Digital Shelf Analytics

Why is Seller Analysis Important for eCom Brands?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Praveen Dhama

The eCommerce marketplaces have become hotspots for brands to ensure they capture the maximum market share through their omnichannel approach. To execute this, brands have two options, sell online directly or appoint authorized sellers. Unfortunately, there is one more category of sellers that are unauthorized or third-party (3P) sellers and they tap into the same eCommerce marketplaces and drive away the potential customer base towards their listings. The issue with third party sellers is that you can’t control them for the activities they are performing on the platform. To start with, they don’t necessarily provide genuine products of the brand. In fact, they continuously find ways to increase their financial base by enlisting counterfeit listings actively. Although the bigger issue with such sellers is that they continuously engage in Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) violations, which lead to many repercussions to brands, including damaged brand reputation, loss of genuine/authorized sellers, etc. The biggest disadvantage of MAP violations through unauthorized sellers is that it destroys the price parity of the brand and creates consumer distrust in the brand. Moreover, loyal consumers may ignore the brand’s product listings, opt for alternatives, or go to another store to find better products. When consumer’s product demand from authorized sellers is diverted on eCommerce marketplaces by 3P sellers, the demand and supply relationship between the brand and its sellers is also affected. This unexpected change in demand and supply often leads to overstocking, which is more dangerous in case of perishable products. Third party sellers also take the maximum benefit when brands run out of stock, and they scale their sales creating more damaging situation for brands. While these might seem concerning to you as a brand, the story doesn’t stop here. 3P sellers also engage in copyright and brand infringement by using images, content, or videos of genuine products to sell their counterfeits without the brand’s permission. The eCommerce marketplaces, like Amazon, Flipkart, Shopee, Lazada, etc., have also been flooded with sellers of lookalike products. What Should Brands Do to Monitor their eCom Platform Sellers? Monitoring sellers across eCommerce platforms to flag unauthorized sellers is challenging. To cater to this major issue of eCommerce players, we help them with our Digital Commerce intelligence, mScanIt, to review seller activities in real-time. mScanIt has capabilities to perform Seller Analysis that reveals the stock availability of products across eCommerce platforms. Brands can use the list of sellers on each platform, the type of products they are selling, the stock availability of sellers, and more. Also, the solution can help brands in identifying which seller is winning the buy box. By reviewing these details in real-time, brands can detect unknown sellers and check out their activities on different eCommerce platforms. Simultaneously, a brand can view and compare the product availability of 3P seller’s vis-a-vis authorized sellers within a time frame. If the percentage of product available with authorized sellers is lower than the 3P sellers, consumers could opt for products from alternate sellers or even visit alternate stores. The scenario is persistently noticed in the FMCG industry, as grocery is an everyday need of consumers and is one of the categories with the highest demands since the launch of Quick Commerce (Q-Com) brands and apps. Brands can leverage mScanIt to inform their Key Account Managers or Category Managers to report 3P or unauthorized sellers. Doing so would diminish the chance of MAP violations and effectively maintain the product price of different variants under multiple categories. Moreover, brands can know the exact sellers of their products functioning on eCommerce platforms. It would likely avoid copyright, trademark, and content infringement. Conclusion Seller analysis is an important facet of E-Commerce Competitive Analytics. Brands need to analyze the activity of their sellers to check their stocking needs. Simultaneously, they need to know the sellers active across E-Commerce platforms like Amazon, Blinkit, Flipkart, and others. The seller analysis is also important for eliminating counterfeit, unauthorized, or 3P sellers from the eCommerce platforms, directly impacting the trust between a brand and its consumers. Schedule a demo with us to learn about the advantages of the eCommerce Competitive Analytics solution for your brand.

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Are Your Digital Ad Campaigns Safe from Sophisticated Bots?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

