eCommerce is more complicated than ever. It seems like new retail media platforms are launching every day and new features and ad types are being released on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Managing multiple platforms and tasks requires a variety of tools and teams.
Since multiple tools are needed to monitor ad types, pricing, and inventory – and performance is tracked across different spreadsheets – it can be difficult to gain a full understanding of your eCommerce advertising. Split these challenges across multiple teams, with different data sources, and it can be nearly impossible to manage one cohesive eCommerce marketplace strategy.
Pacvue recently hosted a webinar, “What is Intelligent Marketplace Management anyway?” During the presentation, Pacvue’s Mindy Fashaw, Riku Laitasalo, and Jack Lindberg discussed the need for a single source of truth in retail media and the benefits of an intelligent marketplace management solution. If you missed the webinar, here are some of the most important takeaways:
Organizational Challenges of Marketplace Management
Companies have a growing amount of data to analyze across multiple applications. Unfortunately, the lack of operation and process standardization leads to reactive actions and missed opportunities.
Advertisers deal with disparate data sources including:
- Retail data such as sales, operations, inventory, and margin
- Advertising data from Search and DSP
- Digital Shelf Insights such as content audits, price trends, and share of voice
- Internal data science and hypotheses
One team dealing with data from all these different sources would find it difficult to piece everything together into a complete understanding of their marketplaces. However, the sales, marketing, supply chain, data science, and finance teams ALL deal with this data which often comes from different sources. These data silos make it difficult for stakeholders to get on the same page and nearly impossible to create cross organization efficiencies.
Benefits of Intelligent Marketplace Management
Intelligent marketplace management can do more for your organization than simply provide a single source of truth for your data. Once your various data sources are pieced together, you can start to build on the data to learn about future opportunities and make cross functional business decisions. Rethinking eCommerce management includes:
- Machine learning and real time analytics analyzing data
- Algorithmic based recommendations addressing executional gaps
- Improved business efficiency across departments
By taking data inputs and adding in predictive analytics, you can gain a better understanding of what is currently happening while also gaining insights into what you should do to get ahead.
Intelligent Marketplace Management Use Cases
Pacvue Commerce can help you ensure retail-readiness between teams and drive total sales with a single source of truth backed by analytics and automation. Prescriptive analytics present relevant information and make recommendations for optimizations. Automation allows teams to automatically go from insights to action. Here are some of the key use cases our clients have found for intelligent marketplace management with Pacvue Commerce.
Sales Dashboard and Alerts
Moving from disparate data sources to a single dashboard for relevant sales analytics is a vital first step to more intelligent decision making. In a single dashboard, your company can view data on sales, availability, profitability, visibility, advertising and content.
Alerts and notifications also allow you to shift from reactionary to proactive management. Notifications for key insights such as changes in traffic or content, out-of-stock items or CRAP predictions, all allow you to be timelier in your response.
Purchase Order and Inventory Management
Purchase order and inventory management can become one of the most time consuming and manual tasks of marketplace management. Understanding inventory forecasts, unhealthy inventory and order fill rates provides a better understanding of your retail position and allows you to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Catalog Management and Content Automation
Inventory management feeds into catalog management and how you describe your product taxonomy across all levels and marketplaces. Not only does Pacvue Commerce make it easier to manage stock levels and replenishments to avoid out-of-stock items, it can also improve the way you manage your catalog content across marketplaces.
With a better understanding of your catalog, you can start to optimize your content across product pages, brand pages, and ads. Pacvue Commerce provides a retail readiness score and suggests content changes to optimize ads. Predictive alerts also notify you when ad spend is directing customers to an ASIN that is poorly optimized or receiving low reviews.
Ratings and Reviews
Tracking and organizing reviews can have a huge impact on sales. Intelligent marketplace management allows you to aggregate and organize reviews across brands and categories. This allows you to identify trends, gain insights on product innovations and upgrades and layer in sales to determine impact on growth.
These are just some of the ways the Pacvue Commerce solution brings together cross functional organization efficiencies in an end-to-end marketplace management tool. If you’re interested in learning more about intelligent marketplace management and Pacvue Connect, you can view the full webinar, “What is Intelligent Marketplace Management anyway?”
