How Top Sellers Use Ecommerce Tech to Gain Brand Control

It’s easy to lose control of your brand on ecommerce. Unauthorized sellers can undercut your pricing, making it difficult for authorized distributors following the rules to move product. Those distributors may come to you asking for recourse to fix it, and you may not even be entirely sure where the pricing issues are coming from or how to stop them.

Regaining control over your brand on ecommerce when you’re in scenarios like this can feel overwhelming, especially when you aren’t equipped with proper tools. According to Pattern’s Chief Technology Officer Jason Wells, the old way of doing things was for brands to pay people to look at prices and manually compile data, a process that took a lot of financial resources and time. Now, however, more and more brands are turning to technological innovation to do the work for them, and they’re finding more success doing it.

Why use technology

Technology can be used to analyze and then compile multi-channel data quickly and efficiently so its usefulness is maximized for brands looking to regain brand control. With technology, brands get a complete picture of the ecommerce landscape, including where price erosion is happening and what they can do about it.

According to Wells, the right technology can get a brand’s eyes on “hundreds and hundreds of items” going out their distributors’ doors. Ultimately, it can give brands better control of the customer experience without them having to spend needless time and effort to do it.

What tools can brands use: Predict

Predict is a multi-channel ecommerce software that monitors over 400,000 products every day across 525 of the most popular ecommerce sites, showing brands the potential risks and opportunities they have across the market. Unlike other software, Predict gives brands expansive and actionable looks at where they’re losing control of their brand on Amazon and other marketplaces, in addition to data about ad spending, reviews, keywords, and more.

With Predict, brands can know exactly who’s violating their MAP policies on which marketplace and what their compliance looks like across the board in real time, as well as how much they’re losing on ecommerce sites. Predict looks at the compliance of each unit going out the door, not just a small sample, so brands can be fully in the know.

Prioritize sellers moving the most units

One thing Predict does that other software doesn’t is to prioritize the seller moving the most units. “You could have a seller with 40 non-compliant listings and another with two non-compliant listings,” Wells said. “Any trackers would prioritize or put the seller with 40 at the top of the list. But with Predict and our Buy Box and volume tracking, we can see that the seller with 40 listings is only selling 10 units a month and the seller with two listings is selling 1000 units a month. As a brand, you really want to prioritize the seller with more units.”

In addition to compliance data, Predict shows brands who they may be losing the Buy Box to, which products are being suppressed, and how much loss of the Buy Box and suppression are costing them. Predict can also help brands analyze how competitive each of their products are on the marketplace. This data helps brands do fine-grained first-mover tracking to see who is lowering prices first.

Other data Predict provides

In addition to providing data that can help brands regain brand control, Predict centralizes data like ad spending, keyword effectiveness, and reviews. Brands can use this software to see where their ad spending budgets are going as well as which sales can be attributed to their advertising. They can see which products are getting what ratings on sites like Amazon, receive data to compare customer service response times across channels, and learn which ad keywords are giving them the best returns.

Wells calls it a “super powerful data set” that gives brands a gateway into an entirely different way of controlling their brand on ecommerce markets. While controlling your brand’s presence can seem like a daunting task, technological innovation is arming brands with the data and the resources to come out on top. To learn more about Predict and request a product demo for your brand, contact us.