Brand manufacturers continue to grapple with a range of digital commerce challenges that affect their abilities to grow, scale, and boost profitability, according to Digital Commerce Global (DCG), a research firm that provides digital commerce benchmarking intelligence for brands.
DCG’s 2024 benchmarking study, which included more than 3,000 consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, found that these companies face 20 core challenges, including optimizing their digital shelf performance, assessing retail media and digital advertising ROI, improving content management and syndication, and creating effective assortment and portfolio strategies.
Ironically, 17 of these 20 challenges are internal, meaning brands have the power to address them, says Gregor Murray, VP of strategy and chief “so what” officer at DCG. Murray spoke on the main stage at Salsify’s 2025 Digital Shelf Summit, leading a presentation with Andrea Steele, vice president of digital and ecommerce at Kraft Heinz.
Murray and Steele’s presentation was a “choose your own adventure” in which attendees selected three challenges to dive into. Throughout the session, the experts shared several best practices brands can implement to build their digital commerce capabilities and propel their growth.
Here’s their road map for how your brand can achieve digital shelf excellence.
Benchmarking Brand Manufacturers
DCG anchors its work around what it calls the “SEEC Framework,” which stands for strategy, enablers, execution, and culture. SEEC encompasses 40 digital commerce capabilities that DCG believes make up a world-class digital commerce organization.
“It doesn't mean … you have to have all of them within your digital commerce business,” Murray says. “We use our benchmarking to compare your capabilities for each one of these against those of your peers, those of your rivals, those of the best-in-class manufacturers, and then talk about how you can go about building those capabilities and which ones are going to add the most value.”
DCG then works with brands to create action plans and implement the selected capabilities. Murray says brands that follow this process can expect to grow 9% faster than manufacturers that don’t.
At the Digital Shelf Summit, attendees voted via a live poll to select four critical digital commerce capabilities they wanted to explore more deeply:
- Roles and responsibilities
- Processes and ways of working
- Data accuracy and utilization
- Leadership alignment and support
Roles and Responsibilities
DCG’s research indicates that 61% of manufacturers don’t clearly define the roles and responsibilities of various digital commerce functions within their organization. Those who do, however, experience 5% faster growth than their peers.
“If you don't know what it is that you're meant to be doing or how you're meant to be going about doing it, it's impossible for you to actually deliver your objective,” Murray says.
During the presentation, Murray likened digital commerce roles and responsibilities to a Formula 1 racing team. With the latter, every single task contributes to optimizing the team’s performance. Each task is so critical, in fact, that the difference between a great and a subpar Formula 1 pit stop is a mere 0.7 of a second.
“Everybody knows exactly what it is they're meant to do [in Formula 1],” Murray says.
“In digital commerce, we need to have exactly the same thing because if we don't, processes fall apart really, really quickly.”
Steele echoed this point: “I think it's also really important to wire it all the way up to your incentive structures for alignment and [make] sure you're all chasing the same incentives because, otherwise, people aren't going to be incentivized to do that work.”
Steele adds that the right structure for roles and responsibilities will vary across organizations. Within some companies, it may be a center of excellence (CoE). In others, it may entail fostering more effective collaboration between marketing and sales. Each company will need to decide on the approach that works best for them.
Murray has already seen the value of clearly defining roles and responsibilities with DCG’s clients. One brand, for example, previously had four people responsible for briefing its content agency, which caused confusion and inefficiency.
“Now, that organization has one person who is responsible for approving the content, and that means the process is faster. It's clearer,” Murray says. “The agency knows what they're doing because they also have really clearly defined roles and responsibilities.”
Processes and Ways of Working
Session attendees also wanted to explore processes and ways of working — a digital commerce capability, Murray and Steele say, is closely intertwined with roles and responsibilities.
It’s crucial to define and distinguish between everyday processes like end-to-end content creation for retail media and occasional processes like launching a new product, Murray says.
Murray drew on his own experience to offer an example of what a fine-tuned process could look like for a brand. When Murray previously worked at a brand manufacturer, his team created a process for managing the loss of product availability on Amazon.
Losing availability adversely affects a product’s search rank on the platform, so Murray’s team developed an optimal process for regaining their ranking position quickly. The process included steps for what to do from a media and search perspective, and how the team could take advantage of “every single lever that we've got available to us” to move back to the top of Amazon search results, Murray says.
