How Digital Shelf Optimization is Revolutionizing the CPG Industry

CPG companies have been investing heavily in digital shelf analytics to gain insights into how their products are performing online. However, the focus has now shifted from just analytics to digital shelf optimization. But how and why now?

In this article, we will explore the evolution from digital shelf analytics to digital shelf optimization, what it means for brands and how CommerceIQ is leading the way with the launch of our Digital Shelf Optimization (DSO) product.

What is Digital Shelf Optimization?

Imagine you are in a grocery store, you have a list of items to buy but you can’t seem to find your favorite brand of shampoo. You finally find it hidden behind another brand on the shelf. Frustrating, isn’t it? 

Now, imagine this happens on an ecommerce platform, where you don’t have the luxury of physically browsing the shelves. As a consumer, you may end up choosing a different brand or worse, leaving the website altogether. This is where digital shelf optimization comes in, and it’s revolutionizing the CPG industry.

Digital shelf optimization is the next step in the evolution of digital shelf analytics. While digital shelf analytics focuses on collecting and analyzing data, digital shelf optimization focuses on using that data to optimize a company’s digital shelf performance by automating actions and prioritizing recommendations.

This includes suggesting changes to product content to improve product visibility, but also enabling brands to ensure the right assortment, availability and fulfillment methods down to a store level to help drive sales and increase market share with the help of AI and automation capabilities. 

Many brands have access to a wealth of data, but their ability to take action on it is a bottleneck. And this is getting more complex across the omnichannel each year. 

Redefining the CPG landscape with Digital Shelf Optimization (DSO) 

Brands are challenged with lagging sales, driving profitability amid rising costs, and the growing complexity of evolving retail channels and fulfillment methods. Familiar growth levers are no longer driving sales and category share at the same rate; digital teams are time poor viewing data in isolation which makes it difficult to tie activity to sales results. 

To overcome these challenges and drive profitability online, CommerceIQ DSO enables brands to maximize organic traffic by creating product content that appeals to shoppers through generative AI, identifying store-level availability gaps and allowing brand teams to quickly prioritize assortment needs across the omnichannel. 

Here are three things that will help brands take their ecommerce growth to the next level with CommerceIQ DSO:

1. 1. Unparalleled Coverage: Offers a complete picture of the category, covering 650+ global retailer websites and mobile apps – the most mobile app coverage of all DSA solutions including food aggregators and quick commerce visibility. Its AI-driven catalog creates a source of truth across omnichannel with insights into availability, bundling, outages, and inventory gaps down to store level. 
   2. Data Transparency: Gives full visibility into data quality and the ability to integrate with any data lake. Finally see the clear connection of digital shelf data and the impact on market share.
   3. Advanced Actionability: Helps drive actions with automations and prioritized recommendations to maximize organic growth. Streamline workflows with generative AI to improve content along with actionable reporting on assortment & availability. It is fully integrated into retail media, ecommerce sales management, content and supply chain through the CommerceIQ Retail Ecommerce Management (REM) Platform.

During our recent podcast interview Jo Campbell, Senior VP Digital Shelf Solutions, and John Maltman, Chief Customer Officer at CommerceIQ explained how digital shelf optimization differs exactly from traditional ecommerce optimization strategies. 

“Digital Shelf Optimization connects all of the dots. One of the challenges brands face are siloed teams using different data sources, different technologies and capabilities to manage their business. But what we’re doing is knitting it all together. So, rather than looking for retail media, availability and assortment analytics in isolation, we help create a holistic view of the interdependencies. Ultimately, there are a few core KPIs that everyone is chasing which are “how do you drive market share and sales more profitably. And that is the ultimate goal for us in terms of the digital shelf optimization capabilities.” 

The Evolution from Digital Shelf Analytics to Digital Shelf Optimization

While digital shelf analytics provides valuable insights, it is only the first step in optimizing a company’s digital shelf performance. To keep ahead of the competition, companies must take a smarter approach using actionable, automated data to inform changes to content, their category growth plans and team’s productivity. 

CommerceIQ Digital Shelf Optimization is an evolution from the industry standard insight-based digital shelf analytics solution to an action-driven solution. With the development of CommerceIQ DSO, brands can access innovative features like: 

• Content Optimization which helps streamline the workflow to fix broken content, and use AI to suggest content improvements based on retailer guidelines and category keywords making your teams work much simpler and faster to execute.
• Multi-Location Insights that helps spot opportunities to improve assortment, availability, and fulfillment method across multiple stores and locations down to a store level.
• Market Share to diagnose the impact your content, reviews and share of voice has on sales performance. Finally, a real game-changer that brings a whole other level of profit management to the industry via causal data.

CommerceIQ DSO not only provides more comprehensive data but drives actionability by prioritizing recommendations, along with automations for select retailers. This new product builds on CommerceIQ’s acquisition of e.fundamentals by combining its best-in class digital shelf analytics solution with CommerceIQ automations. The launch of CommerceIQ DSO is the first of many innovations CommerceIQ plans to bring to the platform in the next year.

“The retail landscape is becoming more and more complex, making traditional approaches for growth less reliable and more costly,” said Guru Hariharan, CEO, CommerceIQ. “CommerceIQ Digital Shelf Optimization gives brands an edge on their omnichannel strategy by not only providing the right data insights, but applying generative AI, automations, and prioritized recommendations – enabling brands to be agile with market changes and drive higher profitability.”

Digital shelf optimization requires a deep understanding of fast-changing consumer behavior and the factors that drive purchase decisions. It also requires a willingness to test and experiment with different tactics to see what works best while using tools that advance productivity and performance. Importantly, by continuously optimizing their digital shelf presence using full-category insights combined with automation capabilities, CPG companies can increase sales profitably, gain market share, and stay competitive in an increasingly digital world.

Like to see our Digital Shelf Optimization platform in action?