CommerceIQ brings analytical advantage to retail with acquisition of e.fundamentals

CommerceIQ, a U.S.-based retail ecommerce management platform that helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) achieve profitability and take their share of the market, today announced it acquired U.K.-based startup e.fundamentals, which provides digital shelf analytics (DSA) for retail management support and more.

Guru Hariharan, founder and CEO at CommerceIQ, said in a press release that CommerceIQ’s clients had been asking the company to accelerate its coverage to all global retailers important to their respective businesses. He noted that CommerceIQ’s acquisition of e.fundamentals meets that demand, adding world-class digital shelf analytics and support for more than 440 retailers across 40 countries.

Since the pandemic, the enterprise has experienced several changes — from skyrocketing fuel prices to supply shortages not meeting pent-up demand — and the world is still trying to adjust to the new normal. COVID-19 may have forced the digital shift in the ecommerce industry, but the impact of the shift is likely to be permanent. To survive in the new normal — a world plagued by value chain, storage and logistics problems amidst soaring purchasing activities — companies need to think and act differently about technology investment.

The big guns in the ecommerce space are accelerating processes to keep up the pace, with Statista benchmarking the retail ecommerce sales in 2021 at approximately $4.9 trillion worldwide. This figure is estimated to grow by 50% over the next four years, reaching about $7.4 trillion by 2025. Hariharan claims CommerceIQ is now leading the charge in that space, stating that it’s the first platform to connect and intelligently automate across the shelf, sales, supply chain and advertising to help customers win big.

With this acquisition, CommerceIQ says it now has a product that combines modern workflows and deep analytics to uncover assortment gaps, retail media targeting opportunities and new recommendations that help customers focus on top-prioritized actions to manage their digital shelf presence across retailers.

CommerceIQ’s new capabilities

CommerceIQ’s retail ecommerce management tools automate and unify aspects like category analytics, retail media management, sales and operations all under one roof.

On the heels of this acquisition, CommerceIQ claims businesses can now use its platform to do the following:

● Drive profitability: Optimize trade spend and joint business planning (JBP) investments. Plus reclaim lost profit margin and revenue by automating the recovery of disputed shortages and chargebacks.

● Optimize omnichannel for profitable growth: By capturing store-level availability, distribution and pricing across retailers daily, optimize omnichannel fulfillment, manage inventory and control promotional spend and costs.

● Maximize share of voice and share of search: Empower brands or agencies of record to be consistently visible on the first page of search results through great content and sponsored ads, plus optimize advertising to drive incremental sales on highest margin items and for the most strategic share of voice gains.

● Maximize instock rate: Ensure products stay in stock by automatically shifting promotions away from items at risk of going out of stock and triggering predictive replenishment orders.

● Stop revenue leakage: Stop losing revenue to competitors and unauthorized third-party sellers by understanding buy box behavior, and automating detection, ticketing, and removal of unauthorized sellers.      

Speaking on the impact of CommerceIQ so far, Hariharan said customers love how its intelligent automation helps their teams to win on ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart, Target and Instacart. In agreement with Hariharan is John Maltman, CEO of e.fundamentals, who believes that joining forces with CommerceIQ will quickly bring new capabilities to the market.

“Becoming an integral part of the CommerceIQ retail ecommerce management platform lets e.fundamentals provide a complete solution for brands to understand shopper behavior for their categories, plan their assortment, manage their sales operations, plan inventory to meet demand and optimize media and promotional spend,” said Maltman.

The first product of this acquisition is now available on a free trial for all current customers of CommerceIQ and e.fundamentals, as well as select new prospects.

What this means for the wider enterprise

Jason Daigler, VP analyst at Gartner, told VentureBeat that while analytics tools don’t directly impact the supply chain, this acquisition will help brands optimize their listings on retailer digital commerce sites, online marketplaces and social channels. This singular move will help to mitigate supply chain disruptions as early alerts can be sent in the event of inventory shortages. 

“As brands sell in an ever-increasing set of channels, there are often too many tasks for them to complete to stay ahead of competitors and serve the right product data to the right channels.  Coupling digital shelf analytics with strong automation tools will help brands to allow their digital commerce applications to manage manual tasks while they focus on more important strategies,” he said.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz