How vendors manage inventory and advertising spend with Pacvue

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March 07, 2022 | By Gabriella Kursman, Marketing Manager

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Geoffrey Beliard, Senior Director, Product Management at Pacvue

Pacvue is a leading enterprise service for online retail advertising, sales, and intelligence that combines unified retail analytics with the tools needed to take recommended actions. Online selling teams use Pacvue to grow their business in Amazon’s store and other retail environments.

Geoffrey Beliard, Senior Director, Product Management at Pacvue, is focused on helping brands make better use of valuable insights available from Amazon, so they can measure retail performance, uncover opportunities to increase sales, and help run more impactful marketing campaigns. We sat down with Geoffrey to discuss how Pacvue uses Amazon’s Selling Partner API to help clients manage their inventory and advertising spend.

1. Tell us about Pacvue. How was it founded, and where is the company now?

“Since the early days of Amazon Ads, Pacvue has been on a mission to build the future of online shopping solutions that help brands, sellers, vendors, and agencies achieve great outcomes. Pacvue was created by two co-founders; President Melissa Burdick brought her deep eCommerce and Amazon expertise alongside Chairman Zhaohui Tang’s extensive experience with advertising technology and machine learning. Pacvue began as a programmatic advertising platform, making it easier to run Sponsored Products campaigns inAmazon’s store at scale, but quickly expanded to cover many other advertising products available through Amazon Ads, international expansion, and other leading retailers. Pacvue has recently developed solutions for eCommerce sales and operations teams, as well as a unified analytics suite for our company. Today, global brands and emerging sellers alike use Pacvue to help optimize their total eCommerce business.”

2. In 2021, Amazon launched new API’s sharing retail, brand analytics, and catalog insights for sellers. How have these new capabilities enabled you to better serve your customers?

“The Pacvue advertising service enables our customers to manage and optimize the performance of their media investments by leveraging the retail metrics the Selling Partner API’s capabilities provide. For example, advertisers can automatically pause campaigns when inventory dips below a threshold they specify, as well as automatically resume ads when inventory is replenished.

“Metrics from the Selling Partner API also allows brands to use Pacvue to operationalize their retail execution by providing predictive and prescriptive recommendations to address critical gaps. Through our Pacvue Commerce platform, teams can prioritize their work around content updates, inventory management, and promotion strategy, and focus on the areas that will make the biggest impact for their overall business.”

3. How does your organization utilize the information and capabilities offered through the Selling Partner API to inform media planning and execution?

“The information contained in the Selling Partner API is used to create rules and alerts as part of our advertising platform, so users can manage their spend efficiently. As advertising performance is directly correlated to retail execution (e.g., content, ratings, reviews, pricing, in-stock rate), the Pacvue platform provides end-to-end media planning and execution by enabling users to have a complete picture to inform their decisions. Some examples include:

  • Any changes to an Amazon Standard Identification Number’ (ASIN) replenishment status will alert the user to which campaigns are promoting that product, with a recommended similar ASIN to promote.
  • Users can create a rule to replace unprofitable ASINs in sponsored ads campaigns.
  • Content audits allow marketers to quickly see which detail pages are following best practices and optimized for advertising campaigns, while prioritizing the pages that need the most work.

Another example is a brand in the Home category, which was introducing several new products. Their inventory was limited and some product variations were more popular than others. They created rules in Pacvue to bid based on inventory, and they also measured the impact of content changes on ad performance. They were able to increase total sales 470% quarter-over-quarter, while also increasing return on ad spend 20%.1”

4. How do you use the Selling Partner API and the Amazon Ads API together to support retail and advertising strategy?

“Pacvue enables teams to manage their total eCommerce business by creating a single information layer across retail and media, with recommended actions and automation. Marketers know instinctively to promote products with the highest conversion rates, but that’s easier said than done. Now with the Selling Partner API capabilities, every person on the eCommerce team has visibility into the state of the digital shelf: for example, all the inputs that factor into conversion rates, such as enhanced detail page content, Featured Offer win rate, in-stock rate, profitability, and the upcoming promotions calendar. Pacvue gives marketers recommendations on the best products to promote; similarly, sales and operations teams have visibility into ad-attributed sales and receive recommendations on how to improve overall sales.”

5. What are three tips you recommend to brands wanting to maximize the metrics available through the Selling Partner API to improve their brand presence in Amazon’s store?

  1. Build vs. buy: identify if your organization has the resources to support building a data warehouse to leverage the information Amazon offers to help you drive your business, or partner with a technology solution like Pacvue to operationalize both retail and media execution in one platform.
  2. One of the easiest places to start using the data is to leverage the Catalog Items API to understand the state of your product content and how to improve it; reinforcing content drives sales.
  3. Use the following report types via the Reports API to ensure you maximize the efficiency of your Amazon Ads media:
    • Sales diagnostic
    • Inventory health and planning
    • Promotions performance
    • Search terms

Learn more about how brands can benefit through the Selling Partner API.

1 Advertiser-provided data, United States, 2021.