rank and visibility, directly impacting sales. Get in touch with us to know more about the advantages of mScanIt for your brand.

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Out-of-Stock: Just Lost Sales or More?

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The number of shoppers on established ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart is in billions. And thus, the movement of products in terms of sales is at large scale compared to any mom n pop shop. This large movement of products often lead to problem of out of stock (OOS) which can happen due to negligence at multiple steps of the value chain. Brand stakeholders and ecommerce retailers understand that the OOS is going to remain an ongoing problem. The increasing number of visitors to online shopping stores often impacts product demand. eCommerce managers use the best measures to forecast their product demand percentages before informing their authorized sellers of the inventory. Unfortunately, determining the exact product demand is a slippery slope for eCom managers, as the customers’ needs continuously change. The inaccurate forecast of product demand is also linked to other reasons. For example, if your brand is running an online campaign for a specific product and delay in informing the authorized retailers about increasing the inventory of the product. Under such circumstances, the retailers would update the stocks per the previously stated demand. A similar situation could arise if the brand stakeholders delay informing the retailers about updating the stocks of specific products. The unavailability of products on an ecommerce marketplace could also be linked to technical issues, non-compliance with a product page guideline, and other reasons. Although the stockouts reasons are concerning enough for a brand’s stakeholders, the repercussions are equally damaging and sometimes irreversible. OOS not only causes lost sales but also leads to lost customer loyalty and lower visibility on ecommerce marketplaces, to name a few. 3 Biggest Repercussions of Stockouts on Ecommerce Marketplaces Customers opt for an Alternative Product Shopping became easier with the introduction of the ecommerce marketplace. With the launch of quick commerce platforms like BlinkIt, Dunzo, and Zepto, even delivery has become faster. The ecommerce stakeholders continuously work on identifying and resolving the customer’s problem; however, OOS is an ongoing problem. Online shoppers have limited reactions whenever a product becomes out-of-stock. The online shopper may click the ‘notify me when available’ button or buy a substitute. As far as I know, the probability of waiting for a product, especially if it is grocery, is far less than most of the other categories. For example, the likelihood that a customer waits to buy brown bread of a particular brand when it is available is meager. The scenario is more common in quick commerce apps, especially when offering instant home delivery. Under this scenario, the brand has lost sale to competitors and will experience the same until the product become available. Brands Witness a Shift in Loyalty Once an online shopper buys a product and becomes exceptionally satisfied with it, the inclination to buy it repeatedly increases. Such buyers are often referred to as loyalists. But, when the product becomes unavailable on the ecommerce marketplace, one of the subsequent choices of the loyalist is to find a substitute. After using a competitor’s product, the loyalist may change their opinion about the previously bought item and compare its qualities with the new one. As a result, the brand’s loyal customer base shifts to competitors if the product is OOS. Brand stakeholders must expect a higher shift of loyalists towards their competitors if the product remains OOS most of the time. Hampers Search Ranks Significantly Products that become out-of-stock are removed from the search results of ecommerce marketplaces because they spoil customer experience and hamper sales. Instead, new products acquire their search rank and increase their visibility. On Amazon, even if an ecommerce manager updates the inventory, it takes 24-48 hours to review the changes and make the product listing visible to buyers. Re-acquiring the top search rank for the product listing becomes challenging, as the customer’s loyalty has shifted to a competitive product and the consumer’s interest in buying the new & regularly available product has increased. The search rank on ecommerce marketplaces depends on product purchases, best seller, SEO, and other factors. The search results algorithm of the ecommerce marketplaces recognizes the new products attracting the customer’s attention and its visibility as well as search rank improves significantly. Moreover, customers that had the product in their cart but faced stockouts during the final step of the purchase journey often leave negative reviews and ratings. Such feedback further hampers the search rank of the product listings and makes acquiring a high position on keyword search results more challenging. Conclusion We agree that the biggest issue of stockouts is loss of sale, but it also has many other repercussions. It shifts the customer’s loyalty to the competitive brand and hampers the search rank. Inaccurate demand forecasts, sudden demand surge and delayed reporting by inventory managers are the most prominent factors leading to OOS. Ensuring the correct availability of products with authorized online retailers requires diving deep into the stockout vs. stock availability percentages of your brand. It requires identifying the change in these percentages at SKU, platform, variant, and other levels every month . Such in-depth analysis enables brands to diminish their stockout percentage and enhance customer experience. Connect with us to learn the advantages of using our e-commerce competitive analytics solution, mScanIt Ecommerce Analytics Solution, for predicting your product availability at minuscule levels.

