Summary

• Ecommerce merchandisers often rely on multiple systems and manual processes to understand website page performance.
• The “sorting challenge” refers to the issue of manually sorting products on ecommerce sites and missing crucial business objectives.
• An AI-driven retail analytics solution integrated directly with the ecommerce platform can address the sorting challenge.
• EDITED’s Chrome extension provides real-time performance metrics and actionable insights directly on the ecommerce site.

Introduction

As an ecommerce merchandiser, it’s imperative for you to know what is working in your business and what isn’t. You are constantly making decisions about what to boost or bury on your website, but how are you gathering this information?  Most likely, you are using multiple systems and having to pull data together in a spreadsheet to better understand how pages are performing. 

This manual process can be time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, sorting tools often miss vital metrics in their current algorithms, or web metrics don’t always address crucial business goals.

How great would it be to have all of this data in the same system where you are making decisions and seeing action-oriented metrics? 

What Is the Sorting Challenge?

If the above issue sounds familiar within your business, you are probably facing “the sorting challenge.” Some brands still rely on manual sorting for category grid pages, product recommendations, and other areas on their sites. However, there is another option. To make life easier and increase efficiency, you need to switch to boosting essential products through automation. 

Some retailers, though, do have some sorting automation in place, yet still notice that the metrics that are vital to their merchandising rules and algorithms are missing. Simple automated decisions, including moving bestsellers or new arrivals to the top of various pages, often do not address pressing business objectives such as driving profit, improving customer experience, reducing fragmentation, or accounting for seasonality. 

To solve the sorting challenge, you need an AI retail analytics solution that can be easily understood, quickly adopted, and directly integrated between your online storefront and ecommerce platform. And, you need this all in one place.

Action and Insights at the Point of Decision  

By implementing this type of retail analytics software in the form of a Chrome extension, you get access to product performance metrics and actionable insights overlaid directly on your website and digital commerce platform. With the automated ability to visualize performance, you can: 

1. See KPIs directly on your ecommerce site in real time and understand the “why” behind product performance-related metrics. 
2. Eliminate manual data collection and the guesswork by connecting data across web analytics, orders, inventory, and returns.
3. Analyze action impact by seeing how high-traffic pages would look if you sorted them by different metrics. Then, put those insights into action by optimizing your sort rules to maximize conversion.  

These highly visual cues inform you and your team about item performance relative to category and are all visible on one screen, on the system you already use. Whether adjusting your site category or clearing out seasonal inventory, identifying the actionable insights needed to optimize profit all in one place is crucial to your business’s bottom line.

Your Retail Analytics Solution in Action

Integrating this technology helps democratize retail insights across your organization to help all disciplines make clearer, data-driven decisions. These insights at the point of decision can help your business across objectives, including:

• Identifying relative product performance and if you should resort or adjust products more quickly.
• Getting alerted to which products are bestsellers, rising stars, low cover items, unprofitable products, and more.
• Visualizing recommended actions such as which products to boost/bury, which would benefit from a price change, or which need replenishment. 
• Evaluating the impact of merchandising, marketing, and retailing action’s effect on gross margin by category.  

This simple solution is pre-integrated, laying insights right over the solutions you’re already using. Now, you can easily put the best performing products compared to their category peers into positions where they will be seen most, drive higher conversion, and ensure you are promoting the items your customers actually want to see. 

Conclusion

The ability to sort product and category pages on your website in an automated way, while simultaneously having access to action-oriented metrics in one view, allows you to make better decisions faster. With EDITED Overlay, you can overlay 300+ profit, demand, inventory, shipping, traffic, marketing, and promotion metrics directly onto your website. You also get alerts for recommended actions to take with “Insight” and “Action” badges all in the same system. 

This Chrome extension simplifies boosting and burying product with access to all the insights you need on one screen. Moreover, if you are a Salesforce customer, EDITED has certified a Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge, which allows you to see insights and move product easily all within the app. 

Discover how you can simplify sorting with recommended actions directly displayed on your site through EDITED here.