Good online merchandising strategies help store owners take control of how visitors perceive your brand and shop on your website. The more attractive your merchandising, the higher chance of driving brand engagement & awareness. Merchandising can both increase the average order value (AOV) from your customers and inspire customers to return in the future, two of the main ways businesses see growth in revenue.
From best-selling to collection-based products, homepage layout to category pages, photography to social proof, eCommerce merchandising is an indispensable part of any online store. Seemingly insignificant nuances of your online merchandising strategies can be a game-changer in the fierce eCommerce competition.
What should you take into consideration? Here is a list of 5 online merchandising strategies you can implement today.
1. A mobile-friendly layout
Mobile eCommerce purchase is expected to grow by $3.56 trillion by 2021, making up for 52% of online traffic. The shift to omnichannel urges eCommerce retailers to adapt their merchandising strategies to ensure a seamless experience for their customers across devices.
Companies with a mobile app have an absolute advantage in the omnichannel world. If you don’t have one, make sure that your website is responsive and optimized for mobile and tablets alongside desktops and laptops.
Besides pleasing your current customers, a mobile-friendly layout helps attract news customers by boosting your search ranking for portable devices.
2. Easy search and navigation
In order to make a purchase decision, customers should be able to find a product. If it takes so long for them to find the desired item, people would be worn out and turn to your competitor.
There are multiple ways to make your website more user-friendly such as:
- Place a visible search box so that visitors can look for the right product without going through every page.
- Incorporate every product with an appropriate category tag such as coats & jackets, tops, dresses, jeans, knitwear, etc.
- Bring new offers and best-selling products to the top of your product page
- Change the photos within your hero slider frequently
Photographs are a powerful tool to attract customers. Therefore, remember to take good care of your theme and visualization.
3. Personalized recommendations
Recommendation technology, grounded in data, is getting more advanced these days. Smart product recommendations are tailored to each individual in real-time. Over time, personalization has made it more perfect. Personalized online merchandising can increase AOV, accelerate upsell & cross-sell while helping customers find what they need.
Products are displayed automatically based on user activity, preferences, and current sales trends. This data can be gathered using cookies, session recording apps, and heatmap plugins as well as analytics tools like Google Analytics. You can also use targeted Google and Facebook ads to navigate customers to a specific page designed distinctively for them.
If you are on BigCommerce, don’t miss out on the Product Recommendation app. It can assist you in upselling and cross-selling with flexible rules. Discover more features here:
4. Highlight user-generated content
These days, approximately 70% of customers consider user-generated content (UGC) before making a decision. UGC can help you raise brand awareness and gain trust for free.
Don’t miss out on any chance to showcase compliments from your previous customers. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great platforms to foster user engagement. You can consider repost user-generated pictures and stories as a part of your online merchandising strategies.
You should also link your website with social media accounts and review platforms to boost SEO ranking.
5. Use merchandising automation
Software as a Service (SaaS), specifically automation platform, is extraordinarily beneficial for small and medium businesses in monitoring their store at the minimal operational cost.
You should update every product at the right time in the right place. However, keeping an eye on merchandising all the time can be tedious and fatiguing. That’s why automation software is essential for your business.
The app can help you arrange product listing dynamically (based on the number of views or purchases, ratings, comments, etc), feature promoted products, manipulate product availability (purchasable, pre-order), dynamically publish & switch banner ads, and many more.
For example, you can set up the following workflow for Christmas eve.
Condition: Having your product and design ready in the store
Trigger: At 12am Christmas day
Action: Auto-publish Christmas special offer
Delay: Then wait for 2 days until the holiday ends
Action: Auto-unpublish the offer
Then there’s no need to stay up until midnight to update the item manually anymore.
If you’re opening a store on BigCommerce, Atom8 is a great ultimate automation tool that helps your business achieve significant growth! Explore here:
Atom8 automates all your repetitive store management tasks to save hours of working.
CONCLUSION
The key to effective online merchandising is to present the product in front of your customer at the right time.
It’s not easy but you can drive sales by a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, latest technology, and up-to-date online merchandising strategies.
In the end, gift your customers with a desirable shopping experience and they’d definitely come back to you.
