Ecommerce merchandising: 5 killer strategies

As new e-commerce brands enter the digital landscape, businesses need solid strategies and tools to gain a competitive edge.

Ecommerce brands often leverage cutting-edge tools such as CRMs and analytics software to attract and retain customers and improve process efficiency.

Even with these tools in place, you still need help reaching your conversion and sales goals. That’s when e-commerce merchandising comes in handy. An effective merchandising strategy will help your customers find the products they are looking for.

We share five strategies that ecommerce brands can follow to attract and retain customers’ attention.

But first, let’s understand the concept of e-commerce merchandising. This includes product placement on category and product pages, and related recommendations to encourage cross-selling and up-selling. The aim is to create an engaging shopping experience based on what customers search for.

Create a responsive website

A responsive website makes it easy for your customers to access and use your website on any device, including smartphones and tablets. This makes it easier to view and navigate your ecommerce store, increasing your chances of conversion.

By 2023, smartphones will dominate e-commerce.

• According to a recent survey, mobile devices account for 60.66% of all website visits.
• Over the past six months, at least 79% of smartphone owners have used their mobile devices to shop online.

Prioritizing a responsive website for your ecommerce store can lead to creating mobile-friendly landing pages that drive conversions.

First, use a responsive web design testing tool to determine if your online store website is optimized.

Build an attractive homepage

A successful ecommerce merchandising strategy starts with an attractive homepage that reflects your brand, showcases your best products, and makes browsing easy.

Here are two ways to create an attractive homepage.

Product personalization

Use personalization to showcase products based on your customers’ previous purchases or recently reviewed products.

Amazon is good at persuading visitors to spend more money by recommending things that users have seen (or forgotten) before.

Create compelling storytelling

Adopting the basics of storytelling, start by structuring the content of the site that displays the story. Start by highlighting the most compelling details, both in words and in pictures.

Use this to establish your brand identity, communicate the nature of your product, and gradually narrow it down to more specialized categories, deals, or product-specific discounts.

Organize related products

Group all related products by various criteria and sell them together. This merchandising technique, called product bundling, helps drive sales.

Some important techniques:

Bundle related products: Here, a package contains multiple related or complementary products by creating a bundle of products of the same brand or category.

Give your customers money-saving options by buying multiple products at once and associating a sense of value with their purchases.

Cross-selling: Cross-selling strategies help introduce customers to additional products that they may be interested in.

For example, for customers buying laptops, offer accessories such as laptop cases and extra memory cards.

Upselling: Upselling provides an upgraded version of a product that a customer is already considering purchasing.

For example, if a customer is considering an entry-level product, suggest (through comparison or recommendