The emergence of retail ecommerce

Remember being a consumer in 2019?

When you were looking to purchase something your options were to:

A. Order online and wait an average of 4-7 business days for your items to arrive.

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B. Go to the retailer of your choice and cross your fingers that what you were looking for was in-stock. If yes - great. If no - better luck next time or at the next retailer.

Then the pandemic hit, and purchasing capabilities accelerated by 10 years seemingly overnight.

Shoppers started buying from retailer.com, retailers increased their technical and operational competencies with curbside pickup and click and collect options, and the emergence of retail ecommerce was underway.

Despite the impressive inception of this completely new commerce channel, the technology and tools available for CPG brands to actually execute on it were still new or unfamiliar. A successful retail ecommerce strategy required:

1. Shoppability
2. Insights

Retro retail shoppable media was primarily made up of circulars and coupons - distributed content with the goal of driving awareness and sales at a retailer. As the world moved digitally, brands upgraded to the “Ad to Nowhere,” running ads or media that directed consumers to content that was designed to inform, but lacked any way to actually make a purchase.

Static store locators followed, displaying “Where to Buy” pins-on-a-map that told customers which retailer they could purchase from, but did not provide an actual path to do so.

For brands, successfully connecting media to transactional retail shopping experiences was challenging because:

• retail distribution is fragmented and regional - brands can’t reasonably manage thousands of retailers across over 40,000 zip codes
• inventory is variable and largely unknown - it doesn’t make sense to run any marketing towards retailers where shoppers could hit an out-of-stock page

With the continued evolution of retail ecommerce capabilities, retailers began to build out APIs that brands, agencies, ad platforms, and shoppable media solutions could leverage. Still, the data was limited and difficult to access.

Once a shopper bridged over to a retailer.com, the brand lost all insight. Without knowing if an add-to-cart or purchase happened, brands didn’t know which campaigns were performing. This also meant brands couldn’t run any modern performance marketing techniques (e.g. A/B tests, retargeting, lookalikes, etc.) for future campaign optimizations.

Enter: Pear Commerce.

The Infrastructure For Retail Ecommerce Finally Exists

Pear Commerce is the retail ecommerce platform that connects CPGs to 3,000+ retailers, converting shoppable media into actionable insights that fuel performance marketing.

With Pear, brands now have access to the infrastructure that enables strategization and scale through retail ecommerce:

Pear provides automatic shoppability - Create a personalized path to purchase to nearly any retailer’s ecomm cart.

Pear connects any UPC to every available retailer automatically. With real-time inventory scanning at over 3,000 retailers, shoppers will never hit dead links or out-of-stocks. Pear’s technology only displays retailers with products in-stock and purchasable for the user based on location and inventory counts.

Brands can now leverage Pear’s shoppable landing pages, direct-to-cart links, actionable store locators, and shoppable widgets to drive retail ecommerce growth.

Pear unlocks actionable insights to fuel performance marketing - For the first time, access real-time, attributable closed-loop purchase data and insights surrounding retail ecommerce customers.

Pear ties each step of the funnel to conversion events - up to and including purchase - and integrates with any ad platform (e.g. Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Pinterest).

This gives brands the ability to retarget to every stage of the retail ecomm funnel (e.g. abandoned carts), build lookalike audiences and optimized campaigns from actual add-to-carts and purchases, and improve ROAS mid-campaign with actionable performance data (e.g. understand how Walmart performs on Meta vs TikTok, broken down by creative).

Its arrival may have been rapid, but retail ecommerce’s longevity is undeniable.

Interested in learning more about how your brand can leverage this emerging channel and experience its uncapped growth potential? Get in touch with our team →

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