You’re on your phone, shopping for a replacement pair of your favorite running shoes. You know the brand and style, so you go straight to Google to compare options. 

But despite knowing exactly what you want, the experience isn’t simple. One listing lacks details. Another doesn’t have the right size. A third offers a suspiciously low price. You pause, unsure, until a retargeting ad catches your eye… and sends you to an out-of-stock page. What should have been quick and convenient isn’t.

Unfortunately, in today’s complex shopping landscape, experiences like this one happen every day, creating confusion and frustration for customers. It’s a direct result of how brands show up—or fail to—across the digital shelf.

The Digital Shelf Defined

Customers now experience your brand across multiple digital touchpoints, including retailer sites, apps, social channels, and search engines. Together, these make up your digital shelf. Like a physical shelf, performance depends on visibility, availability, and how your product compares to the options that surround it. It’s the age-old merchandising puzzle, made more complex by greater scale and speed.

The New Reality of Digital Commerce

The lines between awareness and commerce have blurred. Where channels like video and social once drove discovery, they now also drive conversion. In fact, 70% of consumers purchase across three or more digital channels each month. This dilutes both the customer journey and the ability to control how your brand is represented. 

Despite this shift, most brands still manage their channels in silos, limiting visibility and making it hard to shape consistent experiences. Without a connected view, brands are forced to react to shifts instead of anticipating them.

The complexity that makes experience management hard also makes brand-switching easier. Thirty-two percent of consumers will abandon a brand they love after just one bad experience, meaning the stakes for getting experience right have never been higher. 

The Gaps That Cost Brands Revenue

Today’s fragmented digital ecosystem leaves brands exposed to five common blind spots:

1. Multi-Retailer Visibility: Brands sell across dozens of partners but lack real-time oversight.
   The cost: Pricing errors, stock issues, and inconsistencies that erode customer trust
   
   
2. Competitive Intelligence: Brands don’t know who outranks them or how competing products differ.
   The cost: Lost market share and ineffective merchandising strategies
   
   
3. Media Performance Clarity: Brands can’t prove which retailers, keywords, and placements drive ROI.
   The cost: Wasted ad spend and missed opportunity
   
   
4. Cross-Channel Attribution: Brands can’t connect the dots when shoppers move across channels.
   The cost: Suboptimal budget allocation, poor customer experiences, and an inability to prove marketing impact to leadership
   
   
5. Product Content Accuracy: Brands lose track of how listings appear across sites, leading to unnoticed detail inaccuracies and missing attributes.
   The cost: Customer confusion, diminished trust, and brand switching

The scope of today’s commerce opportunities means that the only way to realistically keep up with a brand’s full portfolio is through advanced, real-time analytics. 

Digital Shelf Analytics: Your Unified Command Center

Digital shelf analytics uses AI to help brands take a data-driven approach to measuring, benchmarking, and improving channel performance across retailers, markets, and competitors. 

Whether it’s an alert when a product goes out of stock, or share of category data to negotiate better positioning, brands get faster insights to satisfy customers and beat out competitors. Aggregated data, analyzed at speed, enables brands to move proactively instead of reactively.