What is a digital shelf and how does it impact online sales?
When someone walks into a brick-and-mortar store to shop for a water bottle, they’ll walk to a specific aisle and see all the options laid out neatly for them. Often, water bottles will already be organized by brand, type, size, or color.
But it’s an entirely different experience when consumers shop on an online marketplace. They may search “water bottle,” “watter bottle,” “botella de agua,” or “insulated bottle” and see entirely different sets of results—each one its own digital shelf to shop through.
Placing products on the right digital shelves is essential for ecommerce brands looking to reach customers on online marketplaces. When considering your opportunity to win more traffic, one of the best ways is to see which brands you are competing with. This will help you determine which keywords in your category are driving sales.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
- What is a digital shelf?
- Why is a digital shelf important?
- Why you need to understand your digital shelf
- How businesses and brands can benefit from a digital shelf strategy
- The various digital touch points of a digital shelf
- How can I optimize and win the digital shelf?
What is a digital shelf?
The “digital shelf” is an ecommerce term referring to the product listings that appear when a shopper searches for a particular keyword. When you type in “water bottle” on Amazon, you’ll see a digital shelf that looks something like this.
Depending on which search terms shoppers choose, they’ll see different brands, price points, features, and products. This critical data can help brands plan advertising strategies, product descriptions, imagery, and more.
Pattern’s resources, especially our proprietary data and technology, give our brand partners key insights into what it takes to win on ecommerce marketplaces. With the right info, you can see exactly what steps your brand needs to take to get traffic, win conversions, and ultimately grow long-term profitability.
Find out more about the digital shelf and why product brands should be aware of it below.
Why is a digital shelf important?
Digital shelf data can be surprising to brands. Many ecommerce managers assume they know who they’re competing against—popular brand names found in physical store shelves.
What ecommerce leaders don’t often realize is that the “common path” to find your listings isn’t always intuitive.
Let’s say, for example, that you sell white athletic socks. You’d assume that people are finding your products by searching for keywords like “men’s socks” or for your brand name. You might not know, however, that people are finding your product while searching for “moisture wicking socks” or “durable socks.” You may find new ways to describe and advertise your product by truly understanding your digital shelf.
Better descriptions, better advertising, and optimized listings will lead to increased sales.
Why you need to analyze your digital shelf
Technology is more important than ever for ecommerce leaders. It can drive you to make better decisions and win against competitors. With the right digital shelf analytics tools, you can truly understand what influences your success by better understanding your organic ranking.
To win on Amazon, ad spend is crucial. But conquesting keywords from competitors can be a frustrating, expensive process for brands, yielding less than expected results. With the right digital shelf technology you can create a better ecommerce strategy that is optimized to work with Amazon’s algorithm to improve your presence across digital shelves that contribute to your overall revenue growth.
When you can win traffic and conversions to your listings against “smaller” traffic for more obscure keywords, Amazon’s algorithm recognizes those wins and will improve your organic ranking. As you win bigger and bigger keywords, you’ll see your position across digital shelves improve.
How businesses and brands can benefit from a digital shelf strategy
To help brands make the most of their ecommerce presence, Pattern has created a unique tool to help them measure, strategize, and optimize their marketplace performance. Pattern’s Digital Shelf tool searches for digital shelves across Amazon allowing brands to see exactly who they’re competing with to win traffic and conversions on Amazon. Every day, Pattern scrapes over 3 million keywords on Amazon and distills this information to identify which products are popping up next to yours most often in search results.
Try our free Digital Shelf tool here
You can look at your Digital Shelf by searching for the product name or ASIN IDs. Pattern’s proprietary technology tracks your listings’ position on the shelf compared to other product listings you’re most closely competing with. The on-demand reports can help you better understand search volumes for your target products, and use that data to adjust your strategy.
The digital touch points of a digital shelf
There are a number of sites and channels you should consider when looking to optimize your digital shelf:
- All of your online marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart, Target, and more)
- Your brick-and-mortar retailers’ websites
- Mobile shopping apps
- Your own direct-to-consumer (DTC) site
Each of these digital shelves bring a positive or negative product experience and a chance to compete to optimize your conversion. Each of these digital touch points and channels have their own keywords and best practices. Brands must balance targeting their product content to each online channel while keeping their broad appeal to the audience with product descriptions and titles.
How can I optimize and win the digital shelf?
Let’s look at the data and insights that Pattern’s Digital Shelf tool can provide.
The tool showcases this product’s top competitors, including their pricing, star rating, top ranked keywords, volume of keywords, and more. You can look at the top 5 or top 200, and see how your other products are performing compared to one another.
Diving deeper, you get a helpful look at the competitive landscape in this matrix.
You can see not only how competitive products compare to yours in organic ranking, but also how often they appear next to yours on the digital shelf. The matrix tracks how your other ASINs are performing compared to the rest of your competition. Brands can use this data to help them better understand where they are across digital shelves to improve their keyword strategy and target a more general or niche category as needed.
But gathering data is just the first step. Brands must also take action based on this intel. A great 3P partner will help you interpret the data, use the latest ad strategies, and continually improve your product content, organic ranking, and digital shelf presence. They should proactively help you clearly define new opportunities, create or suggest improved creative assets, use next-gen adtech, and provide detailed, transparent reporting.
At Pattern, we’ve seen the benefits of digital shelf technology change the trajectory of hundreds of brands’ performance on Amazon. With large amounts of highly accurate and current product listing data coming in every day, we can understand the search terms that drive success for your brand across marketplaces. We help our partners strategize for incremental growth in traffic, conversions, and, ultimately, profitability.
Ready to see how you’re performing on the digital shelf? Try our free tool here or contact us here for deeper insight.