Background

The digital shelf is the modern, online battleground where brands vie for the attention of high-intent shoppers. Like physical shelves, the digital shelf is about how, where, and when your products appear and optimizing every element of that interaction with your potential buyer.

Reach the top of the page, and you've won the eyeballs of shoppers searching in your subcategory. Sink to the bottom, and your brand suffers with the dregs of ignominy.

In 2023, a large grocery brand with a diverse portfolio of brands spanning several grocery aisles approached Stackline for help with the digital shelf. It can be challenging for large brands to prioritize national and regional channels. Each channel has different levels of digital capabilities.  

The e-commerce team brought on different digital shelf providers to manage the various channels. Each digital shelf provider had delivered varying degrees of success, but none enabled robust tracking of long-tail channels. Last year, the team explored new options better suited to their evolving priorities.

Since partnering with Stackline Omni in 2023, the large grocery brand has undergone a remarkable transformation. What was once a struggle with the digital shelf has now become a success story. Stackline Omni has become the linchpin for optimizing its digital presence and improving performance. Working with Stackline, the parent brand's ecommerce team has elevated the digital shelf as a pivotal element of its operational framework and marketing strategy.

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Challenges

After leveraging other solution providers, this prominent brand experienced multiple false starts and setbacks on its digital shelf journey. With thousands of products and 30+ retailers, large brands face challenges with all the steps required to create, implement, syndicate, track, measure, and optimize content.

• ‍Massive Product Catalog: The parent brand is an enormous business comprising many household brands. Today, the Stackline partnership supports 30 brands, 25 retailers, and 15K unique product pages - all managed centrally.
• ‍Manual Content Audits: The ecommerce team wanted to pivot from its manual processes, in which team members would have to review one product detail page at a time for quality and accuracy.
• ‍Content Blind Spots: The parent brand's digital product experience management workflow had critical gaps. There was no closed-loop system to identify errors, gaps, or inconsistencies between their PIM, content syndication tools, retailer systems, and retailer landing pages. These gaps led to missed content optimization opportunities, decreased organic position, and customer conversions.

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Solution

In 2023, the parent brand made a strategic decision to onboard the comprehensive AI-first digital shelf solution, Stackline Omni. Today, they track over 30+ brands and continue to bring more into the fold. For their top brands, the central team can now keep a pulse on every tracked product, on every channel, every single day.

• ‍Automated Piece-of-Mind: The team now has unprecedented insights into item performance, enabling up-to-date monitoring of critical metrics like content accuracy and completeness. Leaders have seen vast improvements in these content metrics across titles, descriptions, bullets, images, and video across many of our retailers due to the ability to quickly identify gaps and outages with Omni.
• ‍Improved Discoverability: Leveraging Stackline's tools has enabled the central ecommerce team to find non-compliant products on retailers' sites and refresh them with keyword-rich content, enhancing products' discoverability and leading to an increase in organic share-of-shelf on priority terms.
• ‍Enhanced Customer Experience: By optimizing product content, keywords, and imagery, the parent brand has improved customer experience, fostering loyalty and repeat business. The team also enhanced its retailer relationships through elevated data-enabled insights.

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In their words

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About Stackline

On a mission to fuel the future of commerce by bringing brands and customers closer together, Stackline is the leading AI-enabled retail intelligence and activation platform for the world's most innovative brands.  Business leaders, product innovators, performance marketers, and financial firms trust Stackline as the single source of commerce truth. Fueled by proprietary neural networks and deep learning systems, Stackline's market insights, revenue metrics, behavioral data, and autonomous functionality create the actions that determine success or failure.

Founded in 2014 in Seattle, Stackline employs over 250 connected commerce professionals creating value for 7,000 global brands.

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