Picking the Best Digital Shelf Software: Tips to Consider
First thing first, what is a digital shelf? It is how and where your products and services are showcased online. It is a collection of digital touchpoints your potential customers use to browse, explore, research, and purchase your products online.
Now coming on to digital shelf analytics (DSA), it is an alternative to the manual compilation of retail data for brands, manufacturers, and consumer-packaged goods companies.
The most significant advantage of using DSA is that it saves a lot of time and effort that you would have utilized when compiling data manually. Plus, it helps you track digital performance, which was hard to access in the manual processing.
Moreover, it offers a better shopping experience to your potential customers. What else do you need! However, picking the right digital shelf analytics software for your brand is quite tricky. DSA solutions have different strengths and weaknesses.
Therefore, it is advisable to define your goals first and then determine the ideal DSA technology for your business. But even before that, do ask yourself the following questions:
Which key performance indicators do you want to focus on?
Of course, you are here to do the business. Companies need to keep track of the right KPIs to ensure no sales opportunity is lost in indirect sales channels.
Some important KPIs that may interest you are listing and assortment, share of shelf, low or zero stock levels, content, internal and external search visibility, consumer ratings, compliance, and selective distribution agreement status. The best DSA software will be able to watch all or most of these KPIs.
Do you need a broader view, or just looking for insights for the most selling products?
Before you make a big move, it is vital to understand the product strategy you wish to focus on. This means whether you want to focus on your most-selling products and resellers’ performance in specific areas or markets, or you want to monitor hundreds and even thousands of products in various geographies or both.
It is possible that at present, you want to watch one or two out-of-stock items from your listing, but your requirements can change anytime. Remember, e-commerce is an ever-changing world. That’s why it is recommended to choose a scalable solution that caters to your changing business needs.
Which technology are you using currently?
It is necessary to ask which technology you are working with now. Though most DSA solutions are cloud-based today, it is recommended that you always choose a compatible solution with your existing technology platform.
In addition to this, also avoid home-built or bespoke solutions because there are chances they are hard to implement, less scalable to your growing business needs, and difficult to fit into your current system.
Who is going to use the DSA Solution, and what insights are needed by them?
Your employees would not need raw data. Instead, they would need meaningful real-time insights which they can leverage when contacting the resellers. Therefore, you need to have a solution that enables you to slice and dice data and reveal a better insight by using various data filters and overlays.
For instance, key account managers will desire high-quality insights to promote your goods and improve the conversion rate. At the same time, your legal team would ask for added support to tackle counterfeit goods.
Finding out which is the best digital shelf analytics solution is undeniably tricky. The methods used to gather and process the raw data are different and may affect some of the crucial factors like reliability, accuracy, and scalability. Whichever you use, make sure you constantly oversee and manage it.
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