Malvika Jaggi.
For a long time, the digital shelf was treated like a checklist. Bullets in place, A+ content uploaded, keyword fields populated, hero image cropped to spec. Brands filed quarterly compliance scorecards and counted high percentages as wins. Then the math stopped working. Spend on retail media kept rising, conversion rates kept drifting sideways, and category leaders began to notice that a perfectly compliant product detail page could still convert poorly. The discipline that emerged in response is now reshaping how consumer brands operate online and Malvika Jaggi, an eCommerce executive based in Austin, has been one of the practitioners pulling it forward.
Jaggi runs the client partnerships and platforms practice at One Tree Brands, an agency she joined after more than a decade on the brand side at Red Bull and Reckitt. At Red Bull North America, where she rose to Senior Director of eCommerce, she owned the digital P&L across more than 50 retail partners and scaled the business 4x from $90+ million to roughly $400 million. The journey, she has told audiences at events like the Digital Shelf Summit, taught her that the visible work of the digital shelf with factors such as keyword density, image hierarchy, copy quality was inseparable from the invisible work of margin, demand planning, and capital allocation. Treating them as separate disciplines was, she argues, the original sin of the channel.
The shift she describes is straightforward but often resisted inside large organizations due to legacy processes. Search visibility gets a shopper to the page; conversion elasticity decides what happens after. Product detail page optimization and search optimization, she has argued, must be run as a single workstream, not handed off between merchandising and media teams. At Red Bull she modernized the digital shelf strategy across PDP optimization, keyword work, enhanced content, and ratings and reviews management, with the explicit goal of moving incrementality, not vanity metrics. The same logic with which she built her DTC tenure at Reckitt, where she led a $35 million+ Shopify business and improved profitability by 549 basis points through operating model redesign and disciplined capital deployment.
Industry analysts who track the consumer packaged goods sector have been documenting the same pattern Jaggi describes. Digital sales now represent a meaningful share of total category, at 16.8% in 2026 Q1 up 5% versus prior year as measued in Marketpulse, volume in beverages, household essentials, baby nutrition, and personal care, and the levers that move them are structurally different from those that moved shelf placement at brick-and-mortar retailers. Algorithms reward velocity, ratings momentum, in-stock rates, content completeness, and ad efficiency, in different weightings at different retailers. The brand that wins on Amazon is not always the brand that wins on Walmart.com or Instacart. Each retailer behaves like its own marketplace, with its own incentives and its own quirks of demand.
Jaggi's framing of this challenge articulated in podcast appearances on the Always Off Brand show and in webinars run by industry platforms is that of a flywheel. Strong content lifts conversion. Better conversion lifts ad efficiency. Better ad efficiency improves organic ranking. Improved ranking compounds back into greater visibility. Each component reinforces the next. The flywheel breaks when one input is treated as fully solved. A team that ships compliant content but never tests it learns nothing about what actually moves the consumer. A team that runs media without watching contribution margin can post strong return on ad spend numbers while quietly eroding profit.
That last point has become the contrarian centerpiece of her work. Return on ad spend, she has long argued, rewards spend that would have converted regardless and hides margin erosion behind a deceptively healthy number. The replacement she has used inside her own organizations is a discipline of contribution margin tracking, true incrementality testing through holdouts and geo splits, and clean-room environments to compare ad-exposed and unexposed cohorts. At Reckitt, where she ran a $15 million-plus retail media portfolio, she improved return on ad spend by 65 percent through structured testing and used the same testing infrastructure to question whether retail media was incremental at all in some categories. The honest answer, she has noted publicly, is that many brands have never tested it.
Ratings velocity is the other lever she has worked to reframe. For years, reviews were treated as a lagging quality signal and proof that customers liked what they bought. Jaggi has pushed teams to read them as a leading demand signal. Review velocity feeds the algorithm, the algorithm feeds visibility, and visibility feeds revenue. A modest acceleration in monthly review counts can shift category ranking in ways that no amount of incremental media spend matches.
What ties these threads together is a refusal to leave digital commerce in a checklist mindset. The discipline Jaggi has been building, in her own teams and now at One Tree Brands, treats the digital shelf as an integrated profit and loss instrument. Compliance is the floor. Conversion is the work. Margin, measured honestly, is the verdict.
Author: Faizan Farooqui
