Outdated image at a retailer
The brand redesigned its packaging six months ago. An audit reveals two retailers still show the old image, which confuses the shopper at the moment of choice and cancels out the investment made in the redesign.
Does the product appear in the category? With which image? Is the description complete? Simple questions almost nobody answers regularly.
Online brand presence is how a brand shows up in the stores where it is sold on the internet: whether its references appear on category and search pages, in what position, with what image, title and description, at what price and whether they are shown as available. It is the digital equivalent of looking at a shelf and checking what is on it.
A product page at an online retailer is edited by several people, fed by automated catalogues and reordered by algorithms. An image can be replaced with an old version, a description truncated in a redesign, a reference dropped from the category while still reachable by link. None of this raises an alert: the brand only finds out when sales drop.
Does the reference appear on the category page, or is it only reachable by direct link? The difference is enormous in sales and it is the most common failure.
When searching the generic category term inside the site, where the brand appears against competitors.
It exists, it is the current packaging and it has enough quality for the site's zoom.
Correct name, right format and weight, complete and untruncated description.
Within the agreed range, and consistent with other retailers.
Shown as available. The online equivalent of out-of-stock.
Negotiated visibility in the online channel too and needs to verify compliance.
Needs to separate demand problems from execution problems on the page.
The product page is as real a consumer touchpoint as the packaging.
Brings a concrete correction list to the retailer meeting, with dates and evidence.
The brand redesigned its packaging six months ago. An audit reveals two retailers still show the old image, which confuses the shopper at the moment of choice and cancels out the investment made in the redesign.
A reference stops appearing on the category page but still exists by direct link. Sales fall with nothing having changed in demand. A weekly audit catches this in days.
The retailer redesigns its pages and text now cuts at 200 characters, leaving out allergen information. That is a compliance problem, not just a marketing one, and it is only found by looking.
| Without monitoring | With regular monitoring |
|---|---|
| You find out from the sales report | You find out at the next audit |
| No proof to take to the retailer | A record with date and evidence |
| Every check uses different criteria | The same criteria every time |
| No idea whether it improved or worsened | A comparable time series |
| Corrections requested ad hoc | A prioritised correction list |
| Criteria | Defined by the workspace checklist, the same as the physical channel |
|---|---|
| Recording | A digital visit, with the location flagged as an online store |
| Evidence | Brands and products marked, with the state of each |
| Comparison | Across retailers, across periods and across channels |
| Retailers | No limit |
| Export | PDF reports and REST API |
Weekly or fortnightly for the retailers and references that carry most weight, monthly for the rest. In a channel that changes daily, a quarterly check is for the archive rather than for acting on.
No. Price monitoring is one of the criteria, and the only one usually automated. Presence, position, image and description need judgement and are almost never tracked.
You can. The pages are public. The retailer only comes in later, when you bring them the correction list.
Category presence, by a wide margin. A product only reachable by direct link is effectively invisible to anyone browsing, and it is the most frequent and most easily fixed failure.
By retailer weight and ease of fixing. A missing image at a large retailer is solved with an email and is worth more than ten description tweaks at small ones.
For large catalogues monitored continuously, those tools make sense. For a team already visiting stores that wants to extend online with the same criteria and at no extra cost, digital-visit auditing covers most of the problem.
The brand's shop window is no longer only in the store. It is on the category page of an online supermarket, and almost nobody audits it with the same rigour.
A visit to an online store is a visit. It has a location, a date, criteria and evidence, just like an on-site one.
Knowing your brand is present in 80% of stores is useful. Knowing which brands it shares that space with is what changes the conversation.
We run a sample audit at a retailer of your choosing and show you what turns up.