How Digital Shelf Analytics is revolutionizing market research

In the digital era, consumer behavior evolves at breakneck speed. With every visit to a website, click, or online purchase, consumers leave a digital trail containing valuable information about their preferences, needs, and behaviours. For companies, understanding this flow of data has become an absolute priority to remain competitive in an increasingly saturated and dynamic market.

Although we started talking about the digital world, it’s crucial to understand the parallelism with the physical world. For example, in a huge sector like Fast Mover Consuming Goods (FMCG), even though online transactions account for only between 2% and 5% of sales, the correspondence of assortments, promotions, and prices reaches 95% between the two worlds.

This is where Digital Shelf Analytics come into play. This powerful tool is transforming online market research. With the right technology, it can provide control at the highest granularity of the market, both online and offline.

What exactly is Digital Shelf Analytics?

As explained in a previous article, it is the constant process of reviewing and meticulously monitoring your products on the Digital Shelf to obtain actionable data, using intelligent automations to find improvement opportunities.

This data includes information about product visibility in e-commerce, their positioning on search pages, prices, customer reviews, and information about what the competition is doing, among others. Furthermore, it can also assist multiple teams within your organization in their work.

If we abstract one level up and consider a more holistic view of the market, with Digital Shelf Analytics, we have reached the ability to control categories, assortments, brands, and countries (even down to the level of postal codes by country). Until now, this analysis was impossible to perform in real-time. The appropriate tools didn’t exist, and companies relied on costly and inefficient market studies.

With all this information, you’ll ensure that your product pages are optimized and updated to the maximum detail. Thus, your customers will find all the information they need.

How are Digital Shelf Analytics tools revolutionizing market research?

Here are some reasons why digital shelf analytics tools are creating a revolution:

Effective Product Assortment Management

One of the most significant advantages of Digital Shelf Analytics is its ability to help companies effectively manage their product inventory. By analyzing market demand, competition, and other key factors, companies can make real-time, detailed decisions on which products to offer, at what prices, in which channels and countries, and how to present them to customers to maximize sales and profitability.

Competitor Monitoring

In today’s competitive market, it’s crucial for companies to stay informed about competitors’ activities. Digital shelf analytics allow companies to closely monitor how competitors’ products are performing, what innovations they have, what pricing and promotion strategies they are using, and how to effectively differentiate themselves.

Moreover, with a good Digital Shelf Analytics tool, you can conduct price studies per litre and price per gram based on ingredients and product types to have precise market information for innovation or entry into competitive tenders. You can learn more about this possibility in this Case Study about a leading manufacturer of fruit and vegetable juices and smoothies.

Price Optimization

The use of Digital Shelf Analytics provides companies with detailed information about product prices, both their own and those of competitors. This information is valuable for optimizing pricing strategy, as it allows companies to identify opportunities to adjust prices competitively without compromising profitability.

Moreover, it will also impact the physical channel, due to the parallelism that exists in certain sectors between the digital and physical channels. We shouldn’t narrow our focus and think that when talking about Digital Shelf Analytics, we can only consider the digital world. The data provided by these tools can go further and provide reliable information about the physical shelf as well.

Understanding Consumer Behavior

A Digital Shelf Analytics tool will provide companies with a deep insight into consumer behavior online. By analyzing data such as product searches, touchpoints that potential buyers go through in their customer journey, and customer reviews, companies can better understand what drives their product purchase decisions and adapt their strategies accordingly.

Improvements in Customer Experience

With the right Digital Shelf Analytics technology, companies can quickly identify areas for improvement in the customer experience. These tools allow real-time adjustments to ensure that customers have a smooth and satisfactory experience, from presenting their products on the digital shelf to navigating flows on their website or e-commerce platform.

Data-Driven Strategic Decision Making

Ultimately, Digital Shelf Analytics empowers companies to make data-driven strategic decisions instead of relying on assumptions or intuitions. By having access to detailed, real-time market information, companies can identify emerging trends, anticipate changes in demand, and adapt to market conditions accordingly.

Imagine that the teams of your business involved in sales, supply or marketing could receive alerts in real time about what is happening in the market: price changes, entry of new sellers or competitors, stock-outs… And they could implement solutions immediately, without having to wait to receive a market report at the wrong time. And without having to spend a huge amount of money that could have been used for other things, such as innovation.

You don’t have to keep imagining because with a Digital Shelf Analytics tool like the one offered by flipflow, this is possible.

Conclusions

Digital Shelf Analytics is revolutionizing market research by providing companies with an unprecedented view of the global market. From understanding consumer behavior to optimizing prices and promotions, and making data-driven strategic decisions, tools like flipflow offer a significant advantage in an increasingly digitized and competitive market. For companies seeking to stay ahead in a constantly changing world, technology related to Digital Shelf Analytics has become an indispensable element within the set of market research tools.