Digital Shelf Optimization: Definition, Strategy, and Trends

Global ecommerce sales are on track to hit $7.4 trillion by 2026, and brands that win the battle of online visibility will reap the lion’s share. Digital shelf optimization is your ticket to snagging a sizable slice of the pie.

You can’t compete in ecommerce if your products aren’t landing in consumer searches. Doing a little facing—straightening up those digital shelves to make sure your products are seen—is key. Boost your sales performance, online visibility, and discoverability by making sure your digital shelf is optimized for sales.

Armed with the right tactics and tools, you can build a winning digital shelf strategy and own your brand's online presence. Learn the ins and outs of digital shelf optimization in this comprehensive guide.

What is the digital shelf?

A digital shelf is the online space where products are displayed and sold, including product listings, descriptions, images, prices, and reviews across ecommerce platforms and digital channels.

Anywhere your products are featured online (website, app, third-party retailers) is part of the digital shelf. Think of the digital shelf as your brand’s digital self.

Would you shop in a store with messy shelves, a chaotic layout, or constant intercom racket? If not, you understand the importance of a good shopping experience.

It’s no different for ecommerce buyers, and that’s what makes the digital shelf so important. Buyers are looking for a simple, straightforward, and downright pleasant way to shop online. That means:

• Your products should be easy to find via search.
• Navigating your website, storefront, or app should be simple and intuitive.
• Your product listings should be informative and accurate.

At its core, the digital shelf is the shopping experience you create for buyers everywhere you sell online. Every component of the digital shelf plays into your product visibility and sales performance.

Key components of the digital shelf

The digital shelf includes all interactions buyers have with your brand online. From finding your products in search results to clicking 'Add to Cart,' each encounter with buyers is part of your digital shelf.

These are the key components of the digital shelf:

• Finding your products in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
• Navigating your website/marketplace/app to find products
• Browsing product detail pages to choose the right products
• Reading reviews, social media posts, etc. to evaluate your products

Your digital shelf strategy affects your sales performance over time. When it’s easy to discover your products because your listings rank well in SERPs, you sell more.

When your storefront or app is easy to navigate, it's easy for customers to find and buy what they need. When your product pages are informative and accurate, buyers land on the right products (and return rates drop).

When product reviews and social media conversations paint your brand in a positive light, new customers are encouraged to seek out your products. It all comes back to your digital shelf and how you manage it.

Factors influencing product visibility on the digital shelf

A digital shelf performance checkup can translate into better product visibility. A retail store might boost product visibility with aisle markers, arranging popular items at eye-level, and facing product labels forward.

Different visibility-boosting methods can be applied to your digital shelf presence. Instead of signage and product placement, these factors come into play for ecommerce brands:

• Search rank
• Product images and rich media
• Product listings and descriptions
• Customer reviews
• Pricing

1. Search rank

How well your products rank in search results is a major visibility factor in digital shelf strategy. The top 3 organic results get almost 70 percent of all clicks from Google search results. Amazon says 70% of their users don’t go past the first page of search results.

In other words, if you’re not first, you’re last.

High-ranking product pages get more impressions and clicks, period. When a majority of your customers are choosing their spoils from the first few results, it’s essential to make sure your products land there.

2. Product images and rich media

Humans are visual creatures, so product images have a powerful influence on your digital shelf presence. When you can’t touch, feel, or see the item before you buy it, clear photos and videos are the next best thing.

Good product media is worth paying attention to when 90% of consumers say quality photos are the most important purchase factor and videos can boost browsing time by a whopping 340 percent.

Buyers want to see the product and packaging from all angles to know exactly what they’re getting. They want rich media—tutorials, demos, and 360 spin images—to connect with the product and make sure it suits their needs before buying.

3. Product listings and descriptions

The visibility of your products hinges partially on how well you craft each product listing and description. You don’t need to be a master of language to create a compelling product page. Take steps toward Product Listing Optimization (PLO) to get a boost in search results!

That includes fine-tuning your product titles, descriptions, target keywords, and item details (like manufacturer information and dimensions). Optimizing these elements is key to making your items more visible in online marketplaces.

4. Customer reviews

Your target audience is full of savvy buyers who want to make an informed purchase decision. Customer reviews help them do just that. It’s hardwired into our brains to look for a consensus when making a decision. About 66% of consumers say reviews are influential when it’s time to purchase an item.

These golden nuggets of authenticity are your ticket to boosting visibility and sales. Even better: search engines and ecommerce marketplaces may even reward top-reviewed brands and products with a higher search rank.