The digital world is evolving rapidly, and marketers are moving from traditional platforms to digital platforms. But in this growing digital ecosystem, someone is hiding behind the screens to disrupt your growth. Behind all the pros of digital advertising, a manipulated truth is that marketers are unaware of who is coming to see their ad campaigns. To throw light on this, ad fraud solution providers have come into the limelight to validate how much invalid traffic is coming to the ad campaigns. However, just when the marketers were ready to combat ad fraud, cybercriminals expanded their fraud zone with sophisticated bots. Unlike the general bots, the sophisticated bots can replicate human behavior and hide easily behind the cloak of genuine traffic resulting in manipulated data. This again makes the marketer’s ad campaigns vulnerable to ad fraud. What is the solution? Advanced Problems Need Advanced Solutions Once a sophisticated bot penetrates your digital ad campaign, it will not just impact one KPI but also manipulate your entire sales funnel and manipulate the data. For example, if you’re running an impressions campaign then first it will inflate the number of impressions with bot traffic. And once that is done, they will impact your hard KPIs like lead, conversion, or install. The result is that you not only waste your ad spend on invalid traffic but also open the gateway to your brand assets for the sophisticated bot army to attack and destroy. Thus, it is important to get a full-funnel ad fraud detection tool instead of a solution that covers just one KPI. Know in detail about the different types of sophisticated bots that are hard to detect on the web and app. And for the advanced solution, stick with us till the end of this blog. Sophisticated Web Fraud Techniques That Are Hard to Detect Imperceptible Window To improve the CTR of the site, the fraudsters open the advertiser’s landing page to a zero-sized pixel. However, the end-user is unaware of this and when they visit the website it is registered as a click in google ads platform. The advertiser ends up paying for these clicks/visits which were not even seen by the user. Example of Page View Fraud In the above case, the user didn’t click on the advertisement, but a click has been registered. As the window size is imperceptible for the user, they are unaware of this case. Generally, it is difficult to detect these anomalies without the help of advanced data analytics capabilities. Cookie Stuffing Cookie stuffing is organic theft where a website drops one or more third-party cookies onto a user’s web browser. An Iframe of ‘0x0’ pixel is used to dropping a cookie to hijack the organic user. These malicious cookies thus incorrectly attribute the organic traffic to the fraudulent affiliate. In the above example, we have incorporated a mFilterIt pixel which drops a randomly generated cookie whenever a user visits the advertiser’s website for the first time. Upon the return of that user, the same cookie value indicates the return of the same user. We also observed that despite faking or rotating the IP, the bot device is returning the same cookie within a gap of a few minutes. Bot User Fake users or Bot emulated users usually don’t have any mouse movement or touch interactions. They are also programmed in a way where they don’t react to the advertiser’s landing page. In this case, where there is no user interaction, we use the capabilities of Machine learning algorithms combined with captured values like configurations, plugins, device settings, canvas fingerprinting, etc. This helps to analyze the bot patterns and cases where the clicks bots are happening at a high probability. With the help of AI, ML, and data science, we detected approximately 32k such cases just in the pilot phase. Sophisticated App Fraud Techniques That Are Hard to Detect Click Spam Click spamming starts when a user downloads an infected app on their device – or visits an infected mobile website. These infected apps are usually downloaded outside the walled gardens of the Play Store and IOS app store. The infected app has built-in code which is programmed to create clicks on ads or allow external devices to click within the app. The app works normally on the user’s device, except for the tiny code running click-spam activities in the background. This fraud technique generates click spamming from the user’s device without their knowledge. And the advertisers are under an impression that the clicks are generated by real users. Example of Click Spam In this case, clicks and installs are high whereas the conversion rate is as low as 0.01%. This is a clear case of click spamming. These clicks were generated in a time period of 9 days from Thailand. Surprisingly, the total clicks are equivalent to the population of the country. This kind of CTIT curve is often overlooked by the attribution platforms due to the clicks being refreshed in the background. At mFilterIt, we track the click patterns in case of click generating from the same device ID. Event Spoofing Event spoofing is one of the advanced fraud techniques used by fraudsters to manipulate the install data of advertisers. In this case, the fraudsters programmed bots that can fire fake clicks in the background to capture the events. This eventually leads to an event being spoofed and attributed without a legitimate install. This results in the advertiser believing that a legitimate install happened. However, in reality, no event has occurred. The events like bookings, purchases, signup, registration, etc. are required to be analyzed thoroughly to identify in-app fraud. Example of Event Spoofing In this case, the CTIT is distributed within a few minutes, which is unusual. The normal traffic pattern is spread over as the conversion time is usually not in the control of the publisher. mFilterIt’s Full-Funnel Model – Our Advanced Solution How We Protected a Global Pharma Player Across the Funnel A premium pharma company noticed that their impressions were high, but

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Amazon Best Seller: What it Takes to Get This Badge?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

Most online shoppers searching for a product on Amazon consider the best seller as the most reliable product in terms of quality and usage. The shopper believes such products would have the highest positive reviews and ratings and would match the expectations mentioned on the product page. The best seller badge on Amazon is given to a product with the highest sales volume in a certain time period. The badge is often given to new products every hour. The best seller badge further helps to achieve higher sales more easily. In addition, the product appears in the top ten search results and, therefore, acquires higher visibility than its competitors. Getting the best seller badge would require increasing the visibility of products so that more customers can find and purchase the product. The product discoverability and position on the search rank can get enhanced by optimizing the page title, images, and description. They play a crucial role in convincing the shopper that the product is worth it’s price. The story doesn’t finish here. Amazon also has a Best Seller page, wherein the top selling products under a category are shown along with their ranking. The product with the highest rank often appears more times than others on the organic and sponsored search results of Amazon. Sometimes, the products from this list also become visible on unrelated keyword search results as well. Therefore, achieving the best seller badge is often a priority of ecommerce managers and retailers, as it helps to boost sales. How to Get the Amazon Best Seller Badge? Rank Higher on Organic Search and Sponsored Keywords Product visibility on ecommerce marketplaces influences buying decisions. The product with the highest search rank on organic and sponsored keyword search results would appear before its competitors. Most customers often go for a product appearing in the top ten results. Achieving a position in the top search results would require keyword optimization, title enrichment, and more. Measuring your product’s performance against the top competitors in the ecommerce marketplace helps to find new areas of improvement and, ultimately, achieve the goal. For example, if you measure the performance of a product’s title with its top competitors and find that their title performance is higher than yours. Now, your ecommerce brand marketers could look at the competitors’ page titles and find factors influencing the performance. Our ecommerce competitive analysis, helps brands to find areas for improvement. Brand marketers use the insights to enrich the product page title and increase the search rank on keyword search results. Find the Category in Which Your Product Can Give Tough Competition A product on Amazon can be a part of multiple categories and choosing the best one makes all the difference in the world. At times, you might be tempted to enlist the product under an irrelevant category because they offer the lowest competition. Enlisting a product in such a manner can signal wrong message to the online shopper and make them disinterested in it. As such, the best way to get the best seller badge is to find a relevant sub-category or niche offering the lowest competition. Your sales might slightly get affected, but the chances of shoppers bouncing off your product page would significantly decrease. Moreover, you could keep the best seller badge for a longer duration under the chosen category. But seasonal products like gift items, come under an exception to this guideline, as their sales don’t depend on category. Sometimes, sellers can achieve high sales and the best seller badge by placing seasonal products under an irrelevant category. Set up Promotions for the Product that You Want to Sell the Most Deciding the product that you want to sell the most on Amazon is not an easy choice for eCommerce managers. However, once the decision is made, the next step is to set up promotional campaigns such as ads, discounts, deals, etc., to boost sales. Display ads on eCommerce marketplaces grab the attention of even the browsers and turn a few of them into customers. Similarly, discounts or limited-time deals entice online shoppers to buy the product. Eventually, the increase in sales through the promotions helps the product get the best seller badge. We would also suggest you run promotions under categories wherein Amazon’s private label brand has the least competition, as they undoubtedly have the upper hand otherwise. Getting the best seller badge would become much easier under such categories. Our solution, mScanIt, also enables global brands to achieve real-time actionable insights on product promotions at category, platform, and other levels. Finding the ongoing product promotions of the competition becomes much simpler with our solution. Implementing mScanIt’s actionable insights into the campaigns has also enabled brands to achieve higher sales. Conclusion It’s easy to say that all it takes to achieve the best seller badge is high sales volume, but attaining higher sales requires a lot of effort. Keyword optimization on product pages and finding the correct category are just a few methods for increasing visibility and sales volume. As the best seller badge is given to new products every hour, it has become essential to have a solution that can find tracks metrics affecting eCommerce marketplaces. mScanIt, powered by mFilterIt, is a new-age technology that helps brands to track product prices, product page scores, etc. Evaluating the results of own brand’s products versus the top competitor’s listings helps brand marketers take measures that can enhance the search rank and visibility, directly impacting sales. Get in touch with us to know more about the advantages of mScanIt for your brand.

