Custom Retail Media Platform: Features, Benefits, and Technical Capabilities

Advertisers poured $136 billion into retail media campaigns in 2024, and their interest will likely spiral in the next few years. For a retailer planning to stand out in the market, the value of retail media is undeniable. However, one of the challenges is determining how to allocate your resources effectively to transform a retail media platform into a growth engine.

While it is hard to imagine that all retailers are the same and have the same business situation and background, a custom retail media solution becomes the key to unlocking tangible outcomes.

By developing a custom platform, you can leverage a flexible, scalable, and secure foundation that will become an instrument for achieving short- and long-term business goals. Built-in support for introducing new and innovative features, analytics capabilities, and compliance mechanisms will also contribute to the ultimate success of your retail media project.

Where does this journey lead? You will achieve higher ROI, maintain complete control over your data, attract more advertising partners, and differentiate in a crowded marketplace.

Which benefits does a custom retail media platform bring to the table?

Core Features of a Custom Platform

Advertisers and brand marketers use a retail media platform to showcase targeted creatives to relevant audiences. Retail media campaigns also cater to different stages of the shopping journey at the appropriate time. Additionally, retail media campaigns extend to all properties owned by a retailer, including in-store displays, as well as third-party websites, apps, and platforms.

It’s no surprise that a custom solution should respond to these needs. You may also have a unique business or revenue model that extends these functionalities. Or your goals may align with changes in your operations, such as new marketing strategies, product lines, or customer segments.

Some of the core custom retail media platform features include:

• Ad inventory management involves categorizing ad spaces, defining ad placement rules, and tracking performance metrics in one centralized location. Moreover, you can add AI-powered inventory forecasting tools to identify premium ad slots. The system reserves them for advertisers ready to bid a higher rate due to perceived value.
• Ad campaign management allows you to leverage a unified control panel to set up campaign names, goals, and spending limits. It continuously refreshes the data on impressions, clicks, and conversions, letting teams adjust targeting and budgets on the fly. AI-driven algorithms can also automate these processes.
• Campaign reporting features provide access to customizable dashboards containing pre-built reporting templates. You can generate detailed data visualizations and modify the views according to your needs.
• Payment and billing provide a glance at all the information related to your bills, transactions, and invoices. You can customize every aspect of this feature to fit your specific revenue models and add credit limits, payment methods, and other attributes.
• A self-serve advertising portal is the backbone of a user-friendly and efficient advertising experience for your partners. By implementing this functionality, you can provide streamlined workflows and intuitive navigation, which are critical for brands and advertisers.

These features are core to the custom retail media platform for business. However, adding or enhancing innovative capabilities is easy if your needs exceed this list. As previously mentioned, AI can power some features, and you can request the addition of other innovative tools.

Integration Capabilities

To function effectively, retail media platforms must act as a central hub and manage the flow of information between systems. If they don’t, they will face data transfer issues caused by incompatible formats, outdated APIs, or the lack of integration pathways. Any such bottlenecks can disrupt operations, delay decisions, and erode trust with customers and brand/advertising partners.

In this regard, custom retail media platforms provide unmatched capabilities. They are specifically built to facilitate uninterrupted data exchange between your IT ecosystem’s unique mix of internal and external tools. Specialized integrations help combine external data sources, legacy software, and back-end channels into a centralized hub.

Although integration needs vary by company, the most common ones include:

• Integration with internal and external systems

A custom platform fits the current infrastructure, so you don’t have to adapt established workflows and processes. It relies on custom APIs to pull and push back relevant data from existing systems in real-time. As data exchange occurs in both directions automatically, the systems remain synchronized without manual adjustments.

API-based integration examples

• Scale integrations and adopt innovative capabilities

Custom retail media platforms can respond to your business’s evolving requirements. Changes can be made without technical limitations to improve current capabilities or add emerging tools on top of current integrations. Developers connect each tool or platform as a separate module to achieve that. Any decision to update, refine, or replace a module doesn’t affect the rest of the ecosystem.

