Are you inspired by the tremendous growth stories of eCommerce platforms like Amazon and eBay? Curious to know the secret ingredient behind their success? Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll discuss various aspects of eCommerce merchandising that can drive your business toward the right path by making your products irresistible to customers.

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Article Roadmap

• What Is Ecommerce Merchandising?
• Importance
• Evolution
• Components
• Improvement Strategies
• Ecommerce Merchandising vs. Visual Merchandising
• Next Steps

What Is Ecommerce Merchandising?

Ecommerce Merchandising is the process of organizing and displaying products on an online store to boost sales and revenue and simplify findability. However, eCommerce merchandising isn’t only about product display; it also encompasses product image placement, website simplification, customer experience, branding and other business strategies.

The goal is to offer a better customer experience and encourage them to click on “add to cart” or make a purchase. With customer behavior monitoring and effective merchandising strategies, you can achieve a higher customer acquisition rate, enhance brand visibility and increase sales.

Despite the growing popularity of eCommerce, more than half of U.S. consumers still prefer to shop in-store. One primary reason could be their satisfaction with physically feeling, touching and interacting with the product before buying. However, by incorporating clean and detailed page design, high-quality pictures and product descriptions with interactive media experience, eCommerce can give serious competition to the physical buying experience.

Importance

Showcasing products aesthetically and providing a user-friendly website exploration process can attract customers to engage with your business. Ecommerce merchandising plays a vital role in improving the lead conversion rate by placing CTAs, periodic cart reminders and other strategies. It helps achieve:

• High-quality customer engagement to prompt customers to come back and make more purchases. This is important because 59% of U.S. customers leave after bad experiences.
• Revenue boosts with better customer acquisition and retention rate. With higher conversion rates comes higher revenue. Plus, satisfied customers are likely to recommend your brand to others, improving overall visibility and attracting new customers.

Evolution

User’s Browser Adaptation

When considering user experience for in-store buying, the key components are greeting customers, asking if they need help and providing guidance on products and services. To enhance online customer experience, businesses also needed to prioritize these elements.

Ecommerce businesses started adapting to the user’s browser specifications to provide a familiar experience. Customers use various devices such as laptops or desktops, tablets and smartphones. All these devices have different browser designs that display websites differently.
Tailoring website layouts to accommodate these specifications allowed eCommerce businesses to provide an improved user experience while reducing the bounce rate.

Inventory Management

With the rising popularity of eCommerce businesses, inventory management became one of the most crucial aspects of eCommerce merchandising that demanded closer attention. Businesses operating online and offline stores needed to streamline warehouse management processes to manage inventory efficiently.

The supply and demand process of traditional in-store retail businesses is similar to some online companies. So they could only showcase products that are available at their physical stores. This highlighted the need for an adequate product supply. Several businesses even hired professionals to track and predict trends to prioritize manufacturing high-demand products.

Ecommerce giants like Amazon follow a similar approach. They continuously collaborate with suppliers to avoid displaying “not available” on their website. However, the key distinction lies in the freedom from the constraints of a physical location that eCommerce websites enjoy. With advanced inventory management software, they could stay on top of their inventory status and constantly communicate with manufacturers and suppliers.

Personalized Experience

One of the most vital steps in the evolution of eCommerce merchandising is delivering a customized customer experience based on data. Earlier, technology limitations hindered eCommerce businesses from understanding their customers’ needs. Now you can track your customers with just a few clicks to better know your target demographic and create customizing pages and targeted advertising campaigns.

This newfound ability opened a new avenue for businesses to offer highly personalized experiences tailored to customers’ preferences. They can suggest products based on browser history and social media interactions.

Artificial Intelligence Integration

Like several other industries, AI has played a pivotal role in propelling eCommerce merchandising strategies to new heights. Businesses have gained capabilities like managing service requests, offering product recommendations and even leveraging augmented reality to enhance customer interactions with products.

These innovative features have given eCommerce businesses a competitive edge over brick-and-mortar stores. They can offer customers interactive and engaging experiences without facing any crisis due to employee shortages.

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Key Components

The primary objective of eCommerce merchandising is to capture your customers’ attention. To achieve this, you need to strategically improve these three components of your online business:

The Homepage

The homepage is the first thing potential customers see after entering your website. It serves as the initial greeting and gently persuades them to explore your product section. Personalizing the homepage based on your customers’ demographics and nationality is a great idea.

You should include your company’s most popular products and services, ongoing discounts, links to different website sections, options for sign-up/login, and CTAs to encourage lead conversion.

The Product Page

The product page specifically displays detailed information about your business’s products and services. You can also categorize them to allow users to easily find products within specific categories. You can also use product pages as landing pages.

Optimize your page’s SEO to ensure that your company’s products appear as top search results on Google when customers search for relevant keywords. You should also include a 360-degree view of products, product descriptions, specifications, videos and demos, color options, similar products, and “add to cart” CTAs to provide a comprehensive experience.