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Out-of-Stock: Just Lost Sales or More?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

The number of shoppers on established ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart is in billions. And thus, the movement of products in terms of sales is at large scale compared to any mom n pop shop. This large movement of products often lead to problem of out of stock (OOS) which can happen due to negligence at multiple steps of the value chain. Brand stakeholders and ecommerce retailers understand that the OOS is going to remain an ongoing problem. The increasing number of visitors to online shopping stores often impacts product demand. eCommerce managers use the best measures to forecast their product demand percentages before informing their authorized sellers of the inventory. Unfortunately, determining the exact product demand is a slippery slope for eCom managers, as the customers’ needs continuously change. The inaccurate forecast of product demand is also linked to other reasons. For example, if your brand is running an online campaign for a specific product and delay in informing the authorized retailers about increasing the inventory of the product. Under such circumstances, the retailers would update the stocks per the previously stated demand. A similar situation could arise if the brand stakeholders delay informing the retailers about updating the stocks of specific products. The unavailability of products on an ecommerce marketplace could also be linked to technical issues, non-compliance with a product page guideline, and other reasons. Although the stockouts reasons are concerning enough for a brand’s stakeholders, the repercussions are equally damaging and sometimes irreversible. OOS not only causes lost sales but also leads to lost customer loyalty and lower visibility on ecommerce marketplaces, to name a few. 3 Biggest Repercussions of Stockouts on Ecommerce Marketplaces Customers opt for an Alternative Product Shopping became easier with the introduction of the ecommerce marketplace. With the launch of quick commerce platforms like BlinkIt, Dunzo, and Zepto, even delivery has become faster. The ecommerce stakeholders continuously work on identifying and resolving the customer’s problem; however, OOS is an ongoing problem. Online shoppers have limited reactions whenever a product becomes out-of-stock. The online shopper may click the ‘notify me when available’ button or buy a substitute. As far as I know, the probability of waiting for a product, especially if it is grocery, is far less than most of the other categories. For example, the likelihood that a customer waits to buy brown bread of a particular brand when it is available is meager. The scenario is more common in quick commerce apps, especially when offering instant home delivery. Under this scenario, the brand has lost sale to competitors and will experience the same until the product become available. Brands Witness a Shift in Loyalty Once an online shopper buys a product and becomes exceptionally satisfied with it, the inclination to buy it repeatedly increases. Such buyers are often referred to as loyalists. But, when the product becomes unavailable on the ecommerce marketplace, one of the subsequent choices of the loyalist is to find a substitute. After using a competitor’s product, the loyalist may change their opinion about the previously bought item and compare its qualities with the new one. As a result, the brand’s loyal customer base shifts to competitors if the product is OOS. Brand stakeholders must expect a higher shift of loyalists towards their competitors if the product remains OOS most of the time. Hampers Search Ranks Significantly Products that become out-of-stock are removed from the search results of ecommerce marketplaces because they spoil customer experience and hamper sales. Instead, new products acquire their search rank and increase their visibility. On Amazon, even if an ecommerce manager updates the inventory, it takes 24-48 hours to review the changes and make the product listing visible to buyers. Re-acquiring the top search rank for the product listing becomes challenging, as the customer’s loyalty has shifted to a competitive product and the consumer’s interest in buying the new & regularly available product has increased. The search rank on ecommerce marketplaces depends on product purchases, best seller, SEO, and other factors. The search results algorithm of the ecommerce marketplaces recognizes the new products attracting the customer’s attention and its visibility as well as search rank improves significantly. Moreover, customers that had the product in their cart but faced stockouts during the final step of the purchase journey often leave negative reviews and ratings. Such feedback further hampers the search rank of the product listings and makes acquiring a high position on keyword search results more challenging. Conclusion We agree that the biggest issue of stockouts is loss of sale, but it also has many other repercussions. It shifts the customer’s loyalty to the competitive brand and hampers the search rank. Inaccurate demand forecasts, sudden demand surge and delayed reporting by inventory managers are the most prominent factors leading to OOS. Ensuring the correct availability of products with authorized online retailers requires diving deep into the stockout vs. stock availability percentages of your brand. It requires identifying the change in these percentages at SKU, platform, variant, and other levels every month . Such in-depth analysis enables brands to diminish their stockout percentage and enhance customer experience. Connect with us to learn the advantages of using our e-commerce competitive analytics solution, mScanIt Ecommerce Analytics Solution, for predicting your product availability at minuscule levels.

