Mind the Gap!

How the Assortment Gap is limiting your ecommerce sales – and how to fix it.

In North America, large supermarkets may carry 30,000 SKUs in-store, but only list a quarter of those SKUs on their curated ecommerce micro-site.  Here at Upshelf, we call the difference between in-store and online offerings the “Assortment Gap.”

45% of online grocery orders are Click and Collect, and this option is the most popular with 4-person households, the most profitable segment for grocers. Busy parents are choosing this option to save time between work, school pickups, and after-school classes, especially as they return to offices and longer commute times.  As they opt not to venture inside the store, their opportunities to purchase or discover products that aren’t listed in the online micro-site vanish.

Many brands aren’t aware that when they ship 25 SKUs to a retailer, a large portion often are not listed for sale online.  And short of doing the manual work of visiting each micro-site associated with the retailer’s physical location, it’s difficult to track and identify your Assortment Gap, as each micro-site may be different, even under large national Banners.  

The Upshelf Dashboard is unique in separating SKU Availability into three categories:

• In Stock – the SKU is available for purchase at this Point of Sale/micro-site today
• Out Of Stock – the SKU is not available for purchase at this Point of Sale today – with further data on when it was last in stock, average days out of stock, and the ability to set Alerts to let you know when it is In and Out of Stock
• Never Listed – the SKU has never, in the time Upshelf has been tracking it, been available for purchase at this Point of Sale
  

Identifying which of your SKUs have never been listed is an excellent opportunity to reach out to your Channel Partners, and collaborate with them to ensure more of the products that are available in-store are available online.  For our clients, this has been the fastest and easiest way to increase ecommerce sales – simply by making sure your products are available online.

Interested in learning more about how Upshelf can help you win the digital shelf?