Derisking E-Commerce: 3 Pillars Pet Brands Must Master

By reading headlines, it appears that every pet food and product manufacturer is swimming in profit thanks to the rise of ecommerce and omnichannel surge over the last 12 to 18 months. There’s been an estimated 30% growth according to petfoodindustry.com. 

Realistically, we know that it’s just not that simple.

In fact, the exponential increase in ecommerce business adds complexity and uncertainty…

• More competition means more choices for consumers
• More demands from more retailers to drive consumer traffic and purchases
• More pressure to have the right products in the right places at the right time
• Less control and oversight of pricing, promotion and discoverability of your products
• Less awareness of market realities, competitive benchmarks, pricing perception or profit drivers
• Less confidence in your digital performance, decision making and ability to tell your internal and external stories

While these factors are relevant to all CPG brands, the acceleration and penetration of omnichannel shopping and higher shopper loyalty in the pet category elevate the need to address them quickly.

The 3 Pillars of Ecommerce Mastery

Working with pet brands and pet retailers, we’ve seen that the most successful organizations focus on mastering these 3 areas:

1. Compliance
2. Visibility
3. Strategy

These components are critical to ecommerce success because – collectively – they provide the core controls, causal, and drivers of growth. Similarly, deficiency in any of these areas directly impacts the other areas in a way that compromises the reliability and effectiveness of your entire ecommerce approach.

For example, if you cannot enforce MAP compliance, your visibility into pricing perception is skewed. Add to this the fact that MAP violations may be driving availability issues and jeopardizing your ability to be seen by your customers. As a result, your marketing investments and revenue strategy are compromised by an inability to accurately construct a pricing architecture that protects profitability.

How to Manage the 3 Pillars for Growth

Pet brands looking to solidify their ecommerce presence and competitive strategy should use the 3 pillars as foundational building blocks, but also need to understand the factors that strengthen each area.

For many pet companies, e-commerce has become more about putting out the latest fire than acting strategically.

When we look at the driving factors of price, promotion, assortment, and availability across your competitive set and retail ecosystem, we can identify which of the pillars is weakening and which can offer the biggest gains.

For example, we often hear pet brands say “We know we’re out of stock. There’s nothing we can do about it right now.”

Out-of-stocks lead to lost revenue and compromise your digital shelf positioning, so we need to focus on areas that can balance this loss.

In this case it may be:

• MAP compliance to protect profitability of our in stock products 
• Promotional compliance to make sure that we are not paying for promotions when there is no stock
• Digital shelf visibility to understand how the OOS impacts discoverability and ranking & plan for the future
• Market strengths and weaknesses to build a strategy to get back in the cart when we are available

Picking and Choosing Your Battles

Mastering ecommerce necessary to compete as a pet brand today.

However, it shouldn’t feel like a leap of faith. Pet brands need to be intentional and informed in setting priorities and making investments. 

The 3 pillars and influencing factors are guides to help you reduce risk in your ecommerce business decisions. But it’s not possible to address all these factors at once… You have to choose which battles are worth fighting today.

This is why it’s so important that your understanding, prioritization, and investments are tethered by accurate, relevant, and quality data.

When data informs each of the pillars, you eliminate blind spots in your ecommerce and competitive approach without worrying about crashing.

Bungee Tech was founded on the belief that ecommerce should not be a blind leap, but an adventure for brands that are securely tethered to solid ground with Bungee Tech’s data and analytics.