The Ultimate Guide to Mastering ecommerce Channel Optimization

Ecommerce has undergone rapid evolution since the emergence of Amazon and eBay in the mid-1990s. This growth has only accelerated with industry innovation and the digital-first push from the COVID-19 pandemic. To thrive in this fast-paced environment, top consumer brands are now adopting Ecommerce Channel Optimization (ECO) as a core strategy. ECO combines data analytics, machine learning, and automation to fine-tune e-commerce operations in real time, enabling brands to win at the critical moment of purchase.

What Is Ecommerce Channel Optimization?

Ecommerce Channel Optimization (ECO) involves leveraging advanced technologies like machine learning and data analytics in ecommerce sales management platforms to optimize sales across various channels. This approach helps brands enhance their digital shelf presence, increase sales, and drive profitable growth by making informed decisions at every touchpoint in the customer journey. ECO is vital for brands aiming to maximize conversions and improve customer lifetime value in a highly competitive online marketplace.

A strong ECO journey consists of three iterative phases: 

1. Insight to deliver visibility into performance and guide decision making. Top-performing brands understand that speed matters. They anticipate and remediate issues at a faster pace. 

2. Action where brands prioritize recommendations and automate manual tasks to move at the speed of ecommerce. 

3. Collaboration where sales, marketing and operations teams unite around a single source of truth to focus on shared goals around growth and profitability. 

The Power of Cross-Channel Optimization

The pandemic has brought in record numbers of new ecommerce users while existing ecommerce users have expanded their online purchases. These users are likely to stick around long after the pandemic is consigned to the history books. 

The sudden and dramatic shift from brick and mortar retail to ecommerce has put tremendous pressure on consumer brands, creating issues across sales, operations and marketing teams, all while the algorithms for ecommerce continue to change with current consumer behavior. When teams are not working in harmony, the whole process becomes disconnected. 

For brands with  hundreds or even thousands of products – each with dozens of variables such as inventory, promotions and advertising that change daily – this type of situation is impossible to manage using existing processes, especially when there are multiple channels to manage simultaneously. Say you have 400 products on Amazon, each with 30 variables changing daily. If you have a team of 10 people, they each need to make 1.092 million decisions each quarter. Even if staff were to work 60-hour weeks, each team member would need to make eight decisions every minute just to keep pace.

Nowadays, brands must adopt a cross-channel optimization strategy to ensure consistent branding and seamless customer experiences across all marketing channels. By optimizing sales channels, brands can drive traffic to their product listings, increase sales revenue, and engage potential customers more effectively. This strategy ensures that marketing efforts are aligned with business objectives, enhancing operational efficiency and improving overall performance.

Key Strategies for Optimizing Marketing Channels

To succeed with ECO, brands need to focus on several key strategies:

1. Maximizing Paid Search and Organic Search Results: Utilize analytics tools to identify key metrics and optimize product titles and listings. This helps improve visibility on search results, driving traffic and conversions.

2. Enhancing Inventory Management: Accurate inventory management across multiple channels ensures that products are always available when customers are ready to buy, reducing lost sales opportunities.

3. Driving Consistent Branding Across Channels: Whether through social media platforms, mobile apps, or other communication channels, maintaining consistent messaging and visuals is crucial for brand reputation and customer engagement.

4. Leveraging Data-Driven Decision-Making: Utilize data from various channels to make informed decisions about ad spend, targeting, and customer engagement, ensuring that marketing efforts are always aligned with market trends and business goals.

A successful ECO strategy requires integrating data from all sales, marketing, and operational channels into a single source of truth. This integration provides better insight into customer behavior, enabling brands to make data-driven decisions that enhance performance across all channels. By tracking key performance indicators such as conversion rates, customer inquiries, and search results, brands can identify areas for improvement and optimize their strategies accordingly.

Growing Your Ecommerce Brand with ECO

The ecommerce flywheel was born from the understanding that everything in ecommerce is interrelated. Having the ability to monitor what is happening on your digital shelf is also critical to avoiding out-of-stock issues and reducing instances of third-party variants.

When all components on the flywheel are aligned, inefficiencies are erased and ecommerce business thrives. Here’s what that looks like:

Optimize assortment

Understand the types of products shoppers are searching for and offer a range of products that fulfills that demand and fills any gaps in variations where there is a large demand.

Identify the digital shelf:

Know which keywords are important within each category of your digital shelves to determine which shelves are performing or underperforming and act on this insight quickly.

Organize the digital shelf

Highlight the specific features customers are looking for so that products are easily found, meet consumer needs, and accurately fulfill the search query. 

Fill the digital shelf

Optimize digital inventory management by accurately forecasting demand and ensuring sufficient stock levels. This proactive approach maximizes order fulfillment rates, minimizes stockouts, and enhances customer satisfaction.

Set the right price and promotions

Measure the elasticity of demand for all products and seasonality of demand for certain ones to maximize conversions and returns from promotions with less effort. 

Run retail-aware advertising

Maximize ecommerce sales by using a single source of truth to direct search traffic to items in stock and connect search advertising online with display advertising offline.

An additional benefit to leveraging ECO and maintaining a single source of truth is that it gives you the ability to automate all repetitive tasks and manage by exception. Tasks that can be easily automated in ecommerce include forecasting, paid search keyword selection, bidding, budgeting, order fulfillment, and trade spend allocation. Tasks that require more critical thinking should be devoted to skilled people like creating new products, testing new content, reducing packaging costs, and building a direct-fulfillment product. With automation, brands can reach the scale required to keep up with the algorithmic world of ecommerce and win.   

Having a single source of truth allows a brand to extract insights, make recommendations, and implement automation across the entire ecommerce flywheel, tying together sales, marketing, and supply chain operations.

See the power of growth with an AI-powered ecommerce sales management tool. Request a demo today.