How Georgia-Pacific optimizes its ecommerce with CommerceIQ platform
Georgia-Pacific elevated its ecommerce strategy by shifting from Edge to CommerceIQ, achieving new heights in both consumer and B2B markets. Through CommerceIQ's integrated solutions—Ecommerce Sales Management, Retail Media Management, Profit Recovery, and Market Share—Georgia-Pacific harnessed data-driven insights, streamlined operations, and ultimately, enhanced its market performance. Explore Georgia-Pacific's CommerceIQ experience via our focused testimonial videos and product overviews below.
Meet Georgia Pacific Team
Alla Kokorina
Ecommerce
Category Manager
Christy Wilhelmi
Vice President
Ecommerce
Michelle Downing
Senior Team Leader,
Amazon Enterprise
Paras Shah
Director,
Digital Marketing
[00:00:06] Christy Wilhelmi: Christy Wilhelmi, I lead our ecommerce organization at Georgia-Pacific, both on our consumer businesses and our B2B businesses, integrating our Amazon enterprise across our organization as well as building our omnichannel capabilities across ecommerce and our tech stack.
[00:00:20] Paras Shah: My name is Paras Shah and I lead the digital media team for Georgia-Pacific. I help strategize how we can leverage our media to drive sales across curbside pickup, home delivery, and parcel shipping for our brands.
[00:00:32] Animated title card: How would you describe where GP is in their Ecommerce journey?
[00:00:36] Christy Wilhelmi: In our consumer business, ecommerce penetration has grown a ton, and I would imagine this is very similar to a lot of other CPGs. During COVID, we doubled our online penetration, so our percent of sales and revenue driven by ecommerce. So we had to really adapt to that changing landscape.
[00:00:53] For B2B, our customers are in a different maturity curve in terms of their ecommerce journey. We've seen them playing a lot of catch up, doing a lot of mergers and acquisition.
[00:01:03] So from that perspective, what I've learned was an aligned company vision and a common language is really important among all of our internal stakeholders so we can be really clear about what we want to achieve.
[00:01:14] I think that we've spent a lot of time doing that. But we still have rooms to grow just as the space moves faster than ever.
[00:01:22] Animated title card: What was your strategy in building a tech stack and how have your needs changed over time?
[00:01:27] Paras Shah: Our focus was initially just more on the foundational elements that would address our evolving needs, and just market trends.
[00:01:33] But as consumer behavior, technology, and market trends continue to change, so did our approach to building and refining our ecommerce tech stack. We found it imperative to integrate AI-driven solutions for predictive analytics to enhance our understanding of consumer preferences.
[00:01:48] We also placed a stronger emphasis on a unified integration that enables different functions, such as sales and category management and supply chain and the media team to all manage the business. We also recognize the importance of leveraging automation tools to just streamline workflows and optimize marketing campaigns for greater efficiency and effectiveness. The best of breed approach offered more distinct advantages tailored to our specific needs.
[00:02:13] Animated title card: When you started 2023, what capabilities were you specifically looking to improve in Ecommerce?
[00:02:17] Christy Wilhelmi: From a capability set, I think that really focusing on improved scorecarding and having one source of truth against our omnichannel business is probably the number one priority that I have.
[00:02:27] Another thing that we've been really focused on in terms of capabilities is this idea around total customer investment. Just having a better understanding of what our total invested price is and being able to make decisions around where we want to invest and what's going to be the best ROI, it was really important as we started our journey in 2023.
[00:02:47] Animated title card: When you started 2023, what were some of your KPIs or goals you were looking to hit?
[00:02:51] Christy Wilhelmi: Growth was really important, GP growing faster than the category, so market share was really important. The second metric that we think a lot about is if we had a dollar to spend, we know the most productive way for us to spend that dollar. And really honing in on what that
dollar is going to intend it to do. Is it a short term ROI? Is it a long term ROI? Third, around loyalty and long term value. I think that especially being in a CPG and a branded company, making sure that we have loyalty and repeat purchase for our brands is like the number one.
[00:03:23] Animated title card: How are you progressing towards those goals?
[00:03:27] Christy Wilhelmi: When we think about share, we feel really good about where we are today, but I think a lot of the consumers are really thinking about making different choices. With the economy the way it is today, we've seen a lot of switching from like maybe more premium products to a mainstream or a private label product. Market share is really important to us to make sure that we can communicate the value proposition to our customers, making it really clear of why they would choose a brand.
[00:03:53] Animated title card: How have you used this data to negotiate with customers?
