As an expert in the e-commerce industry, you probably already know that ambiance is everything. Since your primary point of contact with potential clients is purely online, you need to make the online environment pleasant and conducive for sales. You can do this through online merchandising.
By coming up with an effective online merchandising strategy for your business, you’ll keep your old customers interested and entice new ones to purchase. But before you explore some tips on online merchandising, here’s a quick definition of the term.
What Is Online Merchandising?
Your sales depend on how well your website is made–factors like content, products, buying opportunities, SEO tactics, and a whole lot more. You have to make your products real before your customers ever touch them. That’s digital artistry. The way your website and its content are presented can affect your customer’s buying decisions.
Online merchandising involves organizing, structuring, and standardizing the products and offers on an online website to increase sales. This process often includes promotions, increasing search results, and mainly focusing on overall needs and customer satisfaction.
How Does Online Merchandising Help Your Business?
Buying opportunities and how your products are displayed dramatically affect sales. Making great merchandising choices, especially concerning how search results are managed, how complementary products are displayed, and how the website is designed, will help you sell more and be more profitable.
Online merchandising is primarily concerned with showcasing product or service information so that shoppers can find and buy what they need quickly. It should also introduce shoppers to complementary items. Put another way, online merchandising should entice site visitors to buy.
When online merchandising is executed well, it could lead to higher conversion rates, larger orders, and more sales. Unfortunately, a poorly merchandised site may frustrate visitors and discourage purchases. An outdated website is usually the culprit.
Here’s why you should learn how to avoid digital staleness and follow the tips listed below to maintain your site’s online merchandising strategies.
Update/Refresh Your Pages/Layouts.
Updating your website is one way to avoid digital staleness. Digital staleness refers to the status your site may experience if data remains unchanged or untouched for quite some time. Lack of movement across your website might tell Google’s algorithms that your business isn’t experiencing growth. On the other hand, it also sends your customers a message that they shouldn’t expect much from your products and services. Of course, this is what you’re trying to avoid.
You don’t want to update too frequently, but you also want to avoid appearing stale. Updating or refreshing your layout is a great way to highlight new products or promos. These changes alert your customers about what’s changed and let them know you have many other products and services they can explore.
Drawing attention to newer products through periodic updates helps your website remain active.
Implement Different Online Merchandising Capabilities
Another option to improve online merchandising is to look up other sorting capabilities for your products and services. Another advantage eCommerce merchandising has over physical stores is the additional sorting power shoppers have on the web.
Providing different sorting capabilities on the back end for easy reconfiguration of inventory based on campaigns improves customer experience. Optimize browsing by providing many categories and keeping your products searchable. Enhanced browsing allows customers to sort products by size, price, fit, and even what kind of technology a product features.
Enabling browsing enhancements such as sorting products by color or specific features allows customers to find products they may not have noticed if they could only sort for a particular item category.
In addition to sorting options, many customers begin their shopping by typing into your site’s search bar, so it’s vital to keep your product pages complete and up-to-date with relevant keywords and features.
Using merchandising data also helps you go deeper, revealing key growth areas by breaking your categories into subcategories for granular insights and improving online merchandising. Big data drives assortment decisions, including specific insights on which items to keep, eliminate or add to your assortment.
Invest in a Merchandise Management Solution
Another useful tip in keeping up to date with online merchandising strategies is to invest in a merchandise management solution. This would allow you to enjoy efficiency in merchandizing digitally and put several marketing campaigns to work by showcasing your products on your website in an ideal position.
By investing in a merchandise management solution, you don’t have to worry about conducting numerous product display trials and errors because the software can do it for you efficiently. With an online merchandise management solution like Smart Merchandiser, you don’t have to gamble on the guesswork involved in making your website more conducive to sales. This software will optimize the presentation of your products and services to highlight their features and benefits better.
What Is Smart Merchandiser?
Smart Merchandiser is an online merchandising software that overlays all your analytic, inventory, and social media data on top of thumbnail images in your catalog. With this, you can easily drag and drop the thumbnail images to reorder your catalog. The software ensures that your most popular and in-stock products are in the optimal position to boost sales.
How Can Smart Merchandiser Improve Online Merchandising?
Smart Merchandiser has a number of features that are invaluable to online merchandising. Expect features like inventory management, color management, analytics overlay, social analytics, attribute management, and cross-countries catalog. With these features, you can save time and resources while still achieving your business goals.
Gone are the hours spent clicking between numerous programs, databases, and spreadsheets to gain insight into how products perform. You can also control what, when, and where to display on the screen real estate according to seasonality, buzz meter, sentiment analytics, and inventory to provide the best customer experience.
Smart Merchandiser adds value to any organization looking to improve their merchandising operation’s efficiency with a perfect combination of man-machine interaction and automation of business rules. To learn more about this tool, click here.
From product descriptions to images, everything on your site should tell your brand’s story. When done right, it should entice your potential customers to make a purchase. It’s crucial to keep the customer experience in mind as you improve your online merchandising strategies.
