Brands must continuously adapt on the digital shelf to grow sales and market share. Succeeding at the scale and speed required demands unprecedented levels of automation and cross-functional communication — and no organization can tackle it all in a single initiative. Digital shelf maturity is a multi-step, multi-year process involving various areas of your business.
5 Business Areas Critical to Digital Shelf Excellence
At every stage, you’ll identify the preparedness of each of the following business areas. This will allow you to align on your goals and advance along the journey together.
What is the digital shelf?
Consumers shop along a collection of diverse and rapidly evolving touch points, both online and in-store, to discover, research, and purchase products. To win in this new world, brands must provide the best possible experience along the shopping journey, from discovery to purchase, which is non-linear, random, and happening all the time.
Strategy
Process
Content
Architecture
Channels
What it is:
Leadership goals, outcomes, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
What to do:
Create project plans that are specific and clearly communicated with sufficient investment and staffing.
What it is:
Team, resources, and workflows
What to do:
Provide people with clearly defined roles, resources, and connectivity to manage work effectively at the speed and scale required.
What it is:
Marketing and product information (including images, rich media, and other materials)
What to do:
Collect and manage accurate, available, engaging, effective, and relevant product content for your entire product catalog.
What it is:
IT systems that store, manage, deliver, and analyze information
What to do:
Ensure your systems are integrated and flexible enough to manage change and scale for future growth.
What it is:
Sales channels (e.g. retailers, trading partners, direct) and digital endpoints (e.g. search, social media)
What to do:
Build strong relationships with each sales partner by equipping them with the best product experience possible.
A Phased Approach to
Digital Shelf Excellence
Most brands struggle with a similar set of five stages when moving from traditional offline sales to becoming a digital-first, omnichannel leader, able to adapt to new market forces fast.
Challenge: Teams are siloed, and product data is missing or in multiple locations
Actions:
• Gather content in a centralized location;
• Apply data models for priority channels (including internal); and
• Assign responsibilities across product, marketing, and sales.
Outcome: Improve operational efficiency, data accuracy, and completeness.
Collect
Activate
Enhance
Expand
Optimize
Challenge: Lags in time to market and incomplete product detail pages
Actions:
• Set channel priorities and focus on item set-up;
• Invest in technology with content validation and “best-path” syndication; and
• Identify and escalate gaps or duplicative steps in the process.
Outcome: Improve relationships with channel partners and reduce time to market
Challenge: Losing sales on key channels, low conversion rates on existing product pages
Actions:
• Connect your brand, sales, and analytics teams to understand performance issues;
• Invest in rich media and below-the-fold content for product SKUs; and
• Build a process to monitor retailer search rank, market share, and adapt in real-time.
Outcome: Improve sales rank and conversion
Challenge: Missing new market opportunities or lacking direct sales capabilities
Actions:
• Identify market opportunities and scale existing processes to new endpoints;
• Close gaps between back-end and front-end operations; and
• Invest in inventory and order management.
Outcome: Grow market reach and share of voice and category
Challenge: Difficulty maintaining growth or adapting to market changes
Actions:
• Adopt agile merchandising with one commerce team (total growth accountability);
• Invest in analytics and automated workflows to make real-time content improvements; and
• Empower regional teams or category managers with short-term budgets to seize opportunities fast.
Outcome: Grow market reach and share of voice and category
Get a customized scorecard for your organization to inform your company’s journey along the digital shelf maturity curve at salsify.com
Take the Assessment
The Digital Shelf Maturity Curve was created by the Digital Shelf Institute in partnership with Salsify. It’s based on Salsify’s decade of experience and expertise partnering with thousands of the world’s largest brands and retailers to face challenges of digital-first, omnichannel commerce.
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