Maintaining visibility is a daily battle in the e-commerce space. Brick and mortar stores have always managed to woo their customers with expert merchandising. Product grouping, product placement, attractive signages, mannequins, creating hierarchy in the display, and applying color theory are few of the techniques followed by offline retail stores to create the right experience for the shoppers. Similarly, online stores can also create a similar shopping experience by merchandising with the use of tools available online. E-commerce and online retailers can digitally curate their stores through online merchandising. To engage the shoppers, keep them hooked, to make the purchase, and to boost your sales, you require the right digital merchandising tool with the right features. There are dozens of techniques, tools, and approaches you can use, each one of them has its pros and cons. Below are the top online merchandising elements that you can hone to become a successful player in the e-commerce industry.
The homepage is most often the entry point to your e-commerce site. Since the first impression matters, the homepage must provide an engaging and interactive experience to minimize bounce rates and lead them to a product.
(Image Source: Target)
Be it a New Year sale or a new collection launch, a banner with call to action on the homepage can immediately grab the customer's attention as they enter the site and direct them to the product listing page as in the above example marked as 2. The search bar must be made clear and visible as seen in the above image marked as 1.Custom banners can also be shown when they land on the product listing page to notify them about the sale or let them know about a new product launch.
(Image Source: Candere)
For instance, specific promotions can be pushed to customers when they’re looking for products related to the category. This can help marketers work hand-in-hand with your merchandisers on campaigns. This enables them to create triggers (such as date and time) to launch a campaign with custom banners and imagery to match your social and email efforts. Custom Banners should be optimized for mobile UI as most people tend to shop on their mobile devices.
(Image Source: Evereve)
One of the main advantages of an online store is the facility to walk around the store and view the product in person. To give that experience to a visitor online, we need to give a good view of the product. You can also include a zoomed-in photo to see the material up close. Give your customer the feature where they can inspect out any product from each & every angle & then decide to buy. If you have ever seen any product of Amazon or Walmart, you have come across this aspect of showing the product from many angles.
The most important requirement in online merchandising is using Filters/facets to narrow down the search. Filters help in narrowing down in terms of size, color, style, occasion, or any combination of those, to create personalized product listings for clients who don’t already know the exact product that they’re looking for and convert them to buyers. Online merchandising tools help in effectively managing facets/filters to accelerate the path to purchase. Along with filters, it’s important to allow visitors to rank products by a number of sorting variables, like price, relevance, new arrivals, etc. Doing so builds engagement, while also catering to visitors that have feature requirements in mind but for whom filters are too specific.
Seasonal sale, movie based product promotions, new arrivals are one of the reasons for businesses to promote specific products. With site search, these types of promotions can be featured for targeted queries or groups of queries. Want your bestseller and new arrivals at the top? Boost products based on any parameter you wish – without ruining the automated relevancy. Product Boosting is a solution that can instantly promote or demote products across your online store based on business needs. One can also pin a product that is trending recently to the top of the listing pages. For instance, an outfit worn by a celebrity that is trending can have more number of searches online.
An online retailer will have the customer data and history of the performance of the products. Views, add to carts & buys assist in product curation. The first 100 products displayed influence the CTR ( Click Through Rate) and conversion rates. Based on the overall performance of the products the driven data can be put into use to sort the most trending products with the help of online merchandising tools.
These tools help in automatically sorting the products that are likely to be sold. The trending products will be a combination of best sellers and new arrivals. Moreover, 56 % of product discovery happens in eCommerce Product Listing pages. Considering which, sorting products on a listing page is one of the important features to increase conversion.
It is important to grab the customer’s interest within the first three page scrolls to achieve conversion. It is humanly impossible to merchandise a store that has a huge inventory and so to help enterprises with huge inventories online merchandising tools come handy. Sequencing the products based on attributes (color, style, etc) in order to make them perform is one of the effectual strategies to increase conversion rates. Online merchandising tools enable you to instantly sort products in different patterns to showcase the diversity in your product catalog.
Product recommendations in eCommerce have long been a valuable merchandising feature. You can tune your recommendations strategies using best practices for each different page on your site.
Using widgets to provide recommendations on the listing page is one potential way of increasing CTR. These recommendations can help the buyers in narrowing down the options to make that buying decision. This might help reduce the bounce rate and thus get you better positions in Google’s search results. These widgets show variability in use like for remarking the product like a best-seller or top-rated, remarking the free shipping on any product for special occasions, etc.
It’s not easy. But you can drive many more sales leveraging a deep understanding of your customers, with the leading edge online merchandising tools that have the right features, one such tool is Tagalys. The right digital merchandising features can engage your shoppers, guide them toward enticing products, and boost your sales and result in high conversion rates — basically the dream for any eCommerce business owner.
Vanja S
Sheike
"Tagalys makes merchandising effortless. Their data driven sequencing and sorting drastically improves our effectiveness. Tagalys takes the guesswork out of merchandising and product recommendations."
Ryan R.
Camilla
"I love that Tagalys listens to customer needs and has an innovative + agile team around them which can support addressing those needs and adding improvements to the roadmap."
Rafaelle C.
Blue Bungalow
"Tagalys is the powerful and reliable data-driven solution that we were looking for when it came to search & merchandising for our Shopify Plus store. There is no limit as to how custom you can get with your merchandising, which is exactly what we were after!"
Tiarne Warren
Meshki
"The dedication of Tagalys team is evident from the feature developments. I appreciate their effort in understanding our business needs and feedback. We have saved numerous working hours and achieved great performances."