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Price Not Visible on Keyword Search Results: How it Happens and What Can You Do About It?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

Have you ever come across products without price tags on e-commerce platforms? Well, it happens a lot and causes a lot of distress. Price tags on online shopping stores hold the capacity to captivate the attention of millions of potential buyers and increase online sales/revenue. When the price of a product is not shown, the consumer might choose other options or platforms, as the buying intention remains consistent. Moreover, listings without prices may diminish the search rank on the keyword search results of an e-commerce platform. Most online shopping stores offer products in stock, with prices and titles to entice buyers. The collaborative effort of the brand and the e-commerce marketplace enables higher revenue for both. The price of a product is not shown if some other seller has won the buy box, the product is out-of-stock, or the seller is facing disputes in the e-commerce marketplace. It could also happen due to a technical issue or enlisting a wrong option/variant of a product listing. Neither of these scenarios is good for a brand. What’s more? Products without price tags that rank high on keyword search results are wasting your marketing efforts, as they are stealing the position of your product variants that have price tags. Sure, they are generating brand awareness but they are diminishing the impact of potential revenue or sales from an e-commerce platform. Moreover, products without price tags on keyword searches of an online shopping store give an edge to your competition, as they have price tags and become more enticing for a consumer before making a final buying decision. So, what can you do about it? 3 Ways to Avoid Invisibility of Price Tags on E-Commerce Platforms The global e-commerce retail sales figure is bound to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025. Imagine the loss your business can face by not paying attention to products without price tags on e-commerce platforms. How to resolve this problem? Here are three ways: – Manage Stock Availability Did you know that 39% of U.S. retailers are very concerned about stockouts during the holiday season? The impact of out-of-stock is directly linked to global supply chain disruptions. In the past few years, our clients have discovered that stockouts also happen during the rest of the year. One of our FMCG customers was facing 65% unavailability of products until it started reviewing and analyzing availability at pin code, SKU, platform, category, and other levels. Post-analysis, the brand took measures to resolve the problem by informing the respective Key Account Managers and Category Managers of their e-commerce marketplaces. Their actions resulted in the higher engagement of product listings with the target audience and conversions/revenue. The stock unavailability diminished to less than 30% in nearly three months after taking action. However, the availability of products also resulted in the visibility of the price tags. So, whenever consumers look for specific items under multiple categories or sub-categories of the e-commerce marketplace, they can compare the brand product price to the competitors before making a final purchasing decision. – Optimize the Product Pages Most people will ignore products without price tags on keyword search results. Therefore, you should also ensure that search results of the digital shelf always have variants. How can you manage this? Is it impossible? Well, No! You could probably check the keywords working for your product listings and rank new product variants at the top of the digital shelf results by using them. However, it will take time to rank and will depend on the product page optimization results too. Use the top-performing keywords in the product listings currently in stock across multiple geo-locations. Our solution, e-commerce analytics tool, mScanIt, monitors the Share-of-Shelf of your brand vis-a-vis the competition. You can check the average page position of your listings using a keyword sub-type under the SOS dashboard. By doing so, you can achieve your goal of boosting the digital shelf rank of your e-commerce product listings on brand, competition, and generic keyword search results. The solution also defines your product page scores. So, you can easily monitor the score of the competitors and check the product page content working for them. Doing so would help to build strategies to optimize the product pages further. – Win the Buy Box – Strategically The buy box is the column that consists of the add-to-cart and buy-action buttons. It has become popular among the e-commerce marketplace sellers, as they are assigned based on the marketplace algorithms. However, winning the buy box is also dependent on stock availability. We believe that brands that have associations with the best marketplace sellers have a higher tendency to win the buy box. Simultaneously, keeping the brand reputation intact through seller-wise analysis and reporting unauthorized third-party sellers can become a stepping stone. Moreover, brands can divert the buyer’s attention to their authorized sellers and increase their market share. Isn’t this mind-boggling? Well, it isn’t. There is a whole market of counterfeit sellers on e-commerce platforms. According to a report, 74.8% of people around the globe became victims of online shopping scams through e-commerce marketplaces. Brands lost revenue, but their biggest concern is damage to brand reputation. So, stopping unauthorized 3P sellers can help avoid such repercussions and increase the chance of winning the buy box. Bottom Line Products without price tags on e-commerce search results can damage brands in multiple ways. On the other hand, ensuring price tag visibility can increase visibility, brand awareness, product discoverability, and conversions/sales. The best method for ensuring this is by avoiding stockouts, diminishing counterfeit seller activities on online shopping platforms, optimizing the product pages, and strategically winning the buy box. Connect with us to learn how monitoring products through mScanIt can help to achieve these goals. Get in touch to learn more about keyword search results.