5. Pricing

Pricing affects product visibility online. Offering discounts, coupons, and exclusive promo codes can help your items rank higher in search results. Users who were on the fence may pull the trigger when the price is lower.

You can benefit from adjusting your pricing strategy wherever you sell online. Marketplaces like Amazon offer a boost in search results when sellers offer a coupon or set competitive pricing. When buyers find that you’re offering a better price than your competitors, guess which item is going in the cart? That’s all you.

But what if you have a big batch of multichannel listings that need to be optimized (like product titles descriptions, and prices)? That’s where tools and technology come in handy. We’ll dig into that in just a bit.

What is digital shelf optimization?

Digital shelf optimization is the practice of overhauling every facet of your digital shelf to better grab shoppers’ attention, from product listings and pricing to SERP rankings and reviews. It’s the next step when you realize the importance of creating an ecommerce environment—a digital shelf—that gets your products in front of your target customers and makes shopping a breeze.

You wouldn’t set up shop in a brick-and-mortar store and expect to never sweep, mop, run sales, or rearrange items. In ecommerce, digital shelf optimization is key to maintaining a successful storefront over time. The best part: no broom required.

5 ways to optimize your digital shelf

Dividing a digital shelf optimization strategy into bite-sized tasks makes it less daunting. Start optimizing your digital shelf with 5 core tasks.

1. Improve SERP rankings

You’ve got to be in it to win it, right? When your products show up near the top of search results, you're winning on the digital shelf. Improving SERP rankings is the best way to drive traffic to your product pages and increase conversions.

You can improve your SERP rankings by optimizing product listings for search engine algorithms. The algorithms play favorites with product pages that follow the rules and penalize the ones that don’t.

How can you get on a search engine algorithm’s good side? Keyword research, comprehensive product descriptions, and regular updates will get you on the right track.

Search engines want to see relevant keywords in your product titles and descriptions. Keyword research can be as simple as doing sample searches for similar products. Note the keywords your competitors are using and start building a list.

Search algorithms reward high-quality content with a better position in search results. Quality product content signals include:

• Natural, keyword-rich language (no keyword stuffing!)
• Bullet points to highlight features
• Accurate titles and descriptions that match search intent
• Optimized images and media

Regular updates to your product listings can also let search engines know you’re continually working to improve your buyers’ experience.

2. Optimize product listings

Optimizing the digital shelf means you’ll be going over individual product listings with a fine-toothed comb. What could make this listing better? As a buyer, what do you look for?

Revisiting your product titles and descriptions is a great place to start. Are you using the same keywords an everyday person would to find your products?

You can find tons of cheat sheets online to optimize listings for better visibility on different ecommerce channels. Make sure your product title includes the brand, model number/name, product type, color, and pack size. Get wordy with product descriptions (within reason). Use as much of the available word count as possible. Err on the side of providing too much, not too little, information.  

Optimizing your product photos and videos gives shoppers a better look at what you’re selling. Quality images and media play into search rankings and set you up for digital shelf success.

Follow best practices to optimize your product visuals for sales:

• White background and high-resolution media
• Multiple angles of product and packaging
• Proper file size and optimized thumbnails

Take it a step further by tweaking the file names and alt tags of your photos and videos. Including relevant keywords tells search engines that it’s a quality visual that should be moved to the front of the line.

Don’t forget to put on your lab coat and do a little experimenting to see what works best. Perform regular image and video A/B tests over time to see which ones best grab shoppers’ attention and translate into sales.

3. Prioritize reviews and ratings

Nothing beats the opinions of fellow shoppers in the world of ecommerce. You can tinker with your product listing and dominate search results, but without good reviews, you won’t crack your sales potential.

Reviews tell us what real people think about a product. They might include photos or videos that help us picture using the product in our daily lives.

Reviews and ratings can highlight product issues, great features, or novel uses. Leveraging your competitor’s reviews can help you identify areas to improve and where you’re getting it right.

That’s why it’s important to leave a seat for customer reviews at the digital shelf strategy table.

It's a domino effect of awesomeness. Creating accurate, detailed product listings that rank well in search leads to more sales. In turn, you’ll collect positive reviews that encourage more shoppers to make a purchase.

The icing on the cake? The more reviews you have, the better your listings will rank in search. The circle of digital shelf optimization is a beautiful thing.