[00:03:57] Christy Wilhelmi: Well, maybe an example of one of our businesses, livingware or tabletop. In a recessionary environment, we see consumers make tradeoffs.
[00:04:04] They were purchasing only, if it was on promotion, and we wanted to do that, not at the detriment of the category, but better understanding are we driving more total households to the total category versus just subsidizing those purchases. So a market share analysis allows us to make sure that we're doing the right thing, that we're helping consumers where they are in their customer journey, that we're driving category growth long term that we can both sustainably measure and maintain over time.
A unified platform to manage ecommerce
Maximize your market presence with an integrated platform that unifies sales operations, retail media, digital shelf analytics, and supply chain management. Harness the power of AI to drive sales, optimize performance, and lead in the ecommerce arena.
[00:00:06] Michelle Downing: My name is Michelle Downing and I'm a team leader here at GP and lead the Amazon enterprise, making sure our products are available for consumers to purchase on Amazon
[00:00:15] Christy Wilhelmi: I lead our ecommerce organization at Georgia-Pacific both on our consumer businesses and our B2B businesses, integrating our Amazon enterprise across our organization as well as building our omnichannel capabilities across ecommerce and our tech stack.
[00:00:31] Paras Shah: My name is Paras Shah and I lead the digital media team for Georgia-Pacific. I help strategize how we can leverage our media to drive sales, across curbside pickup, home delivery, and parcel shipping for our brands.
[00:00:41] Animated title card: How have you been leveraging CIQ's Ecommerce Sales Management solution to be faster and more automated managing Amazon?
[00:00:46] There's three things that jump out to me, as our favorite parts of CIQ and honestly have coached different capability partners on how the intricacies of our business work as well. So favorite one is our Weeks of Cover Calculator, which is newer this year where it's actually displayed on the SKU or ASIN pages.
[00:01:06] What we love about this is obviously an indicator of inventory health at Amazon, but what I actually love about this is now both our ads team and our category management team and our supply chain team can look at this and say, Hey, this looks weird, I'm going to go action X Y Z thing as a result
[00:01:24] And so that's what I love is it's not just myself or our NAMs who have to look at those metrics, and make a decision.
[00:01:31] Second thing that I think is one of our favorite parts is around ad spend and ad sales. So this is a great indicator, again, of, why our sales may be up or down is we can very easily see if we were spending on advertising at that point in time. And that allows us to communicate internally about the talking points that we're always required to have, as we think about our own like bookings and shipments to a customer.
[00:01:54] And then, the third piece is really the Business Performance Overview. I think that's been new in the last 18 months or so and then the ability for us to customize this in a lot more detailed way. The reason why we like this is actually a huge time savings for us. It takes us all of 30 seconds to put together a scorecard for an internal meeting versus what we used to have to do, which was probably like a two or three hour endeavor on a weekly or biweekly basis.
[00:02:19] Animated title card: What are some key automations which have been most helpful to your teams?
[00:02:24] Christy Wilhelmi: Historically, if we were pulling out of an internal system, whatever we were comparing apples to oranges, or if we were comparing Amazon Vendor Central versus some other database, we were, again, not making sure that we had a solid foundation and solid baseline. Almost, CIQ in the background is doing the checks and balances for us versus us having to worry and spend a lot of time on, hey, is this accurate? We spent a lot of time doing that historically.
[00:02:50] Paras Shah: I think the unification of data has also helped us feel the flywheel. It's taken a lot of unstructured data that would have existed within Amazon systems, but CommerceIQ has been able to structure that data for us. Just speaking from the standpoint of retail media, I think about just the integration or the unification of the data from supply chain and advertising.
[00:03:07] Because we're so focused on improving our ROI and driving incrementality, we can get an early signal that, hey, inventory levels are low for a specific ASIN. Therefore, the automation will kick in where we stop advertising for a specific ASIN. That cost savings is then reinvested once we can get inventories back to a healthy level, but at the same time, that also gives us a signal that we need to get Amazon replenished as well. So I think the unification of data has helped us significantly from a retail media standpoint
Ecommerce Sales Management
Ecommerce Sales Management by CommerceIQ is the definitive solution for enterprise brands striving for Amazon market domination. Seamlessly integrating Market Share Forecasting, Customizable Reporting, Sales, Supply Chain, and Content Automations, Ecommerce Sales Management revolutionizes how brands maximize their Amazon potential.
[00:00:06] Paras Shah: My name is Paras Shah and I lead the digital media team for Georgia-Pacific. I help strategize how we can leverage our media to drive sales, across curbside pickup, home delivery, and parcel shipping for our brands.
