The 3-Step E-Commerce Growth Playbook for Brands

The commerce space is vast and rapidly evolving. Digital intelligence holds the keys to the kingdom. Brands must evaluate and then re-evaluate how they optimize the value of their digital inventory, strategies, and tactics. Mia Rodriguez (SVP, Head of E-commerce, Kinesso Commerce) shares a three-step plan for navigating the e-commerce modes.

The entire commerce ecosystem is vast—so many routes to market, so many channels to engage customers, so many levers to drive performance and brand equity. And when it comes to developing a digital offering, every brand is in a different place, with different operational dynamics.

But navigating this space successfully is as important as it is complex. In the U.S. alone, e-commerce sales are expected to surpass $1.7 trillion and reach 81% of the population by 2028. At Kinesso Commerce, we spend a lot of time helping brands develop effective strategies to optimize their offerings. We often adopt a three-step development program to structure brands’ progression toward digital maturity, based on the premise that before you can run, you have to learn to crawl and then walk.

Let’s take a closer look at some general steps you can take at each stage.

1. Crawl

The idea is to get the basics down and start looking at performance. It starts with developing a positive online experience, through accurate, engaging product description pages (PDPs), relevant supporting content, and a seamless path to purchase.

If your brand is in the early stages of development, start analyzing your data so you can:

• Create engaging content with detailed information about PDP.
• Check your order fulfillment rates and shipping statistics – they are a reliable indicator of your business performance and ability to meet customer demand.
• Determine how your brand is being discovered and where referral traffic is coming from so you can adjust or update any promotional efforts.
• Start looking at your product assortments across different retail stores to get a clear picture of what’s popular and catching on with each audience.

These are basic but crucial actions that provide a solid foundation for the next phase.

2. Walk

At this stage, brands are looking to drive traffic to their commerce sites. They’ve done the basics, are in pretty good organic shape, and are starting to leverage demand-side platforms (DSPs) for paid media, as well as new merchandising efforts.

But this is often where we see brands start to plateau. They need to look under the hood of their commerce operations and identify what’s causing them to stall. Again, data is your best friend. Re-audit your website pages, PDPs, brand stores, and content. Are there any clues about products or pages that are converting with customers?

Learn to love product reviews. Look through one- and two-star reviews for common underlying themes of customer dissatisfaction. It quickly becomes clear what needs to change. Use this knowledge to create new content, new graphics, new titles—anything to address negative engagement.

Another often-overlooked opportunity is monitoring competitor reviews. By reading reviews left for competing products—especially those with naturally high rankings—you can get a sense of what they do differently.

Interrogating the data can also reveal opportunities to more effectively match products. Research products that are regularly purchased together or that work well together, and consider bundles (physical or virtual) for those items.

The final pieces of the puzzle in this phase of trade development are the types of media and campaigns. You can:

• Evaluate your keyword performance and optimize your budget allocation accordingly.
• Enter dayparts to ensure your ads appear at ideal times and deliver the best results within your budget constraints.
• Evaluate your search performance, both paid and organic.

In short, gather data on how your campaigns are performing across channels, products, and audience segments, then use that data to shape and transform your engagement efforts.

3. Run

The focus now is on expanding reach. It’s about improving the impact on returning customers and attracting new ones. The first step for brands in this phase is to reinvent the “brilliant basics”:

• Locate underperforming pages or products and evolve the user experience on the page – including new video or lifestyle elements and brand-exclusive images. You can even introduce AI to create a more intuitive path to purchase.
• Browse brand stores and reimagine how you present your products. Make it exciting – give customers a reason to come back.
• Increase basket value with smarter product selection. Not every item needs to be on every retailer’s site. Selectivity pays off and makes logistical sense (even from a core supply chain execution perspective). Focus on core “hero” items, with a careful mix of mid- and high-end items to achieve optimal assortment.

Retail Operations

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to take a closer look at the retail business, starting with the economics at the item level.

Analyze profitability down to the SKU level. Hero SKUs often receive significant media investment, but when you tag them with retail fees and other costs, they can become unprofitable. Evaluate their organic performance and consider redirecting media spend to mid-tier products that lack organic visibility.

Maintaining a Featured Offer

Maintaining your place in Amazon’s featured offering is key. You need to have a competitive offering to maintain your position as the primary offering for your products. Ways to stay in the featured offering, or “buy box,” include maintaining market pricing momentum, maintaining stable costs and prices in the marketplace, and finally, pulsating promotions and offering discounts to “subscribers and savers” consumers.

Waterproof filling

Customers are not forgiving of brands that promote products when they don’t have them in stock. They quickly move on to other brands, and often it’s not just a lost sale, but a lost customer. Again, search your reviews and ratings for any signs that supply chain glitches are affecting the customer experience.

Withdraw from the promotion

Frequent discounts teach customers to wait for sales, which usually hurts the bottom line. If you’re cutting promotions, be bold and eliminate them altogether. Short-term pain leads to long-term gain. Alternatively, consider pulsing targeted promotions during key periods or on specific SKUs.

Buyer activation

Connection and consistency are key to successful omnichannel activation. It’s especially important to ensure that in-store activations and cross-channel media campaigns are aligned. Many digital media actually drive in-store performance, so it’s important that activation efforts are aligned.

Complete Funnel Media Upgrade

Maximizing customer journey value means maximizing every media opportunity. The growth of retail media networks (RMNs) offers brands rich audience data. Combining RMN reach and insights with national media channels enables consistent omnichannel engagement, allowing brands to continually increase their audience impact.

Analyze historical SKU performance to optimize campaign organization. Use top SKUs for keyword and programmatic campaigns while promoting mid-tier SKUs through Sponsored Branding. This approach increases awareness and sales of ancillary products when customers search for your brand.

Budget liquidity

This approach may require a change in mindset. Instead of one-time promotional strategies that are set in stone, be flexible in how you allocate your budget. Analyze campaign results as they happen and reallocate budget to whatever tactics, frequencies, retailers, or channels are working. Be flexible. If you see products with low inventory, reduce that budget and put it behind other SKUs. As part of a more fluid budget, you should also set aside some of your allocated investment for testing and learning. This expense shouldn’t be limited to the same KPIs as the rest of your budget, but instead take a more flexible approach to supporting successes that can become real breakthroughs.

Be restless, be ruthless

Of course, this is just a quick overview of the major milestones on the road to e-commerce maturity. There are so many variables and brands have so many individual dynamics that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

But be restless and ruthless in your approach. Question everything and never get comfortable. Keep digging into your data, reviewing your reviews, testing your channel performance and content performance. And when you’re convinced you’ve got it, that’s the point where you start over. Review, revisit, and revive.

I’ll say it again and you can take it to the bank: don’t get too comfortable. When you’re comfortable, you don’t grow.