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Untold Stories from eCom Banner Ads

Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

Display advertising through online banner ads is one of the most effective ways of capturing the attention of online shoppers and increasing sales. Banners intrigue buyers because of their messaging, visibility of top products, promotions, etc. Brands spend valuable resources to create the perfect banner for reaching the target audience and ensuring a higher than ongoing click-through rate (which remains uncertain until the end of the advertising campaign). Brands include the best colors, product variants, price quotes, promotions, etc., in their banners. Most eCommerce marketplaces have banner placements on the category, sub-category, home, and other promo pages. Higher visibility of a brand’s product variants correlates with higher brand awareness, which will likely also impact the Share-of-Visibility of the brand. Capturing the brands with the highest visibility through banner ads on an eCommerce marketplace helps to know the brands bidding the highest on a specific page. Furthermore, evaluating the banners visible after searching a brand, competitor, and generic keyword helps brands to find outputs on search analytics. For example, comparing your brand’s sponsored banner ads vis-à-vis a competition based on specific keyword search results shows if your competitor is bidding higher or lower than you on the keyword. It also displays the difference in visibility percentages based on the sponsored banner ads. Tell Tales from E-Commerce Banner Ads What’s New Hot or Trending? Brands frequently launch new products under specific categories. According to our experts, monitoring the sponsored display ads of your competition helps to come across your competitors’ most trending hot, or new products. It also helps to know the new aspects they are focusing on. Continuously monitoring the competition banner ads also detects the frequency of their launch and builds a forecast of their next launch on an e-commerce marketplace. You can manage the ongoing keyword bidding and banner placement strategies to achieve an edge over the competition. For example, an oral care brand with a mouth-freshness toothpaste variant is focused in the health category section of an e-commerce marketplace. After two weeks, it launches a whitening toothpaste variant in the same category. The same brand keeps the same frequency of its new product launches in the same marketplace category. You can easily predict the estimated launch date of the new product, i.e., it would also be around the same period (two weeks). By evaluating the banner ads of the competitor, you can find the types of product variants focused on a category, qualities featured in the ads for a specific sub-category, prices, promotions, seasonal offers, etc. For example, the brand uses dazzling white’ as part of its banner ads for most of its whitening toothpaste. How are Competitors Targeting their Niche Audience? Evaluating the eCommerce banner ads of your competitors shows the focused target audience on specific platforms and categories. Most brands have ambassadors for multiple product variants. Reviewing the display ads in a category shows whether a brand focuses on millennials, kids, or other audiences. Moreover, it displays the themes that the competitors focus on to increase brand visibility and product click-through rates from their target audience. Monitoring the banner ad campaigns of the competitors also shows the change in discount percentages or offers. Mapping promotional aspects in a brand helps to detect themes like deals, offers, discounts, etc., at an in-depth level and better understand the competitor’s approach towards its target audience. For example, if one of your competitors continuously uses ‘combo’ for most of its display ads on a platform, you can detect the commonly used product variants. You can also see the Share-of-Visibility of their banner ads on multiple e-commerce pages focusing on ‘combo’ promotions. Upon further deep-diving, you can check if their banner displays mention SKUs and prices, which would tell the benefits they are offering to lure their target audience. Through this new information, you can easily detect that the marketers of a competitive brand are focusing on price and SKUs and use it to your advantage. What Are Your Competitors Relying Upon? For the past few years, we mapped the banner communication of brands on e-commerce marketplaces. We found that they entice consumers through cashback, gifts, day/occasional specific deals, limited-time offers, vouchers, as well as a mix of two or more promotions. Upon mapping the sponsored banner ads of the competitors, we found new insights based on location, platform, and other aspects. Analyzing the banner ads of the competitors helps to find their focused form of promotion in a given time frame. The information helps brands find areas for retargeting the banner campaigns, new keywords, and an untapped target audience. Wrapping Up Monitoring the banner ads of competitors gives insights into the banner communication at the platform, category, sub-category, and other levels. Brands can use the information to know the aspects focused on by their competitors, reach an untapped market, enhance Share-of-Visibility on the e-commerce platform, etc. Besides this, brands can detect forecasts of product launch dates and their competitors’ most commonly used themes on e-commerce platforms. Banners of a brand give inputs on marketing and communication, which help scale the business. 2o, and let’s build new stories for your online shoppers.

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Customer Sentiments: A Boon for Sellers and Resellers