[00:00:17]Animated title card: How have you been leveraging CIQ's Retail Media solution?
[00:00:20] Paras Shah: I'd say first for campaign building and optimization on a variety of retail media network platforms that CommerceIQ supports. We leverage both automation rules and manual tweaks, which is, I think, really helped us find ways to drive efficiency and manpower since we are primarily an in-house team with practitioners doing all the hands-on keyboard work. We use CommerceIQ's competitive analysis tool to assess our share of voice against our competition and that helps us make media decisions and investment plans and make changes on the fly.
[00:00:50] We also use CommerceIQ's AMC Insights, pulls in AMC data into just more easy to read reports, which have been used to compare exposure overlap, just identify trends around high performing ad combos. The time of day performance report has also allowed us to optimize campaigns by just automating our bidding during times of high purchase rates.
[00:01:11] Another big value driver for us has been CommerceIQ's new Media Plan feature. It models out the search spend needed to meet growth goals. And we've used it for annual planning to just understand different media scenarios and we're going to utilize the tool throughout the year as we operate in a more agile world.
[00:01:27]Animated title card: Not all CPGs are in housing retail media management. How has your team gone about staffing and training your team in such a competitive market for people of this talent?
[00:01:36] Paras Shah: We're always looking at ways to maximize ROI and most people are stopped on the way to making this big transition because they think about the costs of bringing in a lot of W2s. We've actually found a better ROI by bringing it in-house and more closely aligning those brand objectives with those media outcomes.
[00:01:53] And we focused on aligning our organizational structures around where we can create the greatest value for each brand. So we've got in-house programmatic traders, search practitioners, and social media managers dedicated to each brand. The in-house team of media practitioners and traders, they start by developing a very intimate understanding of the brand and then develop an outcome-based approach that allows our media team to be more agile and nimble in finding ways to drive the incrementality needed to improve our sales and share trends with the use of retail media.
[00:02:19] Animated title card How have you incorporated incrementality measurements into your marketing approach in 2023?
[00:02:23] Paras Shah: The partnership with CommerceIQ has been tremendous in helping us find ways to drive more incrementality. Just during the QBR last year, we talked about how we found it hard to drive a positive ROI on some of our individual marketing tactics.
[00:02:36] CommerceIQ team came back and wanted us to test out for them in terms of managing to the outcome-based approach with iROAS.
[00:02:43] And we basically developed new strategies on driving incrementality in our marketing. That's enabled Georgia-Pacific to really make strategic decisions about our targeting, our ad placements, our keyword choices, and the automations that we've made are based on our iROAS target.
[00:02:56] So we're able to bring it back to leveraging our in-house team, leverage the automations, and then we can reinvest some of the savings to drive more incremental sales for our business as well.
[00:03:06] Animated title card: How have you leveraged CIQ’s omnichannel capabilities as part of your retail media strategy?
[00:03:10] Paras Shah: We've used CommerceIQ's omni channel capabilities really to compare our share across channels, helping us identify gaps or just opportunities in our paid and our organic efforts. Sometimes we have institutional knowledge saying that a certain tactic is the best ROI, but what we've been able to really understand from the omnichannel capabilities of CommerceIQ offers is that there might be an ad combo that might be more effective at driving a more efficient cost per acquisition than what we had thought about before.
Retail Media Management
In the dynamic world of ecommerce, gaining a competitive edge is crucial. CommerceIQ’s Retail Media Management solution redefines the approach to advertising, utilizing advanced machine learning and automation to transform data into actionable insights. This results in more effective ad spend, enhanced search result presence, and predictive analytics-driven strategies.
[00:00:06] Michelle Downing: My name is Michelle Downing and I'm a team leader here at GP and lead the Amazon enterprise, making sure our products are available for consumers to purchase on Amazon.
[00:00:15] Animated title card: How are you using the Profit Recovery solution at CommerceIQ?
[00:00:19] Michelle Downing: Today we participate in Profit Recovery through the shortage claims, and we have been doing this for at least a year, if not even longer.
[00:00:27] We actually started partnering with CIQ on Profit Recovery as we were looking for help in the amount of time it was taking to process disputes with Amazon.
[00:00:36] And quite frankly, shortages especially continue to be a challenge for many vendors, but definitely for GP, as we also expand our selection. As we know, more selection often will mean more types of disputes. As we continue to launch new items with Amazon, we also have CIQ as our soldier, helping us to defend any supply chain challenges from a financial perspective. And so we look forward, truthfully, to anything else that CIQ will have launching in the future as well, because we certainly want to save time in this area.
