Four Pillars of Online Sales Control

A brand’s ability to control its online sales is critical to its ability to maximize profitable eCommerce channel growth, preserve brand equity and prevent damaging channel conflict with its brick-and-mortar business. Brands of all types continue to struggle with how to best achieve the control necessary for success. Indeed, there is a great deal of confusion around what works and what doesn’t, what is lawful and what isn’t, and what metrics are indicative of success versus which are vanity metrics that are essentially meaningless from a commercial perspective. In our work with hundreds of brands across many different B2B and B2C verticals, we have determined that there are four critical pillars to a brand’s ability to appropriately control online sales and to leverage that control to drive true commercial value: channel management; stopping unauthorized sales; pricing and promotional activities; and brand protection. So many brands mistakenly focus on single point tactics or tools in an effort to control online sales, when a holistic solution-based approach leveraging each of the four pillars is what is truly needed.

In this multi-part series, we will explore each of these pillars in greater detail, the importance to brands of being able to access a broad platform of data, tools and professional services across each of these pillars to configure the solution best suited to their unique needs, the best process for configuring, implementing and enforcing your brand’s custom solution, and how best to define and track KPIs to demonstrate ROI on your eControl program.

Please reach out anytime for a complimentary discussion on the eControl program right for your brand at dsgarcia@vorys.com. You may also download our complimentary eBook on achieving brand control & stopping unauthorized sales online here.