Digital shelf analytics
The digital shelf, measured daily, at every retailer.
Digital shelf analytics is only as good as the data under it. Import.io captures the shelf as a shopper sees it, search results, product pages, prices, stock, reviews and sellers, by retailer and by store, every day, and turns it into the six metrics brand, retail and analytics teams run on. In Aperture, or as a feed into your own tools.
Run every day for enterprise data teams and the data companies that serve them Including three leading commerce-intelligence platforms that run their web capture with Import.io.
The six digital shelf metrics that matter.
Every digital shelf program measures some version of these. The difference between programs is whether the data underneath is captured by store, matched to the catalog, and refreshed daily.
Availability
Whether your product can be bought, where and how: in stock, out of stock, low stock, ship and pickup options, by retailer, store and zip.
metric in-stock rate = listings in stock ÷ listings monitored · by store, not nationalSearch and share of shelf
Where you appear when a shopper searches. Position, page, sponsored versus organic, and your share of the visible results for each key term.
metric share of shelf = your placements ÷ page-1 placements · organic and paid splitContent
Whether each listing matches your approved title, bullets, description, images, video and enhanced content, field by field.
metric content score = compliant fields ÷ required fields · per listing, per retailerPrice and promotion
Shelf price, promotional price, unit price and every seller's price against MAP or your price index, with dated evidence.
metric price compliance = listings at or above MAP ÷ listings · plus promo depth and frequencyRatings and reviews
Average rating, review count and velocity, star distribution and review text across retailers, for sentiment and defect detection.
metric rating and velocity · reviews per week vs category · negative-theme detectionAssortment
Which of your items each retailer ranges versus your target distribution and versus competitors, with new and delisted items flagged.
metric assortment coverage = ranged SKUs ÷ target SKUs · gaps vs competitorsData, not screenshots.
A digital shelf program lives or dies on the underlying eCommerce product-data layer. Rank differs by store. Content is edited without notice. Sellers change hourly. Retail sites resist automated access. This infrastructure has run them since 2012.
Search results by store
Every result as a row: position, page, sponsored flag, price, rating, seller and store context.
store 45202 · rank #2 organicProduct content as fields
Titles, bullets, images, video and enhanced content extracted so they can be diffed against your approved assets.
title match 92% · 3 gapsAvailability by zip
Stock, ship and pickup options as the shopper in that location sees them, not a national default.
in stock 94% · TX 59%Every seller
Third-party sellers, Buy Box ownership and price dispersion on marketplaces, at the cadence sellers change.
27 sellers · 9 unauthorizedReviews at scale
Full review text, ratings, dates and Q&A across retailers, deduplicated and dated for sentiment analysis.
88,310 reviews · velocity trackedMatched to your catalog
GTIN and model first, then AI attribute and image matching with a confidence score, so retailer renames do not break history.
match 0.99 · persists across runsAnti-bot handled
Fingerprinting, rate limits, challenges and geo-blocks handled inside the run, not by your team.
challenge → handled inside SLADaily QA on every drop
Row counts, fill rates, match stability and sample cross-checks against source HTML before delivery.
7 checks → released 06:41Who runs on digital shelf data.
Same shelf, three vantage points. Each has its own page.
Brands
Content compliance, share of search, MAP, availability, reviews and unauthorized sellers across every retailer, marketplace and distributor that carries you.
Digital shelf monitoring for brandsRetailers
Competitor pricing, assortment gaps, availability and promotions, matched SKU by SKU, delivered into your pricing engine or in Aperture.
Pricing and assortment intelligence for retailersAnalytics platforms
The capture layer under your digital shelf product: search, content, price, stock, reviews and sellers at retailer scale, under a pass-through SLA.
Data for analytics platformsOne data layer. Two ways to use it.
Work in Aperture or deliver the same matched, monitored shelf data into your own systems.
Aperture digital shelf view
All six metrics by retailer, category and key term, with history, alerts and the evidence page behind every score.
- Retailer and category scorecards
- Share of shelf by term, organic and sponsored
- Alerts on content, stock, price and seller changes
- Exports to CSV, BI tools and workflows
Managed digital shelf feeds
A named delivery team captures, matches, QA's and delivers shelf data on schedule to S3, SFTP, API or webhook, under an SLA.
- Search, content, price, stock, reviews and sellers as typed rows
- Daily AI QA against your contracted schema
- Monitoring dashboard you can open yourself
- Monthly report and call with your CSM
Digital shelf analytics, explained.
Digital shelf analytics is the measurement of how products appear and perform on the retailer websites, marketplaces and apps where shoppers now discover and buy them. The "shelf" is the search results page, the category page and the product page; the metrics are availability, search and share of shelf, content quality, price and promotion, ratings and reviews, and assortment. Brands use it to win where they do not control the storefront, retailers use it to manage their own shelf against competitors, and analytics platforms sell it as a product.
The discipline grew out of physical shelf audits, but the digital version has two advantages and one trap. The advantages: it can be measured every day, and every measurement can carry evidence. The trap: the shelf is personalised. Rank, price and stock differ by store, zip, device and login state, so a national screenshot is not a measurement. Useful digital shelf data is captured in the shopper's context and matched to the catalog so the same product is tracked across retailers that describe it differently.
Import.io provides that data layer, in production for the largest commerce-intelligence platforms since 2012, and surfaces it in Aperture or as fully managed web data.
- MetricsAvailability, search and share of shelf, content, price and promotion, ratings and reviews, assortment.
- FrequencyDaily as standard. Hourly for sellers, launches and promotional windows.
- ContextCaptured by retailer, store or zip, and login state, so scores reflect what shoppers see.
- MatchingGTIN and model first, then AI attribute and image matching with a confidence score.
- Time to valueFirst shelf scorecard across your retailer list typically within two to three weeks.
The shelf data
the category runs on.
Global brands run their shelf programs here, and the platforms that sell digital shelf analytics to everyone else run their capture here.
Ask for a referenceIn production continuously.
Leading commerce-intelligence platforms run their capture here.
Queries a year on one production feed.
Shelf metrics from one daily capture.
Match confidence on identifier-backed pairs.
Managed production operations.
450M queries/year. One production workload sustained at marketplace scale.
Digital shelf questions.
Short answers. Longer ones on the call.
What is the digital shelf?
The places a shopper encounters your product online: the retailer's search results, category pages and product pages, plus marketplaces and apps. Digital shelf analytics measures how products appear and perform there.
What is share of shelf on the digital shelf?
The proportion of visible placements you own for a search term or category on a retailer site, typically on page 1 or the first row, reported separately for organic and sponsored placements and captured in a specific store or zip context.
Which digital shelf metrics should we track?
Six: availability, search and share of shelf, content compliance, price and promotion, ratings and reviews, and assortment. Most programs weight them into a scorecard per retailer and category.
How often is the shelf measured?
Daily as standard. Hourly for sellers, product launches and promotional windows. Cadence is set per retailer and per key term.
How is this different from pricing intelligence?
Pricing intelligence is one of the six shelf metrics, viewed from the retailer's side: competitor prices matched SKU by SKU. Digital shelf analytics covers the whole shopper experience across retailers, usually from the brand's side. Import.io provides the data for both from the same capture.
Which retailers can you cover?
National retailers, marketplaces, regional chains, distributors and DTC sites, in any market. Feasibility per retailer is confirmed in days.
How is the data delivered?
In Aperture as scorecards, alerts and exports, or as a managed feed to S3, SFTP, API or webhook in CSV, JSON or Parquet, with a manifest and a QA pass on every delivery.
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