Digital Shelf Analytics

Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA) is a data-rich application designed to help health and wellness focused CPG brands track their online product presence across e-commerce platforms. The product provides visibility into share of shelf, sales performance and customer review trends, and other key KPIs such as content quality, and issue tracking. DSA empowers brands to uncover actionable insights, identify opportunities for improvement, and drive conversion through data-informed decisions.

Platform

SPINS SaaS Applications
React

Project Goals

• Conduct user research and interviews to validate needs and pain points.
• Use research insights to inform design decisions and prioritize features.
• Design a clear, intuitive dashboard for exploring e-commerce performance data.
• Surface actionable insights to support data-driven decisions.
• Support deep dives into product and retailer performance without overwhelming users.
• Tailor the experience to meet the needs of different user roles.
• Build a scalable UI system to accommodate future metrics and features.
• Maintain visual clarity and consistency across all components.
• Deliver a polished beta experience that encourages engagement and feedback.
• Continuously refine the product based on user feedback and evolving requirements.

User Interviews & Insights

To ground the design in real user needs, I partnered with our UX research team to conduct interviews with stakeholders across several roles, including executives, brand managers, e-commerce analysts, data analysts and sales leads. These sessions gave us deep insight into how teams currently approach digital shelf analysis and where existing internal and third-party tools fall short.

We then created user personas that represent common key roles among our target audience, including a Brand Owner/Manager, Category Strategist, and Data Analyst, and analyzed key themes across their goals, needs, and pain points.

Common Pain Points Identified

1. Fragmented Data Sources
Users often pulled data from multiple portals, such as retailers, internal systems, and third-party vendors, and manually compiled it in spreadsheets. This process was time-consuming, error-prone, and didn’t provide a real-time view.

2. Overwhelming, Unactionable Dashboards
While competitor platforms offered extensive data, users said the insights were buried in dense dashboards with little context or prioritization.

3. Limited Visibility into Customer Reviews and Sentiment
Users emphasized how critical it is to track and respond to shifts in product ratings and customer feedback, but said existing tools made it difficult to analyze reviews at scale.

4. Disconnected Sales Data Across Channels
Teams struggled to view and compare sales performance across retailers. Without a unified view, they couldn’t easily identify anomalies or link sales drops to potential causes like price changes or missing content.

5. Rigid Filtering & Drilldowns
Many platforms lacked the flexibility users needed to segment by retailer, category, brand, or product code, making deep dives tedious and time-consuming.

Dashboard

The SPINS Digital Shelf Analytics dashboard transforms fragmented data and dense data into a streamlined, insight-driven experience. With user insights from user interviews and key stakeholders, user pain points were addressed by the delivery of clear prioritization, high-level insights, integrated visual alerts, and intuitive navigation.

This design improved reporting efficiency, surfaced actionable insights faster, and gave teams greater confidence in their digital shelf strategy.

Navigating a Project Roadmap Obstacle

Problem

The product team for DSA faced a major challenge: the beta release was scheduled before the full data transfer for key features would be complete. This meant that critical insights and dashboards wouldn’t be fully functional at launch, potentially impacting user experience and adoption.

Action

To address this, I collaborated with stakeholders to analyze available data and identify feasible solutions. I conducted analysis to determine which features could still provide meaningful value despite incomplete data. By optimizing dashboards and workflows, I ensured clarity, set accurate user expectations, and maintained engagement throughout the beta phase.

Result

We determined that launching the beta with a focus on sales and reviews would be the most impactful and aligned with core user needs. By prioritizing these features and designing the interface to support future data integration, we delivered a valuable and usable experience at launch. This approach allowed early adopters to gain immediate value from the platform while ensuring a seamless transition as additional data and features were integrated post-launch.

Above is a mockup of the main dashboard for ratings and reviews which provides data on all products sold by a brand or retailer.

Sales

The Sales Dashboard was designed to help teams monitor product performance across sellers and uncover growth opportunities using data-driven insights.

The dashboard enables users to track product sales across different retail partners and identify trends over time, including item Sales Trends, 3rd Party Trends, Merchant Trends, and Unit Velocity. Enhanced data science and AI uncover data-driven insights, providing in-depth growth opportunities.

Additionally, based on key user input, I designed a module that allows users to create customized benchmarks for Units Sold, Sales, and Lost Sales. This empowers teams to define their own success metrics, monitor performance against internal goals or market standards, and quickly identify underperforming products or emerging wins.

Feel free to check out the prototype yourself 🙂

Next Steps & Reflections

This foundational work established a scalable framework that can grow alongside the product. With key workflows clarified, user needs validated, and stakeholder alignment achieved, the beta release laid the groundwork for a usable, testable product focused on enhancing users digital shelf experience. The initial features prioritized stakeholder alignment and the integration of early user feedback.

Moving forward, the focus will be on scaling the product’s capabilities:

• Adding additional pages and features.
• Further enhancing interactivity by introducing drilldowns, comparisons, and advanced filtering, supporting deeper analysis.
• User testing and iterating based on Beta feedback.

This project highlighted the importance of balancing internal priorities with user needs—especially when building toward an MVP. Navigating ambiguity and shifting requirements helped sharpen the team’s ability to prioritize features that delivered real value early on, while setting up a clear path for future growth. The work completed in this phase ensures that the product can evolve in both scope and complexity, without sacrificing usability.