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ecommerce-intelligence

Price Not Visible on Keyword Search Results: How it Happens and What Can You Do About It?

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Have you ever come across products without price tags on e-commerce platforms? Well, it happens a lot and causes a lot of distress. Price tags on online shopping stores hold the capacity to captivate the attention of millions of potential buyers and increase online sales/revenue. When the price of a product is not shown, the consumer might choose other options or platforms, as the buying intention remains consistent. Moreover, listings without prices may diminish the search rank on the keyword search results of an e-commerce platform. Most online shopping stores offer products in stock, with prices and titles to entice buyers. The collaborative effort of the brand and the e-commerce marketplace enables higher revenue for both. The price of a product is not shown if some other seller has won the buy box, the product is out-of-stock, or the seller is facing disputes in the e-commerce marketplace. It could also happen due to a technical issue or enlisting a wrong option/variant of a product listing. Neither of these scenarios is good for a brand. What’s more? Products without price tags that rank high on keyword search results are wasting your marketing efforts, as they are stealing the position of your product variants that have price tags. Sure, they are generating brand awareness but they are diminishing the impact of potential revenue or sales from an e-commerce platform. Moreover, products without price tags on keyword searches of an online shopping store give an edge to your competition, as they have price tags and become more enticing for a consumer before making a final buying decision. So, what can you do about it? 3 Ways to Avoid Invisibility of Price Tags on E-Commerce Platforms The global e-commerce retail sales figure is bound to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025. Imagine the loss your business can face by not paying attention to products without price tags on e-commerce platforms. How to resolve this problem? Here are three ways: – Manage Stock Availability Did you know that 39% of U.S. retailers are very concerned about stockouts during the holiday season? The impact of out-of-stock is directly linked to global supply chain disruptions. In the past few years, our clients have discovered that stockouts also happen during the rest of the year. One of our FMCG customers was facing 65% unavailability of products until it started reviewing and analyzing availability at pin code, SKU, platform, category, and other levels. Post-analysis, the brand took measures to resolve the problem by informing the respective Key Account Managers and Category Managers of their e-commerce marketplaces. Their actions resulted in the higher engagement of product listings with the target audience and conversions/revenue. The stock unavailability diminished to less than 30% in nearly three months after taking action. However, the availability of products also resulted in the visibility of the price tags. So, whenever consumers look for specific items under multiple categories or sub-categories of the e-commerce marketplace, they can compare the brand product price to the competitors before making a final purchasing decision. – Optimize the Product Pages Most people will ignore products without price tags on keyword search results. Therefore, you should also ensure that search results of the digital shelf always have variants. How can you manage this? Is it impossible? Well, No! You could probably check the keywords working for your product listings and rank new product variants at the top of the digital shelf results by using them. However, it will take time to rank and will depend on the product page optimization results too. Use the top-performing keywords in the product listings currently in stock across multiple geo-locations. Our solution, e-commerce analytics tool, mScanIt, monitors the Share-of-Shelf of your brand vis-a-vis the competition. You can check the average page position of your listings using a keyword sub-type under the SOS dashboard. By doing so, you can achieve your goal of boosting the digital shelf rank of your e-commerce product listings on brand, competition, and generic keyword search results. The solution also defines your product page scores. So, you can easily monitor the score of the competitors and check the product page content working for them. Doing so would help to build strategies to optimize the product pages further. – Win the Buy Box – Strategically The buy box is the column that consists of the add-to-cart and buy-action buttons. It has become popular among the e-commerce marketplace sellers, as they are assigned based on the marketplace algorithms. However, winning the buy box is also dependent on stock availability. We believe that brands that have associations with the best marketplace sellers have a higher tendency to win the buy box. Simultaneously, keeping the brand reputation intact through seller-wise analysis and reporting unauthorized third-party sellers can become a stepping stone. Moreover, brands can divert the buyer’s attention to their authorized sellers and increase their market share. Isn’t this mind-boggling? Well, it isn’t. There is a whole market of counterfeit sellers on e-commerce platforms. According to a report, 74.8% of people around the globe became victims of online shopping scams through e-commerce marketplaces. Brands lost revenue, but their biggest concern is damage to brand reputation. So, stopping unauthorized 3P sellers can help avoid such repercussions and increase the chance of winning the buy box. Bottom Line Products without price tags on e-commerce search results can damage brands in multiple ways. On the other hand, ensuring price tag visibility can increase visibility, brand awareness, product discoverability, and conversions/sales. The best method for ensuring this is by avoiding stockouts, diminishing counterfeit seller activities on online shopping platforms, optimizing the product pages, and strategically winning the buy box. Connect with us to learn how monitoring products through mScanIt can help to achieve these goals. Get in touch to learn more about keyword search results.