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / somya goel

Aware of your customers’ feelings? Try These Ways to Streamline Your Sentiment Analysis For Sellers The delivery was on time, or the product was as expected” such types of feedback reveal a lot about the brand and its authorized sellers. Such reviews state that you can trust me or what you see and read is what you can expect.” Such feedback also reveal that the customer can trust the seller, which is a serious relief, as third-party and many unauthorized sellers constantly sell counterfeits or duplicates on the eCommerce marketplace. Consumers feel relieved about product authenticity and start relying on the same brand products (sold by its authorized sellers) in future after going through the reviews. Customers across the globe share their experiences in form of reviews and ratings. These reviews can alter the intensity in favor or against a product, seller, or brand, and they can change their perspective as well as the final buying decision of the online shoppers. Capturing their opinions and the scale of their emotions in a given time frame, commonly known as sentiment analysis, enables them to find the root causes of problems. The holistic approach for figuring out the most and least mentioned aspects of the product listings on eCommerce platforms also gives insights into the probable intent to purchase, points of engagement, new market insights, etc. Such knowledge helps to boost brand building as the target audience gets further filtered, marketing/advertising practices become more customer-centric, and customer service becomes aware of the common pain points or queries. Besides this, brands can use sentiment analysis to boost customer engagement with their enlisted sellers across eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Bigbasket, Flipkart, etc., in multiple ways. 4 Ways Brands Can Use Sentiment Analysis for their Sellers Inform About Competitor Fallbacks Sentiment Analysis discovers the commonly spoken words for a brand and its competitors. Knowing customers’ pain points for competitive brands can prove useful in scaling up business by including them as advantages in the page description, marketing content in product pages, bullet points, etc., and tapping into higher market share. For example, if a brand can learn that its competition is facing delivery issues for a specific product on a particular eCommerce platform, your brand could use this information to gain competitive edge by informing its sellers and offering one-day, same-day, or next-day delivery options to its customers. Share the Practices of Other Sellers Brands want to ensure that the business runs smoothly by resolving customer, product, and seller-centric issues. By using the proprietary technology of mScanIt, it can discover the most appreciated aspects of its authorized and 3P (third-party) sellers and share the information with underperforming sellers, such as: Focus areas Content Examples Screenshots Sentiments It could also enable the underperforming sellers to resolve some of its ongoing problems and increase the intent to purchase products across multiple eCommerce platforms. For example, if a competitor seller is appreciated for the packaging, however, the brand seller has no mention about the same. It could inform its seller so that they can offer better packaging, which the customer appreciates and becomes a relevant theme of the eCommerce platforms. Pro Tip: “Analyzing sentiments using reviews and ratings of consumers helps in identifying their unsolved queries and evaluate their perception of the brand, seller, or product.” Provides Platform-Level Insights Brands increase the revenue of their product variants by placing them across multiple eCommerce platforms such as Lazada, Shopee, Tokopedia, Amazon, etc. Therefore, using Sentiment Analysis, they can gain insights into the customer perception of product listings across eCommerce platforms, and build their strategies, accordingly. Sharing platform-level insights with its authorized sellers would enable the brand to help them in many ways. For example, suppose competitive sellers of baby care products on Lazada have more mentions related to the product’s price, such as cheap, economical, promo, courier, etc. In that case, it can inform the seller about the same. The associated sellers can enhance their product descriptions, bullet points, titles, etc., and capitalize on the pricing aspect while avoiding MSRP or MAP violations. Recognize the Brands Perception Customers often leave feedback about brand/seller/product under reviews of eCommerce platforms. Knowing the customer’s sentiment intensity for the product listing can help to understand their needs, trends, demands, etc., and address them at the multiple levels, including at seller-level, to boost sales, revenue, as well as seller recognition. For example, one of our brands discovered 49% of positive sentiment intensity on the Shopee platform based on more than one lakh feedback. After carefully reviewing the analysis of the brand-level themes, delivery, quality, and packaging were the most talked about issues on the eCommerce platform. The overall sentiment score of the brand was between 0.18 and 0.5, with an average of 0.37. (The sentiment score is calculated in the range of –1 to 1.) The brand communicated its official sellers on other platforms to use this information while enlisting products. Also, the word cloud revealed “texture, effectiveness, and arrived” among the top three negative aspects and “packaging, delivery, and fast” as the top positive aspects. It could inform its upcoming sellers about the same and build a better brand perception on Shopee. Conclusion Brands across the globe have already realized the potential of eCommerce Competitive Analysis, mScanIt, powered by mFilterIt. The Sentiment Analysis dashboard of mScanIt can prove to be beneficial for gaining insights into the minds of consumers and discovering their emotions towards products, brands, and sellers. By realizing the pain points or positive aspects of the brand’s authorized/official sellers, competitive seller practices, or the themes triggering brand perception, brands can find triggers that can enhance customer journeys and seller perceptions. Schedule a demo with us to learn more about the advantages of using the mScanIt Sentiment Analysis dashboard for your sellers.

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Listen to Your Customers: They Know the Best.

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Noopur Mathur

How analyzing reviews helped an FMCG brand to optimize their packaging? In India, we have a saying, “ग्राहक हमारे भगवान हैं” which means “customer is our god.” Ratings and reviews are invaluable sources of getting to know your customers. The shoppers share their personal buying experiences through them. They share the qualities and experience they love with the product, things they are disappointed with, inform about unfocused or undermined USPs of the product, at times talk about better experience with competitor products and lot more. The information customers provide through reviews is invaluable for brands as it helps to understand buyer personas, find new trends, and resolve brand / authorized seller or product issues, influencing the buying decision of the on-lookers. Brands constantly need to weigh the value of their customer’s positive, negative, or neutral reviews to figure out the change in market perception, competitive edge, outcomes, and more. A couple of interesting facts that showcase the impact of reviews for eCom brands: 19-25% of customers believe in the authenticity of customer reviews, and a large proportion makes final purchase decisions based on them. 92% of customers stay away from brands with negative reviews. We also analyzed the impact of reviews on a few brands and discovered that packaging was a significant issue constantly faced by one of our FMCG clients. Our analysis revealed the following challenges: The Struggles of the Brand Even after over 50 years of serving their customers, the FMCG brand was having trouble assessing the challenges that people were facing in context to their products. They wanted to deep dive into the feedback by the customers to understand the market sentiment for their products. The lack of transparency in feedback, which in offline case used to be from the distributors, made it difficult for the brand to identify the source of issues, whether the production issues or the delivery issues. E-commerce platforms have become mediums, wherein brands can directly understand the customers’ feedback of the product, brand, or seller by analyzing the reviews and ratings section. Unfortunately, the rapidly growing rate of reviews on multiple product variants made it challenging for their marketers to develop a subjective view, and sight the biggest problem or categorically segregate the riveting pain points of the reviewers. This was the time when collaboration between the brand and mScanIt started. How Listening to Customer Helped them Grow? Our eCom Analytics solution, mScanIt was deployed and collected data from all of the areas that affect a brand’s performance. This information helps in understanding customer personas and scaling up the consumer base. Using these insights, brand could make more intelligent decisions based on the data, and eventually, propel the growth in terms of revenue. Let us explain the step by step approach: Our program gathered and analyzed consumer evaluations and ratings of a product, sorting them into categories such as delivery, taste/flavor, quantity, packaging, and availability. It further classified the comments and assigned a sentiment value (Positive/Negative/Neutral) to them based on the consumers’ purpose of leaving a review. We reflected this data on the dashboard & showed the complete listings and all the comments made by consumers. We also analyzed the word clouds of negative reviews fetched from the website. This way brand can notice the negative keywords being used for its negative reviews. Interactive Insights from this data are shown through charts, which helps the brand to understand the areas of improvement. Success Enjoyed by the Brand The brand witnessed huge success in terms of brand equity and customer satisfaction. The insights provided by our solution helped them create a strategy to manage product reputation. The issue with packaging was highlighted and corrective measures were taken resulting in drastic reduction of negative reviews. The competitive analysis helped the brand to gain a competitive edge. Our technology assisted the business in to get insights about the page content, convincing shoppers to buy their products. The accuracy of data is 92-95 percent. Furthermore, the firm was able to keep an exact account of its product feedback because of the real-time updates and daily reports it received. The dashboard of our solution displayed sentiment values, sentiment scores, and themes based on consumer reviews enabling them to create relevant strategy. Conclusion Ratings and reviews are fantastic ways to get feedback. Keeping an eye on ratings & reviews daily enables the brand to keep a competitive advantage. Besides this, mScanIt’s dashboard reveals key takeaways under the insights segment, allowing brands to take corrective measures at the right stage. E-commerce marketplaces have a high competition among brands. A single source of truth and trust that delivers insights into competitive intelligence metrics like share of shelf, stock availability, banner visibility, etc., can become crucial in making business decisions. Our eCom solution, mScanIt, is a one-stop solution for monitoring such metrics of your products vis-a-vis the top competitors and gain competitive edge. Get in touch with us to schedule a demo and avail the advantages of eCom Competitive Analytics for your brand.

