.jpeg)
Picture this: you’re a major brand managing a huge range of products in dozens of markets. For example, major make-up brands have products ranging from mascara to lipstick to nail polish and more, playing in countries all over Europe, APAC, and America. On the digital shelf, there are thousands, sometimes millions of data points to consider, as every SKU has their own timeline of KPIs, from search performance to stock availability to sales velocity. Digital shelf tools are a step towards bringing order to that chaos of data. But even with these tools, how do you know where the opportunities are when you’re selling in so many different markets? And how do you find strategic focus amongst your huge range of products?
Collecting data is one thing, but automation is the key to scaling up. This is exactly what we did for a major toy manufacturer working with a vast and diverse product range and playing in over 50 global markets.
CHALLENGE
Unlocking opportunities from all that data
Toys are big business, with the biggest brands operating in a vast number of strategic product areas which can be based on anything from age (“preschool toys”) to activity (“arts and crafts”) to type of toy (“action figures”). This global brand had a portfolio of over 1000 SKUs selling at retailers across 50+ markets. The question of which product groups to focus on was overwhelming. The brand knew they were operating in dozens of verticals and categories, but couldn’t easily spot the opportunities. The sheer amount of data made manual analysis onerous. They came to us seeking a better way.
Size of the prize: In the US alone, e-commerce sales in the toys, hobby, and DIY segment generated approximately 73.7 billion US dollars in 2021 and is predicted to grow to 15.9 million USD by 2025.
Toys, hobby & DIY retail e-commerce revenue
in the United States from 2017 to 2025
ACTION
With all brands, our process begins by getting a clear view of the brand’s business objectives at the regional level. We worked with their e-commerce team to establish their strategic product groups and target KPIs. This allowed us to set up our digital shelf tools to automatically segment SKUs into these product groups and track their performance against their targets. Having created this schema for one market, we were easily able to replicate it for the 50+ other markets that the brand was playing in.
Digital Shelf Automation Enabled The Brand to Automate the tracking of over 5000 strategic product groups globally
VALUE
Our digital shelf automation tools enabled the brand to do what would have been impossible manually:
- Seamlessly track their 5000+ strategic product groups across 50+ markets
- Compare performance across different markets and different regions in line with the strategic objectives of the business so they knew immediately which markets were priority areas for improvements
- Instant access to product groups with clear visibility over which group was suffering the most and why, be it due to search visibility, out of stocks, or inadequate content on retailer websites
Our collaboration proved how digital tools can be used to manage massive portfolios, enabling teams across numerous markets to automatically track priority areas with the click of a button. With our tools the brand was able to scale up its e-commerce function on a global scale. Once again, digital shelf automation proves the key to efficiency and scalability, basic rules of e-commerce that all brands can learn from.
