Top eCommerce Merchandising Strategies

The eCommerce sector is popularly growing with an increase in online shopping customers.

Consumers are looking for more convenience while shopping online, and the best way to offer that is to present the right products in front of them.

To stay in the competition, eCommerce sites need to have a well-planned online merchandising strategy, one that ensures customers see the most relevant products when they search or browse your site.

Want to know more? Stay with us till the end, and we’ll help you optimize your e-commerce store to get more targeted customers.

Table of Contents

  1. What is eCommerce Merchandising?
  2. Why is eCommerce Merchandising Important?
  3. Difference Between Traditional and eCommerce Merchandising
    • Store Layout
    • Branding
    • Product Grouping
  4. Top eCommerce Merchandising Strategies To Boost your Sale
    • Optimize your Store for Mobile Users
    • Personal Product Recommendations
    • User-Generated Content
    • Visual Merchandising
    • Optimize your E-Commerce SEO
    • Be Unique

What is eCommerce Merchandising?

E-Commerce merchandising is the art of displaying products in your online store or website with the goal of increasing sales. It helps consumers connect with the products they’re searching for.

Compared to offline stores, the customer journey is more complex in eCommerce stores as there’s no one present to guide them. With the help of innovative online merchandising strategies, you can guide users through their customer journey and make them reach the products they want.

eCommerce merchandising ensures every customer who visits your website or store gets a similar user-friendly experience that encourages them to buy the product.

Why is eCommerce Merchandising Important?

The importance of online merchandising strategies is to make your website appealing and accessible to users. The more innovative your strategies are, the better your conversion rates will be.

A good merchandising strategy can:

  • Entice customers.
  • Allow businesses to showcase a wide range of products.
  • Helps generate organic traffic with SEO optimization.
  • Promote specific products or special offers.
  • Convert visitors into buyers.

Difference Between Traditional and E-Commerce Merchandising

You need to show the same products to everyone who visits your store physically.

On the other hand, in eCommerce stores, the merchandising strategy ensures that the relevant products are automatically shown to your customers.

There are a few other key differences between traditional vs eCommerce merchandising. Let’s discuss them now.

Store Layout

  • Traditional- Need actual presence of physical stores where customers can move, touch, and feel the product.
  • eCommerce- There’s no limit to physical buildings, and retailers have the freedom to design the site as per their preference.

Branding

  • Traditional– Traditional retailers use lighting, paint colors, and music in their physical stores to represent their brand.
  • eCommerce– For eCommerce stores, things like the brand logo and font combination play an important role in representing the brand.

Product Grouping

  • Traditional– In physical stores, you can place the items on the same shelves and verbally explain their use to the customers.
  • eCommerce– In an online store, you can use links to group the products together under a similar category.

Top eCommerce Merchandising Strategies To Boost Your Sales

1. Optimize Your Store for Mobile Users

If your online store is not well-optimized for mobile devices, you’re going to lose nearly 50-60% of your sales.

It’s essential to make your E-Commerce website mobile-friendly so that your customers can buy the products with minimal effort. It ensures you do not miss an important part of your sales.

2. Personal Product Recommendations

With the help of personalized product recommendations, your store can show relevant products to your customers such as the ones they’ve clicked recently or purchased previously.

By adding great product descriptions with clear, high-quality images and bulleted points, you can guide users to the specific products they’re looking for.

Also, adding features like measurements, colors, or materials used in the product, provide necessary information about your products.

product recommendations

Image Source: apptus.com

3. User-Generated Content

Usually, most customers do their research by gathering information about the product they want to buy.

They generally prefer reading user experiences, product reviews, and how-to guides before making a purchase.

Hence, adding such user-generated information to your eCommerce stores will surely help the customers in their buying decision and build an authoritative trust with them.

ecommerce customer ratings

Image Source: apptus.com

4. Visual Merchandising

Displaying product descriptions, features, and reviews are important for online stores. But for encouraging users to buy the product, it’s crucial to add high-quality images and videos of that item.

The best way of doing this is by adding videos, high-quality images at different angles, and one image of each product in different colors, if available.

The customers also like to zoom the product and view the close-up view before finalizing. So as an online retailer, if you can add this feature too, it will ignite your sales rapidly.

5. Optimize your eCommerce SEO

Around 44% of people begin their online shopping journey through Google search rather than directly visiting any website.

You can have high-quality, informative content and buying guides on your store to increase traffic and improve Google search ranking. Select keywords that people search for, write well-optimized content and publish it.

Such types of merchandising tips can help you get more visitors to your site and increase your sales.

ecommerce seoImage Source: apptus.com

6. Be Unique

Never try to copy others’ strategies for your business. It’s better to be unique and think outside the box.

The question arises, how does one do this?

The easiest way of thinking differently is by taking the help of the A/B testing method. This allows you to make two versions of the same site or webpage and then monitor which is performing best.

This approach is powerful as it helps determine those designs that perform better and get increased conversions.

strategies for ecommerce businessImage Source: apptus.com

Interesting read for you: Digital Merchandising: Drive More Sales to Your Business

Conclusion

eCommerce merchandising is evolving every year. But these basic online merchandising strategies are going to remain for longer periods.

It’s your job as a merchant to give your customers a reason to spend time on your site or store and ultimately buy the product.

Their journey from viewing to buying the product should be effortless, and you should ensure them that whatever they’re looking for on your site, they should find it with a maximum of 1-2 clicks.