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Why Should Brands Measure the SOS of Their Sponsored Listings?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Anukirti Jain

Share of Shelf of your sponsored listings on eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Bigbasket, Flipkart, etc., measures the percentage of your brand’s discoverability vis-a-vis the competition on paid keywords. Paid search is a massive opportunity for brands, as it allows them to rank ‘at the top’ for the specific keyword searches on eCommerce platforms. However, brands could get outbid on keywords by their competition, which impacts their rankings. Therefore, monitoring and measuring the SOS of the sponsored keywords has become vital for brands. Another aspect of measuring the SOS of the sponsored listing is knowing the brands with the highest discoverability. Through this, a brand can detect the focused or targeted keywords of its competitors. Moreover, the brand can also detect whether or it is discoverable on the most popular keywords? If it isn’t, then, the brand needs to check the Product Display Pages (PDPs) and optimize them with the most popular keywords to become discoverable on the eCommerce search engine. According to a report, the worldwide retail eCommerce sales from Amazon accounted for $468.78 billion between 2017 and 2021. In India, 47% of the digital advertising expense on the eCommerce industry was through paid searches. It means a significant proportion of paid search campaigns were running on multiple eCommerce platforms. Brands that ran campaigns on Amazon acquired a piece of the sale and increased their revenue. Therefore, becoming discoverable on eCommerce platforms certainly aids sales/conversions. Besides revenue, brands run paid search campaigns on eCommerce platforms to acquire higher traffic, increase the ranking, enhance visibility and brand awareness, etc. So, whenever their competitors have a higher proportion of the digital shelf, especially on brand-specific keywords, it is a problem that needs an immediate solution. How to Effectively Measure the SOS of Sponsored Listings on eCommerce Platforms? Top Product Results by Keywords Searches The positioning of a sponsored product listing on an e-commerce platform, based on keywords tells many stories to a brand. It could inform the brand that is bidding the highest on a specific keyword and the type of keywords (generic, competitor, and brand) that have the highest share of digital shelf for your brand vis-a-vis the competitors. Brands can use the information to detect the top performing paid searches of their competitors on each eCommerce platform in their respective categories. By evaluating the results of the sponsored digital shelf results brands can build strategies to get an edge over the competition. How? It can build campaigns around the most relevant keywords and attract a higher audience base. Moreover, it can use the keywords in the title of its multiple variants to increase consumer interest in the product and intent to purchase the product. Brands with the higher number of sponsored listings acquire a higher share of shelf for keywords. Moreover, the share of shelf for the sponsored listings is often calculated for the top ten search results and the top three pages. Therefore, building strategies around sponsored listings based on the SOS can boost the positioning of the listing and the visibility of the brand. My suggestion to the brand’s is to “use a keyword-mix which includes competition brand keywords, along with their own brand keywords, which is hardly practiced by most brands and would help you to acquire a larger Share-of-Shelf.” Share of Sponsored Listings on a Sub-Category Level Imagine you are a pickle manufacturer and are running campaigns on ‘mango pickle’ keyword of an e-commerce marketplace. Consumers use the same keyword from their respective geo-locations to buy the product, however, your sponsored product listing is at the bottom of page. Do you think they would make an effort to scroll down and add your product to cart, especially if you are a new brand? Most probably ‘No.’ Enhancing the page position of your brand’s products and thereby enhancing visibility of your sponsored listings is necessary to influence the buyer behavior towards your brand. It is possible by: Evaluating the overall SOS of sponsored listings at a sub-category level, Detecting & retargeting the top and most relevant keywords of your competitors under specific sub-categories, and Finding the top sub-categories that would increase the SOS of sponsored listings. By taking these measures, your brand can substantially increase its SOS of sponsored listings on multiple sub-categories. Besides higher revenue, your brand could enhance its consumer base and find new target audience in its niche. Recently, we shared a case study in which a brand used the strategy of monitoring competitor keywords. By doing so, it found that the SOS of its sponsored listings for competitor keywords was 5%; however, after gaining information on the competitor’s top performing keywords, it started bidding on some of them. Within a short span of time, SOS of its paid searches jumped to 14%. (Read more) SOS Overview of Sponsored Listings Monitoring the SOS overview of sponsored listings would give a clear analysis of the best performing brands based on paid searches. Moreover, you can evaluate the presence of your brand vis-a-vis the competition on an eCommerce marketplace through keyword bidding. As a result, you can find the best performing platforms for your brand. Additionally, your brand measured the share of shelf for sponsored listing using specific keywords. Therefore, you can find the best performing keywords of your competitors across multiple eCommerce platforms. By doing so, you can revamp the keyword bidding strategy to enhance your overall share of shelf for sponsored listings. You can even share the information across the organization using exportable reports through eCommerce Competitive Analytics, a.k.a., mScanIt’s dashboard. The actionable insights would enable your e-commerce managers to evaluate the platform-wise strategies and take measures for boosting the SOS of paid search results. Conclusion Share-of-Shelf of sponsored listings can bring insights related to products, brands, and competitors. Measuring the success of paid searches on eCommerce platforms through eCommerce Competitive Analytics is possible by deep-diving at a sub-category, search rank, overall, and other levels of SOS. The insights and intelligence derived through eCommerce Competitive Analytics, a.k.a. mScanIt, enables your brands to change your ongoing/upcoming advertising and marketing campaigns across multiple eCommerce platforms.

