The saying 'Out of sight, out of mind' rings especially true for brands in a highly competitive market. They invest heavily in marketing to ensure that their products stay visible to customers. This involves extensive marketing efforts to create brand awareness and financial investments for product placement, both in physical and digital spaces. One of the most important focus areas is ensuring consistent product availability across multiple sales channels, which is crucial for enhancing the overall customer experience.
Reaching out through multiple channels
Online channels have started to gain significant traction and share in overall brand sales. Brands are either selling through native platforms like their own app and website, or are leveraging popular online platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, and others.
Now the interesting thing with online channels is that they generate tons of data around product availability, visibility, and customer behavior that can potentially enable brands to enhance customer experiences, optimize product availability, and refine their overall strategies.
When it comes to native platforms, brands can easily access the data, but it gets trickier and complicated with platforms, as data formats and granularity varies across them. This puts the responsibility on brands to gather and organize the diverse data points before they can zero in on what they need to work on.
As online platforms account for a significant portion of brand sales, it is imperative for brands to stay on top of this data.
From a brand's perspective, there are several aspects that demand attention. Firstly, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of data points like demand trends, stock on-hand, purchase orders, and stockout risks across various channels. Secondly, actions need to be prioritized based on potential sales impact to maximize returns. Additionally, they also look at analyzing long-term trends to uncover structural issues tied to specific products or channels (this has been discussed separately in the next blog).
Once the most important products at risk of stockout are identified, the Sales Team must delve into the reasons behind this. This process involves triangulating information from multiple data sources to pinpoint and address the root causes effectively.
Triangulating to the root causes
The Sales Team considers various factor influencing availability on online platforms, such as
- Offtake trends and stock on-hand: Promotions, market changes and other factors can lead to a change in consumer offtake. This would create potential stockout risks. Sales Teams need to be on top of this change in offtake and the stock on-hand to identify SKUs at risk.
- Purchase Order (PO) lifecycle: For the at-risk SKUs, Sales Team closely monitors the PO data to identify any misses like PO not raised or quantities not being in sync with the change in offtake.
In cases where no PO is outstanding, the team reaches out to the platform and initiates a trace to understand the reasons behind its absence. The reasons could vary from platform delisting due to cataloging errors or operational issues, such as case size and load size. They can then mutually look to solve the issue.
- Brand inventory fill rate: Following the receipt of PO, the Sales Team focuses on ensuring they service it promptly, which then requires them to coordinate with internal teams such as warehousing and finance teams. In case there are structural issues around PO fulfillment, they immediately work on reallocating promotions and visibility spends to other SKUs.
Along with tracking SKUs at stock out risk, it is equally important for them to keep track of SKUs with excess inventory. Similar to PO quantities being on a shorter side, process errors can lead to quantities being in excess. This can lead to buildup of excessive inventory, which, at some later point, needs to be either taken back by the brand or liquidated. In both cases, it is a huge economic setback for the brand.
Since this data is readily available to the brands, they can be on top of such things so they're not caught unaware. Continuous management of excess inventory can also be used for addressing inventory-aging issues, minimizing the need for subsequent discounting to clear out aged stock.
While these might not be exhaustive reasons, they underscore the importance of triangulating data for brands to effectively identify who needs to take specific actions to address and resolve issues related to product availability.
Data sources for availability triangulation
Some of the critical data sources that Sales Team need to bring together to contextualize the key influences driving availability include:
- Sales off-take and stock on-hand data provided by the individual marketplace platform that gives brand visibility into secondary sales and the overall inventory position location-wise at a platform level
- Own internal PO and invoicing data that gives them clarity on when platform POs were received, how were the fill rates, and if the products were delivered to the platform within the agreed TATs
- Information on brand investments on these platforms, such as discounts, banner visibility, or ad keywords so that they can account for the offtake surge
- Enriched data on SKU-level availability, search ranking, as well as pricing competitiveness across locations on all platforms
Challenges in data assimilation, enrichment, and triangulation
The process of assimilating, enriching, and triangulating data, coupled with challenges of prioritization, places a substantial burden on the Sales Team’s bandwidth. Consequently, they find themselves caught up in ad-hoc problem-solving, diverting their attention from more strategic decision making.
It is crucial for the Sales Team to pause and assess historical trends related to availability issues. They need to determine whether these issues stem from inherent structural flaws in the system, potentially warranting a system redesign (as discussed in our upcoming blog).
Given the complexity and overarching impact of availability on revenue, the value of a productized solution that abstracts the entire process becomes evident and invaluable for them.
Is there a better approach to get to the availability root causes?
A better way to handle these challenges is to leverage a solution like GobbleCube that is purpose-built for brands to decode their revenue loss due to unavailability. GobbleCube streamlines the process end-to-end for Sales Team through:
Data assimilation: GobbleCube helps brands organize their secondary off-take and stock on-hand data across platforms as well as their internal PO and invoicing data
Translation layer: GobbleCube enables seamless aggregation of different data sources (including SKU ID mapping, location mappings etc.) so that brands can have a unified view of performance across platforms
Data enrichment: GobbleCube enriches data with information like product availability on different platforms, competitor pricing and availability, and search ranking to understand factors driving off-takes
Attribution frameworks: GobbleCube triangulates all these data points to determine whether a surge in offtake corresponds to an increase in overall POs, and whether those POs are being properly serviced or their are there any issues or leakages that need to be identified and acted upon
Prioritization frameworks along with trend analysis: GobbleCube enables brands to develop metrics for more effective prioritization of efforts in line with the overarching goals of the organization. Additionally, it helps brands identify trends and pinpoint structural issues in the system that may require attention or optimization
User-friendly visualization: GobbleCube offers an elegant interface to contextualize all this information enabling easy team collaboration and actions
If this sounds interesting, then give us a shout. We’d be happy to chat!
