What is digital shelf management?

What can be managed on the digital shelf? 

From product listings to customer reviews, you can manage numerous elements of the digital shelf to improve your product’s performance and visibility. Let’s delve into a few critical aspects of digital shelf management. 

Digital shelf insights 

Digital shelf analytics is the process of examining key performance indicators and digital shelf data to gain an understanding of product efficacy and customer interactions.  

The importance of DSA and its intersection with digital shelf management becomes clear as it uncovers crucial product and consumer insights, facilitating optimization efforts such as: 

• Minimizing product returns by validating product data 
• Enabling quick response to negative feedback to improve customer relations 
• Gaining knowledge of customer preferences to build tailored offers 

In essence, DSA helps paint a clearer picture of the digital shelf as part of a well-rounded omnichannel strategy, driving data-backed decisions and enhancing management efforts. 

Search results positions 

As sales are increasingly driven by clicks and swipes on the digital shelf, the search bar is often the first step of a customer’s online buying journey. Securing a strong position in the ensuing results page is therefore paramount—customers can’t purchase what they can’t find, after all. 

Moreover, modern shoppers value convenience and personalization. They expect not only to find what they’re looking for but also to receive tailored recommendations to their interests. 

Satisfying these growing expectations doesn’t happen by accident; it necessitates strategic planning and careful optimization. Key strategies include: 

• Leveraging SEO techniques for improved search rankings 
• Incorporating the right mix of keywords, images, and other relevant content 
• Verifying products are in the correct categories 
• Ensuring content is updated in line with vendor requirements and regulations 
• Integrating data and learnings from your digital shelf in future customer experiences 

Advanced DSA technology confirms these aspects at every step of the customer journey. This captures potential revenue that might otherwise be lost due to poor optimization. 

Product listing pages and assets 

In the dynamic and rapidly shifting landscape of market trends, retaining customer satisfaction often hinges on ensuring that your product descriptions, images, videos, and other assets remain accurate, consistent, and relevant. 

These qualities are especially important for brands, manufacturers, and retailers maintaining an omnichannel presence, where the task of updating and maintaining product listing pages and other digital shelf data can be daunting.  

For many brands, this is where product data syndication (PDS) comes into play—offering a means to syndicate and synchronize digital shelf data assets efficiently across all channels. 

Stock availability 

According to McKinsey, manual forecasting of stock availability typically yields only 60% accuracy, resulting in a 10% increase in inventory costs due to either overstocking or understocking. 

In contrast, a well-managed digital shelf implements real-time inventory tracking, resulting in benefits such as: 

• Reduced out-of-stock events and better search result positioning  
• Improved customer satisfaction due to timely product delivery 
• Increased sales volume as demand is sufficiently met 

The most advanced DSA software solutions don’t stop at auditing online product availability. They also synchronize with physical store locations, thereby boosting in-store performance and offline sales and improving inventory forecasting accuracy to as much as 90%. 

Pricing policy and strategy 

For brands, manufacturers, and retailers in the omnichannel space, maintaining effective pricing strategies can present some challenges:  

• Maintaining pricing consistency across all channels 
• Ensuring resellers adhere to the minimum advertised price (MAP) 
• Adapting to market price fluctuations  

Manual verification of these continually changing details is not practical. Instead, leading DSAs integrate with product information management (PIM) solutions to ensure internal price consistency, offering AI-assisted analysis to streamline efficiency.  

Competitive position 

Front-page search engine results and digital share-of-shelf are limited resources. To stay ahead of the competition and capitalize on the prime real estate of your customers’ screens, managing your digital shelf must go beyond internal data. 

To spot market opportunities and threats, it’s essential to monitor and harness competitor intelligence in key aspects like pricing, search ranking, product performance, and reviews.  

For brands, manufacturers, and retailers, the goal is not simply to exist on the digital shelf, but to excel on the digital shelf by driving greater visibility, engagement, and ultimately, conversions.  

inriver: The complete digital shelf solution 

As digital shelf expectations grow, so does the need for an agile, scalable solution that can meet diverse demands and drive revenue for even the most complex omnichannel strategy. To meet these evolving expectations, inriver offers the complete PIM solution for digital shelf management. The inriver PIM has market-leading API-based syndication and digital shelf analytics, letting you ‘close the loop’ on your digital shelf and curate every byte of your omnichannel output.  

The composable inriver PIM goes beyond e-commerce. Our multi-tenant SaaS solution turns raw data into rich, valuable product information for every digital and in-person touchpoint. From sourcing and manufacturing to sales and recycling, the inriver PIM supports the entire life cycle of your products. This means you can extract the greatest value from your product data by always delivering accurate and reliable product information wherever it matters most.