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What Aspects Does Sentiment Analysis of eCommerce Platforms Reveal?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

Customers on eCommerce platforms often check out reviews and ratings of products before making the final buying decision. In India, 48% of consumers make fashion purchases regularly after going through reviews and ratings. Monitoring reviews and ratings have become important for understanding customer sentiment towards the brand, product, seller, etc., across eCommerce platforms. Detecting and categorizing customer reviews as positive, neutral, and negative using mScanIt’s Sentiment Analysis enables to detect product aspect working ‘for & against’ the brand. mScanIt’s sentiment analysis dashboard defines sentiment intensity; segregates the most popular aspects like quality, product, price, etc., under comment themes; helps to find the most/least popular aspect/theme of a brand, etc. Diving deep into these aspects helps to keep track of consumer reviews across multiple eCommerce platforms, the most popular aspects/themes driving the sentiment intensity, pain points of the consumers, etc. mScanIt’s Sentiment Analysis also reveals key aspects of eCommerce platforms, which are useful for brands in multiple ways. A sentiment analysis is done by using What Can Brands Derive through mScanIt’s Sentiment Analysis? The Intensity of Buyer Reviews consumer reviews. Based on the consumer sentiments, a brand can understand the most popular aspect of its products on eCommerce platforms or can detect which aspects are meeting or not meeting to the buyer demands. A comparative view of the same vis-a-vis its competition enables a brand to learn the brand’s standing against its competition. For example, your brand could have a high (700+) positive reviews for ‘price,’ whereas your top competitor only has 200+ reviews on it. So, the consumers appreciate the price of the product and it is probably the leading factor driving your eCommerce sales/revenue under a category. On the other hand, your top competitor could have 500+ reviews on ‘quality’ whereas, you hardly reach 100 reviews on this aspect. Using this knowledge, you can evaluate your own Product Display Page (PDP) against your competition. It could show that the competitor is focusing more on ‘quality-based’ features and is using them in the advertising/marketing campaigns as well as the PDPs. P.S.: mScanIt can also be useful in analyzing PDPs, share-of-shelf, and banner ads. Probable Intent to Purchase According to research, the product purchasing decision of 91% of online shoppers rely on reviews from other customers. Therefore, listings on eCommerce platforms with higher positive reviews can increase add-to-cart actions and conversions. Furthermore, constantly checking sentiment analysis reveals the average sentiment score within a time frame. Therefore, brands can make sales forecasts and strategize accordingly. It’s one of the ways through which brands can understand the best performing ecommerce platform and optimize on their marketing spends. Moreover, the qualities/themes of the sentiment analysis dashboard would offer knowledge about the factors that might likely influence the customer’s intent to purchase. Points of Engagement with the Customers Reviewing mScanIt’s Sentiment Analysis dashboard gives information about the pain points of customers as well as the top-performing qualities of a product. It reveals the emotional triggers that can become responsible for trolling on eCommerce marketplaces under the review and rating section. Brands can use the emotional triggers generated from the ‘for and against’ reviews and ratings in their responses to improve the positive sentiment intensity and diminish the negative sentiment scores. The same information can be relayed to the marketing and customer support team to strategize and enable growth while addressing customer problems and enhancing the customer’s relationship with the brand. Reaching out to the customers at the right time by setting alerts of hyper sentiment intensities can help a brand to avoid trolls under the review and rating section as well as increase the brand’s ‘delightful’ customer base. Gain Insights About New Markets Customers on eCommerce platforms often reveal their pain points, compare the USPs of previously purchased products with recently purchased items, share the change in brand experiences, etc. Monitoring sentiment analysis reveals new buyer personas, untapped markets, trends, etc., which enable brands to build strategies for reaching out to the un-targeted customer base, increase their revenue, and plan marketing/advertising strategies for eCommerce platforms accordingly. Besides managing their sentiment analysis, brands get a chance to monitor competitors’ analysis tool using mScanIt, which expands all these horizons at a massive scale. Conclusion Monitoring sentiment analysis offers insights into customer behavior, such as the probable intent to purchase, points of engagement, responsiveness towards the product listing, etc. Keeping an eye on the sentiment analysis of eCommerce platforms can enable brands to customize their marketing and advertising strategies towards their buyer needs and even resolve problems whenever the negative sentiment intensity spikes up. Schedule a demo with us to learn methods to scale your business using mScanIt’s Sentiment Analysis.

What Aspects Does Sentiment Analysis of eCommerce Platforms Reveal? Read More »