Online retailers should maintain their digital storefronts with the same care and attention that brick-and-mortar establishments lavish on their floors. After all, in the digital realm, your product page is the most important point in your sales funnel. It’s where the customer first engages with a product, and it becomes the decision point that drives conversions. So, from a customer experience standpoint, the product must be presented in the best light possible.
Of course, operating an eCommerce storefront at scale isn’t a simple task. It’s easy to overlook broken page links and out-of-stock products if you’re manually monitoring and updating your website. Unfortunately, this snag in the sales funnel can frustrate the customer–possibly to the point that they lose faith in your store entirely.
Thankfully, there’s a simple solution. Integrating visual merchandiser software can resolve these inevitable product page errors and ensure your customers experience a seamless journey.
Broken Product Page Dilemma: Identifying the Pain Points
Broken links are one of the preeminent pain points for most eCommerce retailers. Leading customers to error pages won’t just lose you one sale; it can potentially drive away entire customer bases.
You see, search engines like Google penalize websites with broken page links by ranking them lower in their results. Simply put, your website won’t appear to as many customers if it’s plagued by outdated or incorrect links.
On top of the reduction in traffic, a broken product page will also reduce the value of your brand to customers. They’ll get the impression that the entire storefront is out-of-date, unprofessionally managed, or indifferent to their customers’ experience. This sentiment will then reflect on their perception of the products for sale on your site.
The challenge here is that there are so many reasons why a link might be broken. Errors in the URL, content removal, a failure to redirect to live product pages, platform changes, coding errors, expired domains, and server issues are all at play. If any one of these factors goes wrong, the link will fail. This is why you need a visual merchandiser to manage these aspects of your storefront.
How a Visual Merchandiser Transforms Online Shopping
Visual merchandising is the process of curating your digital storefront. It’s basically how you would carefully design a brick-and-mortar retail floor. In its essence, it follows the best practices that stores have been implementing for decades. Attractive displays and intuitive product groupings are at the core of visual merchandising, yet it applies these principles to the digital space.
To this end, visual merchandising software can leverage smart algorithms to personalize the photos and products that pop up on the homepage. Similarly, the layout and navigation of your website can be personalized through features like catalog management and based on factors like an individual’s search history, persona, or in-store behavior.
Of course, there are other critical components of visual merchandising, such as the quality of the product pictures or the availability of professional videos showcasing the products. The product page should also boast an intuitive and simple-to-navigate design to further encourage engagement.
Although, in the hyper-competitive online retail space, it’s sometimes necessary to go the extra mile to attract customers. So, it may be best to look into more advanced software options for visual merchandising.
Leveraging Advanced Options for Your Product Page
Advanced tools can further elevate product page engagement rates by empowering displays' dynamic customization. Business rules, in particular, are one of the most important digital tools for eCommerce retailers. They can leverage data analytics and customer behavior in real-time to curate bespoke digital product displays.
With business rules in play, your customers will enjoy a more personalized journey on your website. In addition, you’ll potentially be able to increase your average order value (AOV) per customer by allowing your website to suggest the most enticing products available to each person.
For instance, Smart Merchandiser features make it easy to switch critical customer behavioral drivers. Namely, it allows you to switch the featured color of a product without altering the website code. With this technology, you can switch the leading color of a product listing with a single click. This ease is essential for managing campaigns, seasons, or new site palettes.
These advanced features greatly increase your ability to update and maintain your storefront visually. However, you'll need to leverage automation to optimize your storefront at scale truly.
Streamlining Product Page Merchandising Efforts Through Automation
Your digital storefront likely has an extensive number of listings, making inventory management a costly and difficult process. But now, automation tools can take care of many of the most expensive or error-prone administrative back-end processes.
In addition to automating product personalization for customers, smart tools are specifically designed to track stock levels. They can keep inventory data up-to-date and flag products that are running low for team review. This serves to prevent stockouts while also ensuring that inventory for a particular product doesn’t pile up. As a result, you’ll avoid running out of popular products and unnecessary holding costs.
Finally, automation tools can also put dynamic pricing in place to optimize margins while remaining competitive in oversaturated markets. The tools will track market trends and cross-reference them with customer behavior to come up with dynamic price tags for a product page. Plus, these tools are capable of implementing a similar dynamic approach to promotional campaigns to boost sales.
Transforming Product Pages With an Advanced Visual Merchandiser
Investing in a visual merchandiser will not only resolve broken product pages, but it will also optimize pricing, inventory management, and storefront design. All these features are essential to nail down in the hyper-competitive eCommerce marketplace.
However, not every tool is capable of managing these complicated tasks. So, you’ll need to integrate a tool like Smart Merchandiser to leverage these benefits. Our online merchandising platform can smooth the customer journey from start to finish. It boasts unparalleled features such as automated business rules, analytics management, visual catalog management, inventory management, and color management.
Contact us today to see how Smart Merchandiser can help you create more effective product pages that drive sales.Seeing is believing. Challenge us by requesting a demo.
