Let’s split the facts first,
“The most important age group, say, they make 60% of their purchases online.”
These are recent numbers and it’s gonna rise day by day. E-commerce merchandising is an art and fun at the same time. Online shoppers have the comfort of receiving their products on the doorstep. In the ever-changing landscape of e-commerce, some businesses are skyrocketing while others are disappearing. To stay in the game, e-tailers need to be competitive regarding what they are offering and especially how they are offering it. It’s about making a choice wisely, staying competitive, or risking fading away!
People have online stores on social media the trend of thrift stores on social media is rising and after visiting your social media, users follow your e-commerce website.
If product recommendation, assortment, and visual representation are not user-friendly, it will cost you much. That’s why focusing on e-commerce merchandising is crucial for business success.
This article gonna dive into the basics of e-commerce merchandising why it’s important and why every e-commerce business should improve it.
What is e-commerce merchandising?
You must have purchased from an online store. The way these online stores sell their goods is e-commerce merchandising. It’s all about branding, product placement, attractive images, and thinking of innovative ways to place and display products. Stores that have clever e-commerce merchandising, easily persuade their customers to buy products.
The ultimate purpose of every business is to take their customers to the “shopping cart”. Customer behavior can be monitored throughout the journey from entering product keywords into the search bar to the checkout process. With the analysis of customer behavior merchandisers can make their e-commerce merchandising strong.
Let’s take a few case studies of successful e-commerce stores known for their outstanding e-commerce merchandising:
Amazon: “King of e-commerce world”, yea, we all know that! Amazon’s success lies in its vast product selection, personalized recommendations based on customer behavior, and smoothly organized product categories.-
Apple: “Did you ever visit Apple’s official website, yea it seems magical, isn’t it? but let me tell you, it’s not only about the design interface. The way Apple’s online store presents its minimalist design and effective product showcasing. It displays product features, attractive visuals, and a smooth checkout process.
Why e-commerce merchandising is important?
Thanks to people showing interest in internet search, online product search, and shopping increasing day by day, this explains how much e-commerce merchandising is important.
In this fast-evolving technology world, it is important to invest in a well-functioning E-commerce site. E-commerce businesses are getting more competitive day by day and they are struggling to provide a unique shopping experience.
“59% of shoppers who have experienced personalization believe it has a noticeable influence on purchasing. (Infosys)”
A change and effective customer experience not only increase conversion but also create a strong brand image. Customers revisit the shop if they have a good experience. E-commerce merchandising can also help businesses achieve their strategic business goals.
Customer expectation, click-through rates (CTR), and the overall shopping experience impact your conversion and ability to generate leads. With e-commerce merchandising, you can better retain customers and improve your marketing goals by keeping bounce rates low and providing a great customer experience.
To get an idea, of what customers want on your website and what they can expect next, reports and analytics explain everything and merchandizers can benefit from it.
If the optimization of e-commerce sites is strong then it will leave a positive effect and enhance customer experience.
How better e-commerce merchandising set your store apart?
To do better e-commerce merchandising, e-tailers have to focus on four basic elements, which we’ll discuss one by one:
Homepage merchandizing
First impressions matter, they say. The homepage is the first look of your e-commerce store to your customers. It like a physical store display, tends to highlight the latest promotions display and trending products with easy navigation and a prominently placed search box.
Product pages
Every product page is a staging ground that should include helpful user content such as product reviews, product descriptions, etc.
Every product page can be used as a landing page, so when users land on the website they directly see the post description, keywords, and design.
Category based merchandizing
When it comes to category-based merchandising, e-commerce merchandisers can change and align products into categories based on color, size, price, and more. It gives customers relative results and increases chances of upcross-selling.
Strategies for effective e-commerce merchandising
Personal product recommendation
To make a personal product recommendation, find out what customers are already searching for in your store. You can analyze:
- What other customers have bought?
- What items are currently in the cart?
- Which carts were previously abandoned?
E-tailers should include good product descriptions, and attributes like measurement, color, material, price, and other necessary information about the product.
Visual Merchandising
Visual merchandising specifically focuses on the presentation of products and services to better highlight their features and benefits. It covers all planning, designing, am displaying the product in the most effective way that appeals to customers. The ultimate goal of good merchandising is to attract customers and motivate them to buy something. This is like seeing a designer dress in a magazine and then searching online to buy it.
Whenever you walk into a physical store you see the top products in the showcase for attracting customers, if you ever go window shopping you know how you get to persuade to visit the store by looking at the products that are up for showcase. All the products in the showcase are not by accident, merchants have used visual merchandizing best practices to help the products to sell themselves.