The Category Page

A category page is a group of product topic pages that helps viewers smoothly navigate your website. You can use different filters on this page to offer more customized results to viewers. These filters include price, weight, size, and latest and top-ranked products.

Category page merchandising generally includes product images, ratings, reviews, product comparisons and recommendations.

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Improvement Strategies

Competition in the eCommerce sector is rapidly increasing as many businesses have emerged in recent years. The rising popularity of online shopping has contributed to this growth within a relatively short period. You must implement effective eCommerce merchandising strategies to stand out from the rest.

Here are some of the best practices you can follow to succeed in this competitive landscape:

Streamline Search & Navigation

The first step in improving your merchandising efforts is ensuring customers can easily find the products they want on your website. Site search was considered a different module from eCommerce merchandising in the past, but modern businesses can no longer make that distinction.

Your site search and merchandising modules need to coordinate and work together to continuously monitor customer behavior and preferences and constantly improve on feedback. This helps make informed strategies for category optimization and minimizes the reliance on manual effort in search and navigation modules. Follow these steps to achieve a seamless search experience:

• Place product listings on the search bar so customers get immediate confirmation that the product they’re looking for is available on your website.
• Implement the autocomplete functionality to accurately predict what users are searching for. It helps correct spelling errors, detects synonyms to offer relevant products and supports multiple languages.
• Design personalized strategies to give users customized recommendations when they search for products.
• Organize products into ranking based on their demand automatically. Prioritize items with a higher chance of lead conversion by placing them at the top rank.
• Provide faceted search and filters to simplify the navigation process for your products. Make sure customers find the required product as quickly as possible with minimum effort.
• Display trending, discounts, past-viewed and recommended products prominently with plenty of CTAs.

Use Visuals

Aesthetically pleasing visuals of the website and products can attract customers and persuade them to make a purchase. Visuals also convey the brand identity, capturing the user’s attention quickly. This is why visual merchandising is important for every page of your website.

Increasing visibility primarily depends on your website’s SEO and ranking. Link your website with different social media websites and post relevant, engaging visual content to boost customer engagement and visibility. Here’s what you need to know to get the best results:

• Include 360-degree visuals for as many products as possible to give viewers an immersive in-store shopping experience.
• Integrate social media pages and feed on your website’s homepage.
• Provide demo videos and high-resolution images for all products.
• Limit excessive textual content to avoid monotony and fill gaps with more pictures and videos.

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Categorize Audience

To create personalized customer experiences, it’s essential to collect and analyze data based on their activities, behavior and demographics. You can manage this data through solutions like Google Analytics to gain insight into customer location, average order value, time spent on each product and other metrics.

Once you get the data, you can categorize your target customers and create personalized content, including product recommendations and adverts. You can take essential data points from:

• Demographics that help you understand your product’s demand among audiences of a certain age and gender.
• Geography indicates if your products appeal to a larger global audience or are popular in a particular location.
• History reveals whether you’re retaining your customers or all are first-time buyers from your website.
• Language preferences allow you to understand whether your content is apprehensible to your target audience.
• Transactional history provides data to refine the design of your checkout module and payment methods.

Personalize Merchandising

Categorization of customers only requires primary data, but to personalize their experience and enhance your eCommerce merchandising, you need an advanced dataset with detailed information. Here’s what you can track to offer a personalized customer experience and improve customer service:

• Track and analyze the search habits of your users and analyze them to personalize product suggestions based on specific search queries.
• Monitor global customer habits to provide relevant recommendations. For example, several users buy smartphone covers after they purchase mobiles, so you can display cover options when someone searches for smartphones on your website.
• Rank brands that customers usually buy higher so they can quickly find their favorite options.

Ecommerce Merchandising vs. Visual Merchandising

Both eCommerce and visual merchandising deal with the same thing — showcasing your products in a way that attracts the maximum number of customers and boosts your sales. However, they differ in their application, with eCommerce used in online commerce stores and visual merchandising in in-person shopping experiences.

Ecommerce merchandising primarily depends on data-based personalization and a user-friendly interface. On the other hand, visual merchandising focuses on sensory experiences like how the product feels in hand and even its scent.

Visual merchandising also uses personalization, but it relies on the expertise of store sales executives rather than customers’ past behavior or demographics. However, establishing credibility, brand awareness and good customer experience remain essential aspects of the merchandising process.

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Next Steps

Attracting more customers to your website and encouraging them to buy more products is the only recipe to make your eCommerce business successful. The best way to do that is to customize your website and display your products well through eCommerce merchandising strategies. So collect your data sets, analyze them carefully and continue implementing changes according to feedback.

If you’re just starting out, don’t forget to check out our free comparison report to analyze top eCommerce platforms. It will provide valuable insights to help you set up your dream business.

What other eCommerce merchandising strategies did we miss? Do let us know in the comments below!