Why am I telling you about Dunkin’ in this review? To illustrate the point that every business is an ecommerce business now. There’s just no way around it. Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar quick serve restaurant, you need to have an ecommerce strategy to stay competitive. It’s an incredibly daunting task, especially if all you ever wanted to do was sell donuts and coffee. The company built out two platforms, Pacvue Advertising and Pacvue Commerce. They are both focused on ecommerce businesses, but neither is an ecommerce platform. And only one of them is the focus of this review: Pacvue Commerce. Don’t let the name fool you: it’s not handling the nuts-and-bolts of showcasing your products, or taking payments for them, or managing the shipping of them. Instead, Pacvue Commerce is a way to manage the performance of all those things, and preferably improve on them, by making more data-driven decisions.
Pricing
Pacvue doesn’t publicize its pricing, but the very nature of the platform is to provide the kind of help that small and medium-sized businesses would need—and yet their client list contains huge names like Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Duracell. This suggests that pricing is based on company size and use-cases, and that the cost of running Pacvue scales in proportion to the size of the customer using it.
The Details
Upon logging in to Pacvue Commerce, the view can be a little overwhelming. There’s a lot of information here, but this isn’t a bad thing for a business intelligence platform. It just takes a little poking around to understand where everything is and what it can do for you. The dashboard is self explanatory: once you’ve set everything up and connected your commerce accounts Pacvue can start giving you some great high level information about your sales, profits, and other KPIs. This bird’s-eye dashboard view is just a taste of the data one menu level down: click your way into the sales module and you can get an impressively deep dive into your performance. The Overview shows data for the aggregate of all your sales and you can get progressively narrower in your scope: to categories, then brands, then specific products. And the data goes deep, analyzing traffic and conversion rates on the listing page, ad clicks, sales efficiency, cost of goods sold, and the list goes on. For nearly every stat available here, there’s an option to graph it out over time to get a visual representation of performance—and you can mix and match these stats to uncover any relationships between.
Likewise, Pacvue is monitoring your content—the listings themselves—and making sure you’re not running afoul of guidelines or requirements. Navigate into the Content Management module, and you’ll get an overview of all your content, and a general overall score of all your listings together. The score is expressed as a percentage, and the overview shows you quite a few different scores rating things like Title Length, Product Description, Reviews, and more. But it’s not really clear from just looking at it what, for example, “Product Description: 93.5%” means. Go deeper, though, into the Product Audit section, and it’s a lot easier to read. Color coded entries let you know what needs attention, and from there it’s not hard to take action.