4. Track KPIs and metrics

What Peter Drucker said is true: “What gets measured gets improved.” You can’t blindly optimize the digital shelf—data is your roadmap to improving your strategy. Analytics and metrics are a critical piece of the digital shelf optimization puzzle.

You need to find out how visible your product listings are to get a clear picture of your online presence as a whole. Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) keeps you informed on digital shelf data, like:

• Sales and revenue
• Product listing performance
• Traffic sources
• Customer behavior

Data gives you a bird’s eye view of the areas that need improvement in your digital shelf and shows you where you’re performing best. Both can help you optimize the digital shelf and continually improve your strategies.

5. Adjust your pricing strategy

Pricing can have a powerful influence on the digital shelf. If you’ve been doing “crock pot pricing”—set it and forget it—it’s time to make some adjustments. A simple price change can boost your product visibility and sales.

One study found that discounted or competitively priced products see conversion rates that rival popular brands. Big discounts can lead to 2% higher conversion rates! It’s worth adjusting your product price point to test the theory for yourself.

When you’re selling a large number of SKUs on multiple channels, adjusting pricing can get tricky. That’s where tools and technology come in. Tools like Repricer can help you sort out your pricing in batches, but tech can play a role in every step of digital shelf optimization.

Using tools and technologies for optimization

When manual edits and updates become too time-consuming to have real value, reach for your toolkit. You have a range of robust software and tools at your fingertips to make optimization easier.

Here’s what you need in your ecommerce tech stack to win more digital shelf space.

Product Information Management (PIM) software

The more channels you’re selling on (Amazon, Google Shopping, etc.), the more challenging it is to keep your finger on the pulse of your digital shelf. Managing thousands of unique product listings on multiple channels with outdated technology is a recipe for failure (we still love you, spreadsheets).

When you reach the tipping point, it’s time to call in the reinforcements: Product Information Management (PIM) software. PIM software simplifies the process of creating and updating product information for multichannel distribution.

These platforms enable you to edit digital shelf content, like product titles, descriptions, and digital assets, in batches to make fast work of time-consuming tasks. Some leverage the power of AI to generate product descriptions, automate discounts, and detect missing product information.

PIM software puts you in control of your digital shelf strategy with a centralized dashboard. You can access your product lists with everything in one place: images, descriptions, prices, SKUs, and more.

If you have 1000+ products, a growing team, or sell on multiple channels, PIM software can be a game-changer for digital shelf optimization.

SEO tools

Every ecommerce brand is in fierce competition for the first page of search results. SEO tools for keyword research and listing optimization are your tech-y tickets to the top.

What keywords and phrases will lead your target customer to your products? Keyword research tools and planners will help you hone in on the right phrases and search terms to use. A good keyword research tool will have features that help you identify and choose high-value keywords:

• Keyword suggestions: Supplies related keywords your ideal customer might use to expand your list of words to target
• Competitor analysis: Reviews competitor sites to show you the keywords they’re targeting to drive traffic
• Keyword competition level: Shows how difficult keywords are to rank for, according to search volume and Domain Authority of sites already ranking for those words

Free and paid keyword research tools can help you build your ecommerce tech stack in the quest for digital shelf optimization. Free tools like WordStream have limited features, while paid tools like Semrush are more robust to start optimizing your listings.

Tools to measure and track your share-of-search and digital share-of-shelf will help you find out just how visible your brand is in SERPs.

Share-of-search is a given branded keyword’s total search volume divided by the search volumes of all brand-related industry keywords. That value is then multiplied by 100—or you can use a tool like Semrush Surround Sound (paid) or Mangools (free).

Digital share-of-shelf reveals your digital shelf space for a given category. It's the percentage of traffic that comes from a specific keyword or phrase to your brand. Your share-of-shelf measures how high up the page your products appear in a category search, or what your share of the digital shelf is.

Tools like PriceSpider can help you determine and track your share-of-search to monitor product positions, drill into ranking data by date and traffic referral source, and track your competitors’ share-of-search to optimize your listings for higher SERP rankings.

Analytics and benchmarking tools

Tools that help you track and manage digital shelf analytics are essential to optimize product listings. Learning how your products are showing up in search and keeping your finger on the pulse of reviews and ratings is key.

Sure, basic analytics tools are built into popular ecommerce platforms. But specialized tracking tools give you the data you need to bring the health of your digital shelf content into focus.

Digital shelf performance tools like EDGE by Ascential and PriceSpider have powerful analytics and benchmarking features that can be customized for your product categories. Use it to see your share of search, keyword performance across the digital shelf, and category rankings to increase sales.