Steele says every brand needs to craft its digital commerce processes from the ground up.
“You have to start with the foundations. What is the thing that everyone needs every day? Where are the places you're going to get the greatest return?” she says. “But you still have to prioritize the rest of these [processes], too. I think it goes back to, ‘How do we run today and create tomorrow? ’”
Each brand will have a different answer to this question, but the highest-performing organizations will develop an effective framework for how they work.
Data Accuracy and Utilization
Good decision-making requires good data, so it isn’t entirely surprising that attendees wanted to delve deeper into this topic.
That’s likely because data issues are an entrenched industry problem: DCG’s research found that 41% of respondents in its benchmark study aren’t confident in the accuracy of the data they receive.
“That's a big challenge, right? If you don't believe the data, you're never gonna act on it,” Murray says.
Data confidence, however, pays dividends for the business. Brand manufacturers who trust their data and use it to drive their decision-making typically grow 9.3% faster than their peers, according to DCG research.
Brands are leveling up their use of data in different ways. Murray says that one brand manufacturer has created specific use cases for the data it collects, such as supply chain forecasting and planning, media mix modeling, and commercial tracking.
After recognizing that all of its different markets, channels, and retailers had varying levels of digital commerce maturity, another brand manufacturer adopted a pyramid approach. The pyramid gives each of these segments a way to accelerate their digital commerce capabilities based on their unique starting point, whether that means starting with pricing, availability, or content at the bottom of the pyramid before moving up to share of voice at the very top, or vice versa.
This type of focus and prioritization is so important, Steele says: “My view is you need the leading and the lagging. If you don't have that top of the pyramid, it's very hard to get people mobilized around doing the bottom of the pyramid.”
Steele also offers another piece of advice for brands to deploy their data effectively.
“Think about all of your commerce data. How many different views is it sitting in today? How many different places? Do you even have the ability to do a throughline from [the] top of the pyramid to the bottom of the pyramid?” she says. “If someone's digging into what is going on at the top of the pyramid, can you get down and diagnose it, and then act within that same kind of workflow and solution on that data? These are some questions you can ask and push on.”
Leadership Alignment and Support
Many brands also still struggle to cultivate leadership alignment and support.
Sixty-one percent of respondents in DCG’s benchmarking research believe that senior leaders within their organizations don’t understand their digital commerce business or the challenges and opportunities their business faces. When leaders do get it, their organizations experience 5.7% faster year-over-year growth.
“Digital commerce is 20 years old. It's not new. It's not surprising,” Murray says. “I get that most of the senior leaders in manufacturers have never been in digital commerce throughout their career. I totally get that. But there's still a duty of care to understand what's going on, understand the challenges, and be a part of that decision-making process.”
Brands can adopt several strategies to build leadership alignment and support, Murray says. Reverse mentoring, for example, allows a digital practitioner within the organization to mentor an executive on the senior leadership team, explaining digital commerce and answering questions.
Digital shelf walkthroughs may also be beneficial. Senior leaders are given something to search for on Amazon, and another member of their team talks them through how everything works on both the search results and product detail pages (PDP). This approach allows leaders to see the shopper experience from a different vantage point and explore how certain changes or optimizations might affect that experience.
According to Murray, some companies have created “sharing groups” for senior leaders to collaborate, connect, and discuss the challenges they're facing and how they've overcome them. These groups function as a streamlined mechanism for best practice sharing and a safe space to ask questions.
Steele says all of these tactics can be effective, but senior leadership digital commerce training will be even more impactful when practitioners give senior leaders “some of those tangible examples and data points to help motivate the ‘so what’ and ‘the why should I care’ first.”
The Path to Digital Commerce Success
By prioritizing and advancing these four digital commerce capabilities, brand manufacturers can carve out their own pathways to digital shelf success.
Clearly defining roles and responsibilities, creating tailored processes for digital commerce tasks, ensuring data accuracy and accessibility, and cultivating leadership alignment — they’re all capabilities that can help digital commerce teams maximize their success within their organizations.
Tapping into all these capabilities can unlock new growth opportunities. And when that happens, there’s no limit to what any commerce organization can achieve.
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