Digital CPG Blog

P&G went live with their e-store last week. It’s another great example of how CPG manufacturers are selling direct to the consumer online.

“Manufacturers of goods have been facing increased pressure and competition from their retailers for years,” eCommerce provider Shopatron argues.  “Any retailer worth his weight is offering store brands of their most profitable products – competing directly with their suppliers. And because they maintain the customer relationship, they have an unfair advantage.”

And so manufacturers are turning online to sell direct in order to have access to that data, diversify their revenue, optimize their digitial advertising and marketing dollars, and procure insights that help support the retail channel.

Jack Neff of AdAge reports that the CPG industry going direct-to-consumer is a major trend: “P&G’s e-store comes as other package-goods marketers are also ramping up e-commerce efforts. Alice.com is hosting e-stores on its site for about 30 marketers, most of them in package goods.”

P&G relied heavily on social media to launch the e-store, which is meant to be a ‘living learning lab’ for e-commerce in which the company will share what it learns with other retailers.

For this latest venture in e-commerce, P&G is adding social features such as “product ratings, shopper feedback forums for users to share tips and links to its Facebook brand fan pages, through which consumers can buy products directly.”