Why Brands need to own the Digital Shelf

Brands invest more than $500 billion per year for prized shelf space in physical retail stores based on a core premise:

Building brand awareness at the point of purchase can influence a sale

What about shelf space in digital retail?

Given that we now predominantly use our connected device to research, discover and purchase products, brands are naturally shifting their spends to digital media.

The digital world brings in a diversity of platforms (across paid, owned or earned media) where brands can converse with prospective shoppers — brand sites and apps, search, video and display ads, ads on social media, or even native editorial content to name a few.

Each of these moments has the potential to lead the shopper to a digital shelf.

The prevalent call to action for brands in each of these platforms are:

Clearly, the above calls to action are rather ineffective — both from a shopper’s as well as the brand’s point of view:

• Digital shoppers care for choice, information, and a friction free purchase experience.
• Brands are keen to manage the digital merchandising experience, and desire rich path to purchase data to help them understand and serve online shoppers better.

The perfect format would be a digital shelf that simultaneously addresses these needs of shoppers as well as brands. Shopalyst makes it easy for brands to own these shopping moments and deliver a brand curated storefront, while working with partner retailers to deliver the fulfilment and service experience.

Some of the world’s best brands in personal care, fashion, food and lifestyle are now making their media shoppable using our platform. By integrating a commerce call to action in their digital advertising, they are serving personalized shopping experiences activated from campaigns on popular platforms like Google Search, Programmatic/Display, Facebook and Youtube. Shoppers discover, compare and complete purchase of featured products in a seamless experience without having to click through to several shopping sites. Purchases from our universal shopping cart are processed as native orders on retailer systems at real-time. This allows retailers to continue be the merchant of record, and manage the fulfilment and post purchase experience as always.

Given our large and growing index of shoppable products from leading online shopping destinations, activating a shoppable campaign is a cinch. With first hand insights on shopper motivations, choices and behaviours available on tap, brands can now engage and serve digital consumers better than ever before.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on January 19, 2016.