The art of having the right product in the right place

By having the right product range and price early on, you can increase sales a lot and reach break even in a new market much faster, writes price expert Martin granberg from Priceindx.

In the past, much of the strategy for purchasing and product selection in e-commerce has been about bringing in well-known brands and stocking up on what you think will sell, while also looking at your competitors.

There are significantly better approaches, but only a few have the knowledge to work with purchasing in combination with data analysis. Here, the e-commerce channel has a potential that most other traditional channels do not have.

The easy access to almost perfect data about both the customers (the payer) and their purchasing behavior, but also a very transparent market, makes data relatively easy to obtain. This makes an otherwise very "dusty work area" incredibly exciting and also profitable in practice all data processing within e-commerce helps to increase the conversion rate in various ways.

Most e-tailers already work with the analysis of various types of market data from a traffic generation perspective in order to optimize the structure of the website or buy the right keywords. The most common tool in the toolbox has been Google Analytics, which is often used to search optimize the website and work with volume and relevance for various keywords.

What is often forgotten or focused too little on in the amount of data that can now be obtained, is the traditional analysis from a buying and selling perspective. You miss the fundamental analysis of the selection as you usually use an "inside and out" perspective and only look at what you have and how you can improve your search on the existing portfolio.

If you therefore turn it around a bit and look at the same analysis (volume/relevance) from a purchasing perspective and look at what is requested (searched) by most people both via Google, but also via various marketplaces - you get an aggregated result of what the market demands is and also what is to be presented in the product portfolio on the website.

With limited resources, you have to compare different options to prioritize brands or products that you add to the website, this analysis becomes a way to wash out the "right" spectrum both from a traffic perspective but also from a buyer perspective.

This can be extra valuable when entering new markets. By having the right product range (and price) early on, you can increase sales a lot and break even in a new market much faster.

By working with dynamic data, you can also capture products that start to trend early and make sure to have these in the range when they reach an interesting level, and thus be early on the ball.

If you work systematically with a data-driven approach to build a new powerful selection with high search volume rather than just trying to optimize your search and improve an existing selection, you can influence conversion at every level.

The effect is equivalent to laying a highway through the standard conversion funnel when you create a more attractive assortment in the category of products that customers are actually looking for and are interested in.