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Scalability and Performance Optimization

Retail media platforms are multifaceted, offering a variety of capabilities to achieve success. Apart from managing inventory, serving dynamic ads on different channels, and integrating powerful functionalities from external and internal sources, they deal with persistently growing data volumes. These demands make scalability, reliability, and performance crucial for current and future success.

Custom software developers focus on designing scalable architecture for a future retail media platform. They prepare it for peak performance when the volume of transactions and data grows. Such a system is flexible by design and prevents excessive costs, technical debt, and user experience issues.

The following practices and design principles help design scalable retail media platforms:

1. Cloud-based infrastructure. Cloud resources allocate the load to virtual machines when the workload increases or traffic surges. For example, as the peak shopping season arrives, your platform can handle hundreds of campaigns without system failures or crashes.
2. Microservices. This design pattern splits the architecture into isolated services with separate functions. For instance, you may use standalone modules that are responsible for ad management, reporting, and billing. If one of them becomes a hotspot, you can allocate more resources to achieve the expected performance goals.
3. Asynchronous processing helps eliminate system slowdown by handling resource-intensive tasks behind the scenes. Say an advertiser scales an ad campaign to new audience segments. The retail media platform notifies users about the campaign launch but queues complex background jobs for distributed processing. As a result, the platform delivers a seamless UX and addresses complex tasks in parallel.

Data Management and Analytics Capabilities

Retail media platforms use data-powered insights to adjust targeting, manage campaigns, and monitor inventory. Real-time data collection and analytics help make informed decisions, optimize targeting, and deliver personalized ad experiences. So, instead of guessing how to tailor ads to specific segments, retailers gain precise answers based on changes in consumer behavior or other signals.

Custom-built platforms consider unique technical and strategic needs and track the information that matters to businesses. They can use advanced capabilities to store, process, and analyze data from multiple sources. Custom enhancements and innovative data-driven tools help accelerate performance, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

• Data management

Custom solutions are purpose-built to unify data from all relevant touchpoints. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), data lakes, or data warehouses are critical tools that enable this process, as they create a single data ecosystem. First, you can set up a data lake to aggregate raw data from retailer-specific channels:

• transactional records;
• behavioral/engagement logs;
• customer feedback;
• social media interactions, etc.

Next, a CDP activates the collected data from a single repository. A data lake extracts, transforms, and loads (ETL) raw data into the CDP to make it available for campaigns and targeting settings.

Instead of relying on generic pre-built connectors, a custom platform can leverage tailored APIs, event-driven systems, or custom ETL pipelines. These capabilities fit seamlessly into the developed solution’s integration-ready, modular, and scalable architecture (concepts we discussed in the previous sections).

• Data analytics

Custom retail media platforms can incorporate basic analytics capabilities, including monitoring metrics such as clicks, impressions, CTR, CPC, or ROAS. However, one of the advantages of your solution is that it enables a deeper analysis of performance and campaign results. You can set up reporting pipelines in any way suitable for your business. Developers can also add the following advanced features:

• Real-time analytics to respond to trends, insights, and signals 24/7;
• Predictive analytics to forecast trends and adjust strategies using historical data;
• AI-powered analytics to put large-scale analysis on autopilot.

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Personalization and Omnichannel Engagement

A key advantage of retail media is the ability to tailor ads to individual preferences. Enabled by direct access to first-party data insights, personalizing ad experiences on every channel is a must-have element of successful businesses. However, personalization is not just about knowing your customers’ preferences. It also involves having the right tools to make each interaction successful.

A custom retail media platform provides the necessary tools to craft customer-centric messages and enhance engagement rates across all channels. Development teams can implement advanced personalization workflows so you can tailor every message, recommendation, and promotion to the unique needs of individual consumers. This approach provides unmatched opportunities to gain a competitive advantage over industry peers.

