Maximising your brand’s impact on the digital shelf
Achieving the right shelf placement provides a significant opportunity for brands to connect with their shoppers. Your online search visibility works the same way a planogram works in-store, and your position online can determine how customers engage and interact with your products.
While a physical store has a fixed layout (that can stay the same for weeks), the digital shelf is “fluid,” making it incredibly difficult for brands to track their own performance in real-time.
The scale of the shift is already here
Global eCommerce now represents approximately 21 per cent of total retail sales, growing at more than double the rate of physical retail. Here in Australia, Australians spent $82.6 billion online in 2025, with online now accounting for 24 per cent of all retail spend – up 14 per cent year on year. Within grocery specifically, Woolworths eCom penetration reached 16.6 per cent of AU food sales in Q3 FY26, up from 5.5 per cent just five years ago.
The Woolworths online shopper 
The Woolworths online customer skews younger, predominantly millennials and families doing big, planned shops. Baskets are 3.8x larger online than in-store. But these shoppers visit far less often, which changes the stakes considerably. Unlike in-store, where a brand can recover ground the following week, online requires being in the basket before the shop even begins.
84 per cent of searches on the Woolworths platform are generic. Shoppers are not searching for brands. They are searching for a need. When a product appears in the top four results the ‘add-to-cart’ conversion is 11.3x higher than products sitting further down the page.
Insights from Quantium 
Through Q.Checkout and Q.Digital, Quantium works with Trade Partners to understand exactly how their products are being discovered online. Where they rank across key search terms, how content quality compares to the rest of the category, what share of impressions they are capturing, and how all of that connects through to basket and sales performance.
It is the difference between knowing your category is growing online and knowing whether you are growing with it. A major snacks supplier used this kind of visibility to turn around an underperforming online position among the top five suppliers in their subcategory, becoming the second-fastest-growing in just 18 weeks. Once the picture was clear, the actions were straightforward: content optimised, search investment activated. The shift didn’t require a major investment. It required clarity, followed by fast action.
The question worth asking now 
The brands pulling ahead online are not necessarily spending more. They are making better decisions because they can see more clearly. If you are not sure what your digital shelf actually looks like, or how your online and in-store share compare, that is a good place to start the conversation.
Want to see your own data in action?
The real value is in seeing your own category, your own products, and your own digital shelf. Reach out to the Quantium Consumer team to schedule a personalised session.
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