What is Digital & Physical Shelf's Role in Omnichannel Retail?

Integral Role Of Both Physical and Digital Shelf to Shopper Journey

With the steady growth and success of the ecommerce industry, online shopping has been playing a crucial role in the buying process. It is because of the presence of the digital catalog and its non-negotiable nature. It is not available for the offline stores. Ecommerce businesses use digital storefronts for research, product discovery, promotional pricing, and transactions. Both digital and physical shelves complement each other in this natural omnichannel system. Now is an excellent time for companies to grow this relationship by introducing and developing new user experiences and interface features to encourage them to engage deeply with digital and physical mediums while purchasing products.

Digging Into Buyers Journey

Learning the purchase path is the primary step to discovering key touch points that support making or breaking the buying decision. Our team has gone through this procedure end to end with a detailed example of where the buyer is purchasing the shoe pair.

First Stage: Awareness

(Eliminating advertorial content and marketing efforts from consideration)

Physical Shelf:

Customer who wants to purchase shoe pair will find their choices by exploring relevant store sections for multiple styles, brands, varieties, etc. Typically the highest bidder receives the best space for a shelf for simple discoverability at the eye level that the behind-the-shelves war explains.

Further, a store assistant or clerk guides the buyer toward the personalized product selection according to brand, style, choices, and fit.

Digital Shelf:

The potential customer willing to buy pair of shoes goes to relevant search engines like Google, Bing, Amazon, etc., and enters the relevant search query related to the shows, for example, Addidas shoes for sports. Here, digital shelves, like SEO, SEA, or PPC, replace the physical shelf and rank their products at the top of the search engines. However, paid advertising campaigns form a small portion of gaining supremacy on the digital shelf. You can optimize product descriptions and add relevant images, competitive pricing, search queries, customer reviews, and product availability to improve the rank using digital shelves.

Here, automated suggestions may guide buyers to the best product according to their choices and requirements within the brand selection. They may abandon that brand if they can't find the relevant product. Using more advanced mechanisms, you may engage the customer more effectively by displaying matching or similar products, competitive pricing, relevant offerings, complementary styles, and more.

Second Stage: Consideration

Physical Shelf:

Now, the customers may have narrowed the product choices with lower options from a single or few companies. The buyer may take more time to closely inspect the product, compare prices, or get a second opinion from their network or nearby sellers. The buyer may see the review of the preferred product from their friend circle. Further, the buyer may also check for a few online options for better purchases. They may see competitive prices and features on digital platforms to choose the product for online purchase. After extensively exploring multiple options and analyzing the product, the buyer will make their final purchase decision.

Digital Shelf:

Having filtered products in hand, the buyer will explore the existing website feature in the consideration phase of the buying process. Discounts, 360-degree images, Zoom, capabilities to try AR, customer reviews, and ratings are crucial here. If a buyer fails to zoom any product, he may eliminate that product by clicking away. If the touch is unavailable, the leading e-commerce sellers add used materials and fabrics in the product descriptions.

For customer retention, detailed product reviews of styling and fit options and linking them with similar designs and optional colorways can expose them to a broader assortment and complement the offline buying experience due to customers' competitive product research. Coupling with the capability to share product details quickly and explore their cross-reference alternatives, with the wish list of products, you can check out products by clicking away.

Inventory management and product stocking are crucial at this stage. While well rounded physical and digital presence can engage customers. However, out-of-stock products may lead customers to find other brands instead of waiting for stock availability. Despite having a proper marketplace, and medium, at any time, if the customer can't get the product for their requirement instantly, you will lose them.

Our product assortment and monitoring can help ecommerce brands to ensure proper inventory management, and product availability, with top selections always available in stock on any shelf or platform.

Physical Shelf:

At the time of purchasing, pricing has more preference. The physical store's unclear promotional options and lack of coupons, loyalty cards, vouchers, and seasonal offers may deter customers. Instead of depending on staff and sales executives for help, the modern-day buyer may explore digital platforms to check product prices to find discrepancies in pricing and better options to make better buying decisions.

Real-time competitor price monitoring with Product Data Scrape can help your brand to stay up to date with the latest pricing and promotional trends and lead the market to offer the best deal to customers with the best profit margins.

Digital Shelf:

During the decision-making stage, companies with the presence of omnichannel retail for their sales have competitive benefits. With several options, make sure that your brand has discounts and deals to stand out against the competing products, and brands can grab customers' attention toward your brand in the extensive competitive market. Our product matching can help ecommerce brands monitor these competitive offers to share the correct insights into the competition level of the business and the positioning that lines up with potential customers. Further, our product matching services help you monitor real-time updates for product data with 99+ percent accuracy and actionable data insights.

Hitting the Retail Bull's Eye

There is an oversaturation in the present shopping experience, and the customers have evolved market savvy, foolproof, and tech-savvy for navigation. With new e-commerce companies constantly entering the competitive market ecosystem, existing competitors are trying hard to beat them and retain customers with proper satisfaction using suitable mediums and platforms. Customers know exactly where to find the best deals, discounts, offers, prices, and reliable product offers in a few clicks.

Major retailers and D2C brands must have the correct product data to meet constantly growing buyer expectations. To meet their requirements, retailers must understand the market, customers, and competition.

We are committed to retailer intelligence to help your brand stand out in the competition of brands, products, and pricing strategies with price monitoring and product matching services.

Check out the metrics we monitor to help your brand rank using advanced digital shelf analytics.

Conclusion

This way, the digital and physical shelves can help omnichannel retail sales for ecommerce businesses. For more about e-commerce scraping services, contact Product Data Scrape.

At Product Data Scrape, we ensure that our Competitor Price Monitoring Services and Mobile App Data Scraping maintain the highest standards of business ethics and lead all operations. We have multiple offices around the world to fulfill our customers' requirements.