Focus on data collection to your advantage
When it comes to data collection, it’s all about how you can analyze customer behavior and use it for your benefit. Many site search tools provide reports and analysis feature to analyze customer behavior what they are doing, what products they are searching and what products are more in demand
If you are ready to collect your customer’s data, then it’s how you collect it. Choosing the best products to sell online is not an easy choice. Enough information and the right information is necessary to make the right choice. And what better way to get this information than by analyzing your customer behavior?
Following are a few best ways to get the data and use it according to your advantage:
Transactional data
This data focuses on the sales point of view on your website. The system collects your customer’s personal information, purchases, returns, and ad payments. You see customer behavior and their shopping journey from entering products on the search bar to the checkout process.
Feedback forms, surveys, and interviews
Merchandizers can add a form at the end of the checkout process and let customers use this form to give a shopping experience rate from 1-10. It gives them an idea of what needs to be enhanced in your store. This digital survey lets merchants understand how happy is a customer in their store.
Basic segmentation
In basic segmentation, e-commerce merchandisers can categorize products into different segments. Segmentation is division into segments. E-commerce segmentation is the division of products on the base of customers’ preferences. The grouping will help you come up with marketing strategies and products that resonate with the customers.
This practice involves dividing a market of online shoppers into different segments based on specific characteristics, behaviors, or demographics.
The goal of segmentation is to better understand the diverse needs, preferences, and behaviors of different customer groups. This specific types of segmentation let e-commerce merchandisers tailor their marketing strategies, product offerings, and overall user experience to better meet the unique needs of each customer.
The differentiation of segmentation lets merchandisers target marketing campaigns, personalized product recommendations, and optimized user experience for each segment.
Feature products and collection-based merchandizing
The selection of items showcased prominently on an e-commerce platform, is called feature products. Strategically selected these products to catch customer attention, engage customers, and drive sales. The featured products in every e-commerce store align with current trends, promotions, or seasonal themes to attract customers.
Collection-based merchandising
Have you ever been to a commerce store where products are not just displayed randomly but thoughtfully grouped, creating a seamless and enjoyable experience? This is the magic of collection-based merchandising.
Every collection represents a theme, category, or style that is visually appealing for customers to explore related products. This merchandising strategy specifically based on collection encourages customers to discover and purchase complementary items.
Many site search tools provide Product promotion and spotlighting features that let merchandisers add feature products. Convertopia is a robust site search tool that gives its freemium plan with all these features to assist merchandiser in enhancing their e-commerce merchandising technique.
Optimization search results with Auto-complete
The world is evolving fast and everyone running out of time. Online shoppers are impatient and they want fast what they type in the search bar.
Autocomplete shortens the time needed to search. It allows users to click on suggestions and be taken directly to the search result thus decreasing the time needed for search. The quick suggestions given by autocomplete improve the overall user experience and lead users to what they want to find faster. There are a few quick benefits you can get by optimizing your search results with autocomplete. Let’s have a look at each one by one:
- It provides keyword suggestions that are known to produce relevant results so that e-commerce merchandisers can increase the chances of a successful search.
- The autocomplete features considerably expand the likelihood of a successful search.
- A properly optimized autocomplete reduces opportunities for typos or awkward phrasing that can hinder search results.
- Decrease shoppers’ frustration and smoothly connect users to what they want fast.
- Let users explore every feature and product of your site through relevant suggestions
E-commerce shoppers enjoy a smooth shopping experience when they enter their query on the search bar and get their desired results without entering the full word on the search bar.
This e-commerce merchandising strategy can be implemented by opting for a site search tool with an efficient autocomplete feature. There is no harm in trying a freemium convertopia plan with full access to the autocomplete feature to get your search results optimized.
Is your e-commerce merchandising strategy future-proof?
To wrap it up, following all the above e-commerce merchandising strategies can make your e-commerce store future-proof. Because the e-commerce world is evolving with a speed of thought the wise thing to do in this aspect, is to embrace adaptability. Ensure to use all these strategies but also don’t hesitate to change them with the evolving technology and need of time.
Is following these e-commerce merchandising strategies worth it? You can take a free experience by taking a free trial with Convertopia. Because, of course, life is all about experiences, so why not implement it in the e-commerce world? Implementing strategies, changes with time, experiencing every new strategy, and proper optimization are all you need to take your e-commerce business to new heights!