A custom platform brings together all elements of successful omnichannel personalization:

• Advanced audience segmentation.

Audience segmentation helps divide a customer base into specific groups based on insights from analytics platforms. Custom platforms integrate this capability seamlessly, enabling you to create targeted promotions that reach the right audience at the right time. In addition to conventional first-party data analysis, you can employ AI-based models to discover hidden patterns, enhance real-time segments, and embrace dynamic customer profiling.

• AI-powered recommendation engines.

Custom retail media platforms can incorporate AI recommendation features without performance issues. Recommendation engines use advanced algorithms to analyze historical data to identify trends and anticipate behaviors. For example, when a customer interacts with website content, the engine updates ads and suggests products that align with individual customer preferences.

• Omnichannel engagement.

Custom solutions let you distribute unified advertising messages across interconnected channels and platforms. You can use analytics insights to determine where your top-performing audience segments spend time and target them with consistent cross-platform ads. Next, the platform’s integration-ready architecture will accommodate new channels, ensuring high performance. It also quickly blends marketing automation tools to streamline ad targeting and serving across platforms.

Security and compliance features

Retail media platforms must prioritize secure and compliant operations due to multiple factors. These solutions deal with sensitive data, including customer behavior details and transactional logs. They also manage external systems like advertising or marketing platforms, generating critical data sets. In addition to these aspects, retail media platforms are responsible for the timely detection and resolution of vulnerabilities in ad-serving processes.

Custom solutions provide advanced security features that protect your business from evolving threats. They ensure compliance with data privacy regulations, safeguard the back-end infrastructure from malicious activities, and mitigate risks of unauthorized access to confidential information.

Custom retail media platforms help you differentiate with comprehensive security and compliance features:

• Privacy and data protection. Custom platforms implement industry-leading encryption mechanisms to add advanced protection layers over confidential information. They also incorporate role-based permission frameworks and enforce authentication tools:

• • MFA (Multi-factor authentication);
  • SSO (Single sign-on);
  • OAuth and OpenID protocols for third-party authentication.
• Brand safety and fraud prevention tools will be tailored to best meet unique operational challenges. They will include comprehensive fraud detection rules and brand safety filters to ensure retail media campaigns comply with changing guidelines.
• Compliance with regulations. Despite growing pressure from regulations like GDPR and CCPA, retailers can meet their legal obligations by turning to custom platform development. This approach helps adjust compliance frameworks to your specific business model and incorporate incremental updates to loosely coupled elements of your custom retail media platform. It mitigates compliance risks and ensures continuous customer trust.

Final Word

Retail media is a competitive industry that requires you to search for unique and differentiating solutions. To stand out, you must:

• Create relevant promotions and offers to capture the attention of demanding consumers and convert them into loyal customers.
• Meet rigid performance, security, integration, and data management standards.
• Deliver quantifiable outcomes to advertising partners and remain up-to-date with the innovations driving the industry’s expansion.

A custom retail media platform drives these objectives forward. Tailored to your unique needs, it future-proofs your strategy by delivering all the essential capabilities:

• A rich set of custom features becomes the foundation for launching and scaling targeted campaigns, leading to higher revenue and customer loyalty;
• Integration-ready architecture lets all systems communicate in real-time, improving your performance and driving faster decision-making;
• Scalable infrastructure helps the platform grow alongside your business, facilitating your expansion without interruptions;
• Advanced data analytics provides valuable insights, helping you reduce ad waste and improve the results of marketing efforts;
• Omnichannel personalization delivers resonating ads across all channels, leveling up engagement and conversion rates;
• Security and compliance protect sensitive data and ensure risk-free operations to establish a strong reputation and earn consumers’ trust.

Do you want to leverage these capabilities and build a successful business on top of a custom solution? Then, engage our experienced software development company and start reaping the benefits of custom retail media platform designed, built, and maintained by our dedicated professionals. Maintain complete control over your retail media strategy while we take care of the technical aspects behind the implementation.