eCommerce brands have gone from being clueless about the post-pandemic scenario to having too much data to process. Retail is complex, and massive losses are underway for those lacking the time and resources to learn fast enough. For many, access to raw, fractured data is more likely to lead to confusion than profits.
With an 11% year-over-year consumer spending growth, CPG growth is not going to slow down. If your organization is already struggling with fractured data and poorly integrated marketing efforts, those challenges will only increase in the near future.
Enterprise CPG brings about a need for integrated commerce. In this blog, we’ll discuss the retail media network explosion, the side-effects of fractured data, and the advantages of creating and analyzing consolidated data.
The RMN Explosion & Its Unexpected By-Product
Since September 2017, the world has witnessed the mushrooming of retail brands and businesses, all looking to fill the market gap in the eCommerce industry. Statista forecasts suggest that online shopping revenue in the U.S. will exceed $1.3 trillion by 2025.
The Retail Media Network (RMN) has undoubtedly boomed, and every brand has amassed enormous amounts of data from consumers and retail platforms without the resources to store and process it effectively. The result is fractured data that leads to the following:
- Slow analysis
- Lost revenue
- Lack of consistency
- Reactive actions
Teams need to develop sustainable ways of analyzing the precious first-party data they collect without compromising on other fronts. Without the proper structure, collecting and storing megabytes of data can quickly become expensive and time-consuming. One solution has been gaining widespread attention, and that is integrated commerce.
What is Integrated Commerce?
Although the term has been around for a while, its popularization is relatively recent. Integrated commerce is the practice of consolidating and unifying data from all fronts of an eCommerce company. This includes elements such as price tracking, basket building, sales operations, competitor tracking, category share, and customer automation.
Without integrated commerce, it’s easy to lose track of upcoming trends and not be able to capitalize on them on a first-to-market basis. Many brands have struggled to track all KPIs, especially with an omnichannel strategy. This leads to millions of dollars in revenue leakage in the long run.
There are three areas in which integrated commerce is of key importance:
- Margin expansion, an ample opportunity with ASIN-level profitability insights
- Time savings, using automation features
- Revenue leakage prevention, with faster resolution times
Keeping the unprecedented pace of growth in mind, brands that see success are those that scale their operations based on growing demand. Now, the margin for error is much thinner, and knowing how to reinvent strategies for both consumers and online retail platforms is non-negotiable.
Strategies That Deliver Results
Enterprise CPG brands with an omnichannel retail strategy have six sources for data collection and analysis:
- Sales data
- Marketing data
- Supply data
- Finance data
- Advertising data
- Analytics
All brand segments now have to be thought of as interconnected, interdependent parts of one system, and strategies need to be put in place without ignoring any of these segments. By consolidating these databases and integrating the system, you can build solutions to problems in the industry and craft custom brand and retailer-oriented strategies.
As more and more brands are adopting e-commerce integration for faster analyses, you can already see these three results:
- Measuring and delivering incrementality, going beyond ROAS and ACOS.
- Drive better profitability with SKU-level granularity to maximize every dollar spent.
- Accelerate share growth and outrank the competition.
Pacvue recently worked with a leading CPG brand struggling to perform daily tasks to deal with fractured data sustainably. By creating short-term and long-term plans and leveraging features like automation to track key metrics, the brand could prevent over $250K in potential revenue leakage with 24-48 hours faster resolution time than their previous processes.
Since then, they have generated over $500K, with a 3% increase in Buy Box ownership, and saved over 260 hours using ticketing automation alone. The resulting 5% in margin improvements have accelerated their growth even beyond the projected numbers.
The RMN explosion led companies to create data they couldn’t utilize, leading to huge opportunity costs for many in the industry. This blog covered the meaning and practical implications of Integrated Commerce for enterprise CPG brands in 2022 and the steps you can take today to ensure steady growth in 2023 and beyond.
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