Digital Shelf Analytics:
From Insight to Impact
Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) offers genuine transparency, clear controllability and targeted optimisation across all digital sales channels. These include marketplaces, retailer sites and price comparison portals. At its core, DSA is about understanding how products appear online, how they perform, and how they are perceived, and translating these insights into measurable results.
The concept is to make the digital point of sale visible and controllable.
The digital shelf encompasses all the places where people come into contact with products online. XPLN automatically collects and analyses all the relevant data.
The core areas of Digital Shelf Analytics
Instantly identify out-of-stock situations and missing listings. Avoid lost sales, improve your service level, and outperform the competition.
Monitor price floors, discount campaigns and market movements in real time. Ideal for brand management, pricing strategy and buy box protection.
Identify content errors, missing assets, and deviations from brand guidelines. Achieve consistent brand management, better rankings and fewer returns.
Keep an eye on your organic and paid rankings. Spot ranking losses, pinpoint opportunities and optimise where sales really matter.
Analyse customer feedback in depth. Recognise trends, risks, and real product opportunities across all channels.
Our platform combines traditional DSA functions with AI-powered insights, intelligent automation, and autonomous optimisations. XPLN thus bridges the gap between analysis, execution and results.
Full Control Over Your Brand in Digital Commerce.
With AI-powered Digital Shelf Analytics from XPLN.
In today's world, the digital shelf determines visibility, sales and brand perception. However, the reality of what happens online remains unclear to many brands.
This is because digital commerce has become more complex. New marketplaces, new formats, new algorithms, and ever-increasing retail media investments. At the same time, costs are rising, margins are under pressure, and operational teams are working at full capacity.
Consequently, many brands feel that they are losing control over their product presentation, prices, and placements. Although data is available, there is a gap between insight and action. The transition from data analysis to effective measures is either too slow or does not happen at all.
Prices change every minute, products suddenly become unavailable, content is misrepresented, and rankings follow the platforms' rules instead of your goals.
XPLN provides clarity here. Our AI-powered Digital Shelf Analytics platform gives you complete transparency on prices, availability, content, rankings, and reviews—across all relevant retailers and marketplaces. This turns data into concrete actions. Automated, scalable, and profitable.
Digital commerce is fragmented, dynamic, and often opaque. For brands, this translates into the following issues:
- Products are displayed incorrectly, incompletely, or inconsistently
- Prices are undercut without anyone noticing
- Bestsellers are out of stock – and no one reacts in time
- Rankings and visibility depend on platform algorithms
- Teams waste time on manual monitoring and Excel reports.
Without end-to-end transparency across the digital shelf, brands gradually lose control over margins, distribution, and market share.
This is precisely why traditional monitoring is insufficient. Today, Digital Shelf Analytics must deliver more. Leading brands require a comprehensive overview of all retailers, marketplaces, and countries.
They need to be able to compare their performance at the SKU-level with that of their competitors, identify sales blockers early on, and automate processes instead of managing them manually. What matters is not just another dashboard, but a measurable business impact.
However, many organisations are still working as they did five years ago. Data is collected, reports are created, Excel spreadsheets are maintained. Decisions are made with a delay – or not at all. The gap between data analysis and concrete action is growing.
The result is constant operational stress and a simultaneous loss of control.
Today, the decisive factors are:
- Visibility & Control across the entire digital shelf
- From Data to Action instead of ineffective reporting
It is no longer a matter of checking individual content or prices. The decisive factor is whether brands can actively control their digital shelf across a few central dimensions.
Everything That Influences Your Digital Shelf – In One Platform
With XPLN's Digital Shelf Analytics solution, you can monitor and optimise:
Visibility & Availability
Are your products visible where demand arises? Are they available, deliverable and listed correctly?
Products must be present where purchasing decisions are made, and they must be deliverable. The digital share of shelf shows how strong a brand's actual market presence is and where reach is being lost.
Price & Profitability
Do market prices, buy boxes and promotions correspond to your own price and margin strategy?
Dynamic pricing, promotions and buy box mechanics determine sales and margins. The buy box share thus becomes a key control variable, as does the ability to enforce pricing strategies without sacrificing profitability.
Content & Conversation
Does the content support purchasing decisions and brand positioning – across channels and consistently?
High-quality, consistent product content is now a direct conversion driver, not just a hygiene factor. The quality of the content determines whether products are found, understood and purchased. Incorrect data, outdated images or inconsistent messaging directly impact on sales and returns.
Competitive Listing & Retailing Media
How do products compete with competitors – organically and through paid advertising?
Algorithmic marketplaces reward visibility, relevance and performance. Those investing in retail media budgets need to understand the effect of this expenditure on rankings, sales and ROAS, as well as how their position compares to that of the competition.
Reviews & Sentiment
How are products perceived by customers? What influences purchasing decisions and returns?
Ratings and reviews are key factors in conversion and ranking on the digital shelf. They provide direct insight into customer expectations, product issues and competitive advantages. Sentiment analysis can be used to identify why products succeed or fail, and where targeted measures are effective.
Gartner Recognises XPLN in 2025 Market Guide for Digital Shelf Analytics — The Sole Germany-Headquartered DSA-Native Provider
This fact demonstrates our technological depth, broad market coverage and level of innovation.
Performance and Speed at Scale
The real challenges in e-commerce go beyond a lack of transparency.
- Retail media budgets are exploding.
- Marketplaces are entirely algorithm-driven.
- Price and content changes happen daily.
- Internationalisation multiplies channels and dependencies.
- Operational work is increasingly being shifted to agencies, resulting in declining transparency.
Manual processes impose a hard limit on this. They incur high costs, delay time-to-action and prevent scaling.
Today's brands need to grow profitably with limited resources. To achieve this, they must:
- Regain control over prices, content and placements
- Accelerate decisions instead of chasing data
- Free up resources through automation
- Protect margins, even in highly competitive markets
Traditional monitoring is no longer sufficient. Automated processes that prioritise, trigger alerts and provide actionable recommendations with AI support are needed.
The risks of an inadequately managed digital shelf can be measured immediately. Sales are lost because products are either not visible or unavailable. Margins erode due to uncontrolled price promotions or buy box losses. Advertising budgets are wasted if retail media measures are not based on reliable data. Incorrect content or aggressive pricing policies damage the brand image. At the same time, dependence on platforms and external service providers increases due to a lack of control.
Digital Shelf Analytics as a E-Commerce Management System
Contrary to popular belief, modern Digital Shelf Analytics systems are not just reporting tools. They are a central management systems for e-commerce.
A powerful solution offers the following functions:
- Comprehensive data collection across all relevant channels
- AI-supported analysis and prioritisation
- Automated responses based on defined rules
- Clear connection between strategy and operational implementation
DSA is the prerequisite for scalable, autonomous e-commerce growth.
XPLN is the leading European platform for AI-supported Digital Shelf Analytics and Execution. We combine high-quality market data with intelligent analysis and automated optimisation. This is how we bridge the gap between insight and action.
You can not only see what is happening on your digital shelf, but also know how to respond immediately. Your brand, your digital shelf, completely transparent.
Bring clarity and control to your digital shelf. Experience how XPLN measurably strengthens your brand in digital commerce during a personal demo.
Book a Demo — Turn Transparency into Growth