Online shopping has taken over the retail world by storm. More and more shoppers are flocking to e-commerce stores in order to replenish their wardrobes for the holiday season. Whether it is an outfit for a Christmas dinner or a stylish dress for a New Year’s eve party, customers want them all and they want them NOW!
With the e-commerce market projected to grow to a whopping $5.5 trillion worldwide, it is important for retailers to have product visibility, excellent ratings and high functioning buy boxes. And all of this is only possible through well-optimized digital shelves.
So what exactly are digital shelves?
What is a Digital Shelf?
Digital Shelves are nothing but online versions of brick and mortar stores. Just like stores have highly enhanced aisles with accentuated product display, e-commerce stores have digital shelves that help attract buyers. The purpose of these shelves is to highlight product features in order to enrich a customer’s buying experience while simultaneously focussing on revenue maximization.
Data suggests that globally, there are around 12-24 million online shops online. Which means the competition is tough and if a retailer wants to grab a customer’s attention they must have well-optimized digital shelves, diverse assortment depending on the likes and dislikes of customer segments, and enhance the features of their product by adding effective copy, aesthetically pleasing images and other essential factors.
In short, digital shelves are all the touchpoints where your products are displayed. This includes, online market places where your products are being sold, like an app, personal website, google searches, or any other third-party websites.
Let’s take a look at the components of a Digital Shelf.
Significance of a Digital Shelf
With 2.4 billion online shoppers the online shopping industry is projected to grow to a whopping $11 trillion between 2021-2025. This means that every retailer will have to have precisely designed digital shelves that attract maximum number of buyers.
In order to get your product to rank higher on search results, you must focus on improving certain parameters such as customer reviews, product descriptions, product images, availability, assortments, etc.
Here is a list of important components of a digital shelf.
Components of a Digital Shelf
Well optimized digital shelves improve visibility which help you see a spike in your revenue. And each aspect of the shelf should be thoroughly scrutinized and effectively optimized. Let’s take an in depth look at the vital components of a digital shelf.
Product Title
A product title is the first thing a buyer reads which is why it should be clear and concise. Long product titles might overwhelm a buyer forcing them to move on to another product. Make sure to add the right keywords to the product titles so that your product ranks well on search engine results.
Product Description
The product description gives a full summary of a product. You should add every detail of the product including the type, size, color and other important details. Ideally, customers would like to know exactly what they are purchasing. By adding high ranking keywords, you can also optimize your product for search engines and make sure your products rank higher than that of your competitors’.
Image Gallery
The image gallery is like a virtual catalogue of your product, which is why it is vital for retailers to add high resolution pictures that accentuate the features of the product. Ideally, brands should adhere to specific image requirements given by each digital shelf. It also helps to add different angles of the product, product shots while in use and an image that helps compare the size of the product.
Product Video
A product video is far more impactful than an image gallery. It highlights the product’s features and gives the buyer a virtual trial of the product. By adding a product video, you can increase your chances of being seen on search results and improve your revenue growth.
Customer Ratings & Reviews
Social proof is one of the most important driving factor when it comes to sales. Customer reviews especially ones with pictures, give buyers a clear idea on how the product might look on a real person. Retailers MUST fill their product pages with genuine, and up-to-date reviews.
The Buy Box
Every product page contains a buy box. This box showcases the size, color, weight, quantity, shipping information, if the product is in stock, and the buy now button. Retailers must ensure that all the details in the box are filled to the T. Since each marketplace has a different buy box, you might have to customize the content accordingly.
FAQs
Customers usually have some questions in reference to the product. Scan through your product pages and turn the customers’ questions into a set of FAQs. This gives buyers the assurance they need and speeds up the buying process.
Now that we have got a clear picture of the components of a digital shelf, we can move onto learning how to optimize them for revenue maximization.
Best ways to optimize their Digital Shelves for End of Year Sales!
Improve Product Visibility
Every time a buyer indulges in online shopping the first thing they do is log on to their preferred market place and perform a product search. These shoppers add a number of keywords based on which a series of results show up on the first page.
According to research, two-thirds of the products purchased from Amazon are from the first page while a third of those are from the top two search results. This means brands can improve their visibility by adding SEO friendly keywords to their product pages. By performing SEO optimization, they can push their product to the first page and thereby improve visibility.
Get the Right Customer Insights
AI-powered automated solutions help retailers acquire, scientifically analyzed customer insights. This data can enlighten you about the buyer’s shopping behavior, what time they shop, the kinds of clothing, colors, and sizes they are looking for, how much are they ready to pay and so on. With the holiday season around the corner, more and more shoppers will be scrolling through the market place. This is the perfect time for retailers to dive deep into what exactly the customer is looking for and optimize their digital shelves accordingly. For example, for the Christmas season, brands can optimize their greens, reds and whites while for new year’s they can push their blacks, blues.
Ideally, retailers should use a customer insight tool, like BRIO, that will give them scientifically engineered data rather than assuming what the customer might like. This way they can be absolutely certain about their product placements.
Tailor Your Products for Different Digital Shelves
Each digital shelf has a set protocol in place. Sellers are required to adhere to each rule for maximum optimization. Make sure to pen down all the requirements of different digital shelves and modify the product pages accordingly. Digital shelves usually ask for SEO friendly content like product titles, product descriptions, high resolution images, enhanced content, product videos and so on.
The best part about virtual market places is that you can add end-number of products to the websites. After performing an in depth customer analysis, retailers can prioritize the products for the end of year sales.
Create an SEO Friendly Product Page
Every retail platform requires sellers to add a product page for every product. Usually, it includes, the product title, product descriptions, product images, features, ratings & reviews, FAQs and so on. Every component of the page must match the product, highlight the key features and have high resolution images. A product video on the product page is always a plus. Make sure to add the exact number of keywords, as Google might flag you for keyword stuffing.
An SEO friendly product page, improves visibility which acts as a catalyst for revenue maximization.
Offer Competitive Pricing
The best part about End of Year sales is the high churn rate of profit maximization but the worst part is that all your competitors will be having their own sales. In that case, retailers should use AI-powered solutions that provide competition intelligence. These bots will track your competitors’ prices and prompt accurate pricing strategies.
And the best part is it will tell you exactly when to increase or decrease your prices and by how much. By taking advantage of technology retailers can plug revenue leaks which will help skyrocket their sales.
Maintain Your Inventory
The End of Year Sales can be a crazy time for retailers. With frequent orders coming in, they need to make sure that the products are well stocked. The minute a shopper sees that the product is out of stock, they will bounce off to another brand, and you will lose a sale. Which is why maintaining your inventory is one of the most important aspects of optimizing your digital shelf, especially during the holiday season.
Use Automated AI-solutions
Automated AI-solutions like BRIO can give you an advantage over your competitors. These are scientifically engineered bots that extract accurate customer insights, provide competitor intelligence and aid in optimizing the digital shelf. Gone are the days of assuming what the customer ‘MIGHT’ like. With these machine learning algorithms retailers can acquire exact data that will propel revenue maximization.
By optimizing your digital shelves, you can build customer loyalty, skyrocket your sales and expand your business at 10X speed!
So this holiday season implement the best digital shelf optimization strategies – Improve your product pages, add enhanced content, stick to white-hat SEO strategies and accelerate product visibility.
And don’t forget to join the 19% of tech savvy-retailers who have already begun their journey with automated AI- powered pricing solutions! Book a Free Demo for our automated retail solutions or contact our optimization experts at info@sciative.com.