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.

Consumers may be shopping online more than ever during and after COVID-19, but Walmart is still a dominant force in consumer marketing. Ninety percent of Americans live within a 15-minute drive of a Walmart store. Online or offline, shoppers are increasingly using retailers like Walmart and Amazon for product research as well as purchases. This means that the most successful e-commerce strategies should help you sell better on the biggies like Amazon and Walmart. Line Item’s powerful approach to e-commerce can help. 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. It’s a powerful tool to help you increase your Walmart sales, and your e-commerce sales in general. What makes Line Item’s approach to e-commerce different? It’s our focus on product attributes and the insights they offer into how to improve your e-commerce sales. Here’s how this works. “Deep dive” attribute analysis Line Item enables a “deep dive” into all products, item by item, not just at a category level. By item, Line Item captures page rank, price, reviews, availability, and delivery times. Then, from titles and features across a dozen or more websites, Line Item figures out all relevant attributes. Let’s look at this example for a laundry detergent product. Line Item would analyze all products, item by item to determine all relevant attributes. This could include brand, form (for example, liquid, powder, or pods), package type and size, scent, whitening agents, natural or organic ingredients, skin sensitivity, high efficiency and more. Using these attributes, Line Item identifies the items that are your closes competition on Walmart.com as well as across a dozen or more websites, giving you new insights into competitor strategies and market opportunities. This can help you sell more on Walmart.com as well as boost your e-commerce sales in general across sites. Selling more on Walmart.com To improve your Walmart e-commerce, you must have more insight into what’s driving your sales—or holding you back. Line Item gives you this better business intelligence via a single tool that can help you improve search results and analyze every aspect of your portfolio’s e-analytics at the powerful product attribute level. In addition to better performance analytics and more focus on product attributes, there are some specific nuances to selling more on Walmart. This is because of its platform’s unique algorithms and advertising policies. Product-specific categories. Selling on Walmart.com requires a different strategy than Amazon. On Amazon, successful strategy comes from the right approach to keywords: relevant, not too broad, not too specific, no keyword overstuffing. On Walmart.com, increasing the number of products grouped in a campaign can significantly boost performance. Because these approaches differ, it’s important to understand them both—and factor their differences into your digital marketing. Line Item will tell you what your competition is doing differently and what you need to do better to sell more on Walmart.com. Ad auction pricing. With “first-price” auction rules, Walmart’s ad platform differs from other bidding marketplaces. This can mean that it’s easy to overbid and overpay, lowering campaign efficiency overall. Because Walmart is where so many shoppers start, this can damage campaign strategy beyond the platform. Line Item will help you determine how your products are responding to search terms and how to strengthen your response. Market Basket. One of the tools in Retail Link® is the Market Basket. It can help suppliers and e-commerce analysts determine what other items were purchased along with their brand or product. This can be important for in-store advertising, campaigns, and more. While these insights are valuable in themselves, the true power comes when they can be integrated quickly along with other e-analytics data. Line Item can integrate your Market Basket insights quickly with insights from more than a dozen sites to determine what’s driving your sales. Better insights into your full e-analytics portfolio can help you track marketplace trends, monitor campaign efficiency, immediately improve ad performance and drive higher marketing ROI. With Line Item, you can more easily understand what’s working for your products and brands on Walmart.com as well as across the web. You can also understand where your competition has the edge. This can give you the insight to improve your strategy for Walmart e-commerce and fuel growth and profitability.

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Amazon is undeniably the king of e-commerce, and it’s here to stay. Not only is it the largest e-commerce platform by revenue in the world, half of all online shoppers visit Amazon to search for a product, even if they buy it elsewhere. Each month, over 197 million people globally search Amazon for a product (and 90% of shoppers use Amazon for price checks). This means that Amazon is important by itself but also as part of your overall e-commerce strategy. With 12 million products listed on Amazon, it’s not good enough to be good enough. Real profitability lies in having the right tools to increase sales. If you want to sell on Amazon—and be successful—you need game-changing insight into attributes. Line Item makes this possible. 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. It’s a powerful tool to help you increase your Amazon sales, and your e-commerce sales in general. Line Item has an algorithm that tells you how your products respond to search terms and how to improve your response. If you want to sell on Amazon, Line Item will tell you what your competition is doing differently—and what you need to do better. Line Item helps you identify and track close competitors on Amazon and across other sites to help you sell more (and more profitably). It can help you analyze your e-commerce performance to address key questions like:

• Do competitors get better page rank because they’re doing a better job with titles and features?
• Are your products priced right?
• Are competitor items unavailable?
• Do competitor items have long delivery times?

Knowing the answer to these—in addition to other e-commerce insights—can help you increase your sales, on Amazon and in general. Line Item helps you sell more on Amazon Other e-commerce services and tools make the user identify competitor items to track by product codes like ASIN, GTIN, and SKU. Line Item does not. Our attribute algorithm makes it much easier to get insights into what your competitors are doing well on Amazon and other sites—and where they are not, so you can capture opportunity. The Line Item attribute difference By item, Line Item captures page rank, price, reviews, availability, and delivery times. Then, using titles and features across a dozen or more web sites, we figure out all relevant attributes you should be tracking to be more successful in your e-commerce. This takes the burden off the e-commerce manager and gives you much more actionable insights. This can help you to: Improve your Amazon SEO Because Amazon is built on a search engine, you can use proven SEO techniques to improve your product rankings, on and off Amazon itself. First, you need to understand how well your SEO is working across all key search terms, on Amazon as well as on other retailer sites and online marketplaces. This is important because shoppers are moving seamlessly between sites as they search. Line Item analyzes whether or not your brands or products are ranking on page one, giving you insights into what is or isn’t working for your e-commerce SEO. Line Item can also ensure that your product titles, descriptions and images are complete and consistent, eliminating gaps that can cost you page rank and sales. Optimize your Amazon keywords Amazon keywords are a little like Goldilocks and the three bears: the porridge needs to be just right. Some keywords are a little too broad on their own (like “glasses,” for instance—do you mean wine glasses or eyeglasses?). Some keywords are a little too specific on their own and aren’t searched very frequently—these are ‘long-tail’ keywords. These might get you a page one result, but you need to understand if it’s worth investing in them. You also don’t want to overuse keywords, which can lead to a high bounce rate. Using Amazon keywords effectively in your product description can make a big difference in selling more on Amazon. Line Item’s algorithm will tell you what keywords you may be missing compared to your competition. These insights can help you close the gaps that may be holding your product back from page one results in Amazon. When you understand what’s selling well—and what’s not—you’re in a much stronger position to make the decisions that can improve your Amazon e-commerce. Line Item is the lifeline that makes it possible.