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eCom-Banner-Ads

Untold Stories from eCom Banner Ads

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

Display advertising through online banner ads is one of the most effective ways of capturing the attention of online shoppers and increasing sales. Banners intrigue buyers because of their messaging, visibility of top products, promotions, etc. Brands spend valuable resources to create the perfect banner for reaching the target audience and ensuring a higher than ongoing click-through rate (which remains uncertain until the end of the advertising campaign). Brands include the best colors, product variants, price quotes, promotions, etc., in their banners. Most eCommerce marketplaces have banner placements on the category, sub-category, home, and other promo pages. Higher visibility of a brand’s product variants correlates with higher brand awareness, which will likely also impact the Share-of-Visibility of the brand. Capturing the brands with the highest visibility through banner ads on an eCommerce marketplace helps to know the brands bidding the highest on a specific page. Furthermore, evaluating the banners visible after searching a brand, competitor, and generic keyword helps brands to find outputs on search analytics. For example, comparing your brand’s sponsored banner ads vis-à-vis a competition based on specific keyword search results shows if your competitor is bidding higher or lower than you on the keyword. It also displays the difference in visibility percentages based on the sponsored banner ads. Tell Tales from E-Commerce Banner Ads What’s New Hot or Trending? Brands frequently launch new products under specific categories. According to our experts, monitoring the sponsored display ads of your competition helps to come across your competitors’ most trending hot, or new products. It also helps to know the new aspects they are focusing on. Continuously monitoring the competition banner ads also detects the frequency of their launch and builds a forecast of their next launch on an e-commerce marketplace. You can manage the ongoing keyword bidding and banner placement strategies to achieve an edge over the competition. For example, an oral care brand with a mouth-freshness toothpaste variant is focused in the health category section of an e-commerce marketplace. After two weeks, it launches a whitening toothpaste variant in the same category. The same brand keeps the same frequency of its new product launches in the same marketplace category. You can easily predict the estimated launch date of the new product, i.e., it would also be around the same period (two weeks). By evaluating the banner ads of the competitor, you can find the types of product variants focused on a category, qualities featured in the ads for a specific sub-category, prices, promotions, seasonal offers, etc. For example, the brand uses dazzling white’ as part of its banner ads for most of its whitening toothpaste. How are Competitors Targeting their Niche Audience? Evaluating the eCommerce banner ads of your competitors shows the focused target audience on specific platforms and categories. Most brands have ambassadors for multiple product variants. Reviewing the display ads in a category shows whether a brand focuses on millennials, kids, or other audiences. Moreover, it displays the themes that the competitors focus on to increase brand visibility and product click-through rates from their target audience. Monitoring the banner ad campaigns of the competitors also shows the change in discount percentages or offers. Mapping promotional aspects in a brand helps to detect themes like deals, offers, discounts, etc., at an in-depth level and better understand the competitor’s approach towards its target audience. For example, if one of your competitors continuously uses ‘combo’ for most of its display ads on a platform, you can detect the commonly used product variants. You can also see the Share-of-Visibility of their banner ads on multiple e-commerce pages focusing on ‘combo’ promotions. Upon further deep-diving, you can check if their banner displays mention SKUs and prices, which would tell the benefits they are offering to lure their target audience. Through this new information, you can easily detect that the marketers of a competitive brand are focusing on price and SKUs and use it to your advantage. What Are Your Competitors Relying Upon? For the past few years, we mapped the banner communication of brands on e-commerce marketplaces. We found that they entice consumers through cashback, gifts, day/occasional specific deals, limited-time offers, vouchers, as well as a mix of two or more promotions. Upon mapping the sponsored banner ads of the competitors, we found new insights based on location, platform, and other aspects. Analyzing the banner ads of the competitors helps to find their focused form of promotion in a given time frame. The information helps brands find areas for retargeting the banner campaigns, new keywords, and an untapped target audience. Wrapping Up Monitoring the banner ads of competitors gives insights into the banner communication at the platform, category, sub-category, and other levels. Brands can use the information to know the aspects focused on by their competitors, reach an untapped market, enhance Share-of-Visibility on the e-commerce platform, etc. Besides this, brands can detect forecasts of product launch dates and their competitors’ most commonly used themes on e-commerce platforms. Banners of a brand give inputs on marketing and communication, which help scale the business. 2o, and let’s build new stories for your online shoppers.

