With today’s rapid-paced, highly competitive retail landscape, data-driven decision-making is not a luxury but a necessity. With brands being spread across many e-commerce platforms and geographies, keeping up with shifting patterns of consumers, price movements, and competition is only possible by having a deeper insight into the performance of the products. Yet, despite being able to draw on humongous datasets, most organisations remain plagued by blind spots in their product performance. That’s where business analytics software comes in.
Advanced software for analytics, especially for e-commerce software, helps discover product blind spots where a product may be underperforming. Blind spots occur due to pricing, stock shortages, invisibility, or poor content. Without employing digital means to analyse large data sets, blind spots usually go unnoticed, likely causing company revenue loss and customer confidence loss.
Understanding Product Performance Blind Spots
A product performance blind spot is an area where a product is not achieving its full potential, but the problem lies hidden. It could be an excellent product offline, but underperforms in online channels because it does not have the right keywords or images. Or it could be losing customers to competitors through overlooked promotional channels.
Blind spots are a result of so many things:
- Inconsistent content across channels
- Restocking holdups for in-demand SKUs
- Price mismatches within regions
- Inadequate search visibility
- Evolving consumer behaviours
These unseen inefficiencies are tricky to identify without a granular, real-time understanding. That’s exactly where digital shelf analytics fits into the picture.
The Emergence of Digital Shelf Analytics
As more internet storefronts grow busier, “digital shelf” has become more widely used as well. Just as a physical shelf in a store displays everything a customer sees while shopping—products, images, reviews, quantity, price, and more—the digital shelf includes every piece of information a shopper encounters online, such as product listings, photos, reviews, stock availability, pricing, and more. Digital shelf analytics measure and analyse such details across internet malls.
By using digital shelf analytics, brands can monitor how their products appear to consumers in real time. It helps answer questions like:
- Is my product in stock?
- Is it priced competitively?
- Are the right keywords being used?
- How does my visibility compare to competitors?
Business analytics software with digital shelf analytics capabilities allows marketers and category managers to gain detailed insights into performance metrics that were hard to measure in the past.
Better Visibility Using Business Analytics Software
Legacy analytics dashboards offered surface-level data: sales figures, page visits, and conversion rates. Today’s sophisticated business analytics software combines several data points from various sources to produce an end-to-end picture of performance.
A quality analytics platform gathers information from retail websites, internal ERP systems, and third-party systems. It maps the datasets against business objectives, providing users with actionable insights.
Key features include:
- Tracking of real-time inventory and pricing
- Competitor benchmarking
- Analysis of keyword performance
- Monitoring of promotions
- Sentiment and review analysis
When used properly, such software not only highlights what’s working but also identifies what’s going wrong—or what could go wrong soon.
Case in Point: Price vs. Visibility
Suppose a brand observes decreasing sales of a top-selling skincare product. At first glance, all seems well—the price remains the same, and the product is available.
Business analytics solutions reveal that a competing company has a promotional pack, which enhances the product’s visibility and appeal. Besides, digital shelf analytics indicates that the brand has fallen in organic positions because its keywords are outdated, and there are no new reviews.
Without analytics, this might not be discovered until declining sales were substantial. With these insights, however, the brand can pivot its pricing strategy, update content, and gain attention, preventing the performance gap from increasing.
The Role of Predictive Insights
In addition to tracking current performance, newer business analytics solutions are paying more attention to predictive insights. Machine learning algorithms can learn patterns and predict demand, enabling companies to plan.
For example, predictive models can notify a company when a product is likely to run out of stock or when a competitor is planning to roll out a campaign in the same category. This advance notice enables brands to be proactive instead of reactive.
Such predictive power is particularly useful during seasonal highs, flash sales, and promotional events when agility and readiness can make a big difference.
Navigating Complex Omnichannel Landscapes
With shoppers shopping across social platforms, marketplaces, direct-to-consumer sites, and apps, tracking product performance in all these touchpoints is more complicated. Business analytics software assists in making this data singular, providing one comprehensive view of how a product is doing within various contexts.
Whether it’s Flipkart, Amazon, or a brand’s own eCommerce website, companies can recognise channel-specific issues and optimise accordingly. For instance, a product that sells well on one platform might not sell as well on another because of varying review systems or ranking algorithms.
Digital shelf analytics provides cross-channel transparency, enabling brands to stay consistent, optimise listings, and comply with platform rules.
Paxcom and Kinator: Closing the Loop
One of the solutions making progress in this area is Kinator, a powerful digital shelf analytics tool built by Paxcom. Kinator allows brands to gain profound insights into how their products are doing on marketplaces. From monitoring price changes and tracking availability to auditing product content and comparing it to competitors, Kinator provides an end-to-end view of digital shelf performance.
What makes Paxcom’s solution unique is its ability to unify diverse data streams into a single, cohesive dashboard. This makes it easier for marketing, sales, and supply chain teams to collaborate from one source of truth. By putting automation and real-time reporting first, Kinator allows brands to identify performance blind spots before they impact revenue.
Towards Smarter Product Strategy
The strength of business analytics software is that it can connect the dots. With insights from solutions like digital shelf analytics, brands are more likely to make intelligent decisions. From optimising content to shifting prices or projecting inventory needs, analytics takes abstract data and distils it into clear, executable plans.
Blind spots in performance may be unavoidable in the rapidly evolving digital marketplace, but being blind to them is not.
By employing the proper tools and a continuous learning mindset, brands can take those blind spots and turn them into areas for expansion.