[00:01:08] Animated title card: What are some of the successes you’ve realized this year using this part of the CommerceIQ solution?
[00:01:12] Michelle Downing: I want to say it was January of this past year we were experiencing a huge amount of shortage behavior from Amazon and growing each month.
[00:01:20] Before they even developed a technology for us, they actually brought us into a room with an expert from Amazon who helped guide us through the different things that could have been impacting us at the receipt of our product in Amazon FCs, and that was probably one of my most exciting and engaging conversations with CIQ was understanding, one, we're not alone, but two, CIQ was actually able to provide us with an expert to help guide us through the challenges that we were experiencing, and then recommended a solution to us that they had seen work for other vendors, which was actually getting Amazon to take us to an FC to watch the unloading process. We went to an Amazon FC as a result, watched them unload a GP truck, and understood that well, while, it was not necessarily GP's fault, the way Amazon's unloading process actually caused us and probably many others to have an increase in shortages.
[00:02:11] As a result of that visit, we've seen a decline. There are other things that we do need to go do like box labeling differently, but we were able to actually have an Amazon person at that meeting say, Oh gosh, this is actually an Amazon problem and not a GP problem. So we had a lot more leverage within Amazon internally as a result.
[00:02:29] We have seen not only cost savings, but time savings in having to submit disputes. And because CIQ is always the first disputer and we only get involved as in the second dispute, we have seen a significant change in the man hours that are required to work with Amazon.
[00:02:46] Without CIQ, we probably wouldn't have noticed the trends that we were seeing with increased shortages. So I would actually say that even if we are spending more money, which is not true, like we would have been spending even more if not for CIQ.
Profit Recovery Automation
Recover lost profits effortlessly. In the fast-paced world of ecommerce, staying ahead isn’t just about sales – it’s about safeguarding your bottom line. CommerceIQ’s Profit Recovery Automation transforms the complex task of financial reconciliation into a seamless, automated process, reclaiming your rightful earnings with precision and ease, ensuring every dollar you’ve earned counts towards your bottom line.
[00:00:06] Alla Kokorino: Hello, everyone. My name is Alla Kokorina and I'm Category Manager here at GP, supporting our Amazon business specifically, both across the retail and the pros side of the business.
[00:00:17] Lindsay Savage: My name is Lindsay Savage and I lead our data governance and business platform team for consumer products, so also supporting our retail and B2B side of the business.
[00:00:27] Animated title card: What made you choose CommerceIQ for Ecommerce Market Share
[00:00:34] Alla Kokorino: For me personally, the biggest value add that CIQ Market Share product provides is this more seamless integration with the rest of the data, covering all the rest of the facets of the business on Amazon. Having this one source of truth really makes us more efficient, by having all the data in one place, and I've been able to leverage in a more efficient way. I can focus more on value creation, value add projects and processes rather than just endless data manipulation and data mining. So that was the key point for me personally, and just by talking to the CIQ team and knowing just a few ideas and things that you guys are working on for the 2.0 version of the product makes me even more excited because if everything comes to fruition, I think it will allow us to get to the bottom of things like to get to the recommendation, to the more actionable insights even quicker than it is today.
[00:01:32] Animated title card: What made you choose to replace EDGE for CommerceIQ Market Share?
[00:01:52] Alla Kokorino: The biggest limitation that we faced with the category shared data is the fact that it used to live in complete isolation from the rest of the data. Trying to layer in anything else on top of it, whether it's out of stock data or lost Buy Box instances, it just has been a very, very manual and very time consuming process.
[00:02:00] Lindsay Savage: CommerceIQ really took the time to listen to what our business needs were for both our B2B as well as B2C side of consumer products, because they are very different in how they operate. And so that was important to take the time up front and understand how we should design our categories and how they should be reflected, as well as just taking the time to understand our business requirements for our dashboards.
[00:02:26] We want to make it very efficient and usable for our business to enable them to make quick good decisions. And so the collaboration and the responsiveness that the CommerceIQ team had was very important to us.
[00:02:42] It's definitely something we look for in a partner, and so as we want to look to be more agile and leverage the technology even further, having that foundation and that confidence in place has been really important for us and a big driver for us as well.
Market Share
Harness the power of real-time, SKU-level insights with CommerceIQ’s Market Share solution. In today’s fiercely competitive ecommerce landscape, understanding and maximizing your market share is crucial. CommerceIQ’s Market Share solution offers unparalleled accuracy in SKU-level insights across major retailers, equipping your brand with actionable data for strategic decision-making and dominance in your category.
