For a brand, monitoring online distribution channels can be a hassle. Online retail teams must regularly visit the sites they are selling on to ensure that all availability, price, search and content metrics are where they should be. The common pain is that it could take hours to read through these product pages when your brand has a large distribution network. You can choose to skip the process, but then you could miss out on sales — and end up with unhappy customers.
ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics automates the monitoring of online retailers so you don’t have to do it yourself. It increases efficiency and productivity for the entire e-commerce team. Here are nine ways ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics can regularly save your online retail team several hours of tedious and repetitive manual effort.
1. Real-Time Monitoring: Check the state of your market instantly
Simply checking all your online retailers for out-of-stocks or new price changes could take a full day. That’s why online retail teams or e-commerce teams often assign a team member to the task of manually checking all the sites.
How about letting ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics do that for you? We can provide an extensive overview of your distribution channels while you are sipping your morning cup of coffee! Your team will be able to see all of your products’ performance at your preferred online retailers, in real time. Our high-frequency technology constantly updates data about your product pages, so you will have more time to cultivate your sales relationships.
2. Retailer Analysis: Prepare QBRs in a flash
How often do you conduct quarterly business reviews? This classic joke never gets old because it still applies. You might know that you need to catch up with your buyer at that online retailer, but you postpone it because there is just so much to do. You don’t have enough time to gather all the data and compose that quarterly report before the meeting.
Here’s how ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics can help speed up the preparation:
- Price evolution: Looking at how prices changed over the last three months can help you prepare for your discussion on margins.
- Retailer analysis: In just a few seconds, you can check a retailer’s compliance with your distribution agreement.”
- Competition benchmark: Is your retailer restocking your rivals’ products more regularly than yours? ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics lets you monitor your competitors’ products, giving you evidence to back up your negotiations.
Letting us take care of your QBR keeps your meeting quick and efficient.
3. ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics Report: Review weekly progress at a glance
A weekly report works like a debrief about the ongoing tasks of the team. It also points out the issues at your online retailers, such as out-of-stocks, sudden price drops or negative reviews. As your distribution network grows, the more complex it becomes for the online retail team to touch base with every site — increasing the likelihood of overlooking an issue.
How about telling us exactly how you want your report? Your ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics Report is generated automatically, so you can pick out all the key elements that you want to include and set up a schedule. We will instantly generate your report with all the online retailers that you care about and send it straight to your inbox.
“Brand Analytics helps me keep an eye on my most important distribution metrics. Whenever I notice a problem, I pass it on to the sales team and they handle it with the retailer.” — Nathalie Wan, Sales Analyst, Netatmo
4. Automated Notifications: Stop searching for distribution mishaps manually
Despite significant progress in the evolution of e-commerce, gaps between brands and retailers remain — and can cause lost revenue and opportunity. Some vendors may not be notified when their products sell out. And some buyers are just too busy to place new orders. And some buyers are just too busy to place new orders. Distribution issues, such as out-of-stocks or lost buy boxes and add-on cords, can catch you by surprise.
On the ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics dashboard, you can set up notifications for any distribution mishaps across all the online retailers. You can instantly assess the situation and resolve it.
Avoid surprises that cost you a sale — and fortify your business relationships.
“I use ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics every day to track my online prices, availability and reviews. In two minutes, I can see if there is a problem in my distribution online.” — E-Commerce Account Manager and Business Analyst, Mayborn Group
5. ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics Extension: Boost your daily workflow efficiency
Are you using some price tracking extensions in your browser to assist your daily workflow? Some extensions can help you monitor current price and history, but these extensions are not specifically designed for e-commerce professionals, requiring you to manually pick out the indicators that you need.
Understanding these struggles, we built a browser extension specifically for e-commerce professionals with no time to waste. It seamlessly integrates highly contextual insights into your daily workflow. Here is what the ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics extension offers (and why it could become your everyday favorite tool):
- Real-time prices and stock levels
- 30-day median price
- Full pricing history
- Full availability history
6. Price History: Quickly understand price movements
Prices are a hassle to track, especially now that most online retailers use dynamic pricing. Do you need to check that a promotion started on time? Do you want to find out which online retailer dropped the price first? In both cases, unless you have someone checking the prices several times per day, you won’t find the answer.
With ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, thanks to the pricing history feature, you can know what happened in just a minute. Our data refresh at a high frequency, so you can see the changes immediately. And it’s easy to go back to the exact time change of any price movement.
7. Content Performance: Execute your content strategy at scale
Content is a formidable driver of growth, adoption and conversion. Your company invests time and money into producing quality product shoots and descriptions to earn that high search ranking, but unfortunately, broken images and poor titles still happen. One solution to this challenge is to manually monitor the product pages. But even small brands may have hundreds of e-commerce product pages from a variety of online retailers, which are impossible to manually check on a regular basis.
With Content Performance, Brand Analytics automatically scans the content of your product pages to help you track three key areas: implementation, compliance and consistency.
8. Automated Review Notifications: Speed up review reading
Regularly following up with all ratings and reviews is a full-time job. Your team works hard to prioritize the feedback from recently launched products while frequently monitoring all of the others. When customer input from a new campaign identifies issues, such as a technical problem or inaccurate messaging, even more effort is required.
ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics collects your product reviews at scale and automatically alerts you about new reviews and ratings. Your team won’t need to spend extra hours catching up with new reviews. Our API plugin also supports raw data collection for full-scale sentiment analysis and other market research purposes.
9. Brand Trends: Rapidly monitor product presence
We know how important it is for brands to get their products on the first page of the search results. Online retail teams have to plan for it from keyword placement to negotiation. Despite your efforts to stand out, the competition is always tough. There are always new entrants and your direct competitors are also attempting to dominate that first page of the search results.
With ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, you’ll have what it takes to step right into the battle, fully aware of the current market situation at any time. You will gain insights into all the dominant brands’ products on the first page of the search results, which will give you insights into their real-time keyword tactics and allow you to review your current strategy. We do this analysis for you, so you can make better decisions to win that top-ranking position at any retailer.
ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics’s solution was designed in response to the struggles of brands and manufacturers in e-commerce. Each feature can reduce the time investment required and can be beneficial to different levels of management, as well as to the functions of the teams. You have no time to waste, so how about getting a helping hand?
Reach out to ChannelAdvisor today and get ready to elevate your brand’s e-commerce distribution.