Google Analytics is a reliable tool to get an overview of where your store and listing traffic comes from. Install an account tracking code and site tag to connect your stores to Google Analytics to track KPIs:

• Traffic referral sources (like organic search, PPC, or social media)
• Total ecommerce revenue and purchases
• Average purchase revenue or order value

The ability to generate custom reports further opens up the possibilities of Google Analytics when you’re optimizing your digital shelf.

Digital shelf optimization case studies and examples

We’ve talked about what the digital shelf is, key components and visibility factors, and shelf optimization tactics and tools. Let’s shift from theory to practice and look at case studies of real brands working to optimize the digital shelf.

Consumer goods company boosts time to market by 60%

One consumer goods company was spread thin between 40 countries and 500 ecommerce partners. The struggle of accurately tracking and updating product listings with multiple data systems was all too real. The inconsistency led to flawed product listings and sales forecast errors. Listing audits took up to 8 months!

It was time to optimize the digital shelf to get back on track. The company turned to PIM and Digital Asset Management (DAM) software to synchronize product information and images across the digital shelf. Product Listing Optimization (PLO) helped them harness the power of the ability to make system-wide changes that boost product visibility and discoverability.

The push toward optimization was hugely beneficial:

• Slashed listing creation time by 68%
• Sped up time to market by 60%
• Saved the company $3 million/year in operational expenses

Increasing listing speed, volume, and accuracy combined with PLO steps like dialing in target keywords and optimizing images are positioning the company to win on the shelf across all 500 ecommerce partners. Their increased productivity and sales sum it up: digital shelf optimization works.

Electronics brand improves digital shelf share by 45%

A global electronics ecommerce brand wanted to boost their digital share-of-shelf and cut time spent manually updating, auditing, and creating product listings. Analyzing their global listings data, the company learned about keyword gaps that were hurting SERP rankings and product information errors.

Productivity was down, and supervisors found themselves spending too much time on tasks like manual content validation. By tracking search metrics and keyword gaps, implementing a PIM platform and digital shelf automation tools, and focusing on PLO, the brand was able to flip the script in just 10 months.  

The data shows vast positive changes across the board:

• 45% boost in digital share-of-shelf
• 97% productivity increase with automated tasks
• Increased SERP visibility with keyword gaps closed

Upgrading their processes from manual to automated with the help of a PIM platform made a notable difference for this electronics brand. Hands-off product validation, a bigger share of the digital shelf, and a boost in visibility proved to be game-changers.

Outlook and emerging trends

Digital shelf optimization has become a cornerstone of success in ecommerce. Online retail is on track to dominate 41% of retail sales by 2027. There are more ecommerce brands than ever. Brick-and-mortar retailers are increasingly focusing on online sales.

As the space grows, everyone’s jockeying for space on the digital shelf.

The number of global ecommerce sites skyrocketed from 9.2 million in 2019 to 27.2 million in 2024. Digital shelf optimization will only become more important for brands that want to be seen in the crowded ecommerce space.

The digital shelf market was estimated at $381.1 million in 2021 and is on track to grow to $7,498.5 million by 2030.

Expect to see more digital shelf optimization software, tools, and services pop up as the space grows. Look for increases in AI-powered automation, personalization marketing, and ecommerce partner integrations on these platforms.

PIM and DAM software along with digital shelf analytics platforms will increasingly drive ecommerce efficiency and visibility.

As long as we’re all buying stuff online, ecommerce brands will be competing to win on the digital shelf. And with the growing power of AI, better customer behavior data, and widespread integrations, the digital shelf will keep sitting at the head of the ecommerce table.

Make digital shelf optimization a priority

If self care is how you prioritize your own wellbeing, shelf care (okay, digital shelf optimization) is the way to prioritize the health and wellbeing of your ecommerce brand.

Owning and optimizing your virtual space is key to reaching more customers, selling more, and fine-tuning your brand’s ability to compete in the digital space. From making changes to boost your SERP rankings to enlisting the help of powerful software and tools to manage product information, making digital shelf optimization a reality starts with making it a priority.

Drill down on those product listings and digital assets. Make sure everything’s optimized for search engines. Nab more customer reviews and shamelessly showcase them. Set competitive prices and track the data every step of the way.

As the online shopping trends prove what we’ve known all along—shopping in your pajamas is better than meandering through Walmart—you can start winning on the digital shelf with the right tactics and toolkit.