COVID-19 may have changed how we shopped out of necessity, but a year after the initial retail reckoning, new habits are here to stay.
Already growing strong before COVID, e-commerce has leaped forward in the last year. In 2020, US retailers with a digital presence saw a nearly 70% rise in online revenue, and e-commerce grew in the US and Canada by 129% over 2019.
With this rapid growth and a permanent shift in consumers’ shopping habits, we’ve now firmly entered the e-commerce era. Perhaps more accurately, though, it’s the era of e-commerce optimization—for the brands and companies that will come out ahead. This is where having a powerful tool like Line Item truly gives you the edge in e-commerce.
Line Item is a performance analytics platform that gives consumer packaged goods (CPG) and e-commerce marketing managers insights into e-analytics and product attributes to drive revenue and profitability.
As brands vie for digital shelf space, mindshare, and consumer loyalty, the e-commerce market has become hypercompetitive. Staying competitive—even relevant—requires better insight into how your products are performing across your portfolio and what’s driving sales.
Let’s look at how Line Item’s visibility can empower you against three emerging priorities in our era of e-commerce optimization.
A true omnichannel e-commerce strategy
Between 2019 and today there has been a tremendous acceleration toward a true omnichannel experience. On the one hand, e-commerce marketers realize that to be successful on the whole, they must be successful on each platform where consumers are buying. On the other hand, shoppers are searching for consistency (or its lack) between channels, price-checking as well as searching product availability.
A truly successful omnichannel e-commerce strategy must be holistic. When customers rely on sites like Amazon and Walmart.com for product research as much as purchases, e-commerce marketers must understand and play to this. When customers are searching online for local options, e-commerce marketers must see the digital shelf and actual shelf as parts of a whole. Understanding what’s working and how search is performing across your product or brand portfolio becomes integral to building and maintaining a successful digital marketing strategy.
Optimizing e-commerce only becomes possible, then, with superior business intelligence. You must be able to optimize your search results across platforms and sites and understand how your SEO strategy is working. With Line Item, you can understand how your SEO is performing across key search terms, platforms, and more.
Tapping into e-commerce trends
In a hypercompetitive market, many brands are searching for the elusive “sweet spot” with new products, items, attributes, package sizes, flavors and more.
This competitive pressure can be difficult to stay on top of, but it can be where the next opportunity lies. Line Item can help e-commerce marketers discover what’s trending in their market or monitor new products by known or unknown competitors. This is possible because Line Item does a deep dive on the web, where new products show up first. This intense deep dive goes into all products, item by item, not just the category level. Line Item captures page rank, price, reviews, availability, and delivery times. Then, using titles and features across more than a dozen websites, Line Item determines all relevant attributes.
This deep dive into attributes can help e-commerce marketers and managers understand what’s truly driving value. With these insights, brand managers can understand more on segment, style, form, size, packaging, flavor, Nutrition Facts and more by UPC, MPC, ASIN, and SKU for detailed and actionable data. It can also help you see what your competitors are doing well, or where there are opportunities to earn more marketshare.
Building trust in e-commerce
We may have millions of products available at our fingertips, but shoppers are still fundamentally human. Retailers earn consumer trust and loyalty through accuracy and transparency—this hasn’t changed since the days of the corner store.
What it means, though, is different in our e-commerce-driven world. It’s also far more complex to manage. Realistic product imagery that matches your actual products and is consistent across sites ensures customers purchase what they want and need, decreasing the likelihood of returns (which eat into profitability). Line Item can help you determine whether images and descriptions are consistent and correct across sites. It can also identify gaps that may be affecting your search results and rankings.
Clear pricing helps customers feel they are being treated fairly. Line Item helps you monitor and optimize pricing across sites to provide insight into whether your products are overpriced; to verify pricing; and to identify “robotic” pricing activity to lower the risk of being undercut by competitors.
Ultimately, gaining an edge in the era of e-commerce optimization comes down to driving more sales with smarter insights. When you do, it ensures your campaigns are performing and contributes to higher profitability. When marketing is an investment in your business and future, it’s the bottom line that matters.
Line Item empowers you with a single tool to gain essential insights into what’s driving your sales—or what’s holding you back. It’s your lifeline to more profitable e-commerce.