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Loss of Availability

Out-of-Stock? Loss of Availability or Lost Opportunity?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

Search engines like Google, Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, Opera, etc., supplement the sale of products on e-commerce platforms. The leading inspiration for online shopping for 39% of global users is ‘search engines.’ Therefore, brands understand and put in heavy budgets in search engine advertising for sales of their products. As the e-commerce revenue has become dependent on the discoverability of the product listings on search engines, so does the need to optimize the product pages. Unfortunately, some of the out-of-stock product pages could also rank high on different forms of ads. The problem is often witnessed until the search engine revokes soft 404s, which are landing pages with out-of-stock products. The Out-of-Stock (OOS) product listings not only drain the advertising dollars of the brands but also derail the objective of ad placement in the first place. The consumer discovers the product listings, clicks to visit the landing page, and feels disappointed due to product unavailability. Such actions could increase the bounce rate of the e-commerce website and impact its SERP. Besides broken expectations, customers drift towards other brands ending up buying your competitor’s product, including add-ons. The lost sales, peaking bounce rate, and diversion to rivals are just a part of the problem. Although the problem might not be that huge for brand loyal audience, if the customer is in real need of that product, alternatives are always on the cards. This leads to customer’s loss of interest in the brand. Ensuring Availability and Happy Customers The good part about your listings is that your product pages match the SEO criteria of search engines. It is the same reason they are becoming more discoverable when customers search for brand, competitive, and generic keywords. It’s important to notice that Google, the maximum traffic provider to e-commerce platforms, has changed its guidelines for shopping ads. As per the new compliance metrics, the search results will be based on product data and not keywords. Therefore, it is more than necessary to optimize the product landing pages and also to ensure that the details on the ads should match the details on the product pages. Now that your products are listed higher on searches and ads, you also have the option of offering recommendations for similar products on the e-commerce platform. The next best step is to focus on managing the stock availability of your top-performing listings. For this, you would need to deep-dive into your products ‘stockouts vs. stock availability’ percentage across e-commerce platforms, especially during the holiday/festival season. Our solution, mScanIt, offers dashboards for your Product Page Benchmarking and Stock Availability. It measures these two aspects of your brand vis-a-vis the top competitors. Moreover, the data is collected on several parameters like availability at the category level, platform, pin code level, and a lot more. Using the Perfect Page Benchmarking dashboard, marketers can identify the best-performing product listings based on the product page title, description, bullet points, etc. Furthermore, you can manage stock availability using the platform, category, SKU, and many other filters. The exportable reports make sharing the ‘stockouts vs. stock availability’ percentage reports easier by using multiple filters with the e-commerce managers and managing stock availability. Conclusion When Out-of-Stock product listings appear on search engine ads, it causes larger implications for brands than just sales/revenue loss or waste of advertising dollars. The brand discoverability or awareness remains intact, but the customer interest in the product/brand might diminish significantly. Unavailability of stock often diverts the consumer’s interest in competitor’s products and toward new interests or products. Therefore, managing stockouts at pin code, category, platform, and other levels becomes crucial for brands. It enables them to capitalize on the lost opportunity of their competitors and hence, supplements the sale/revenue of the brand. Our eCommerce Competitive Analytics helps keep track of stock availability and stockouts across multiple degrees. Want to learn more about what mScanIt can offer to your brand? Get in touch to learn more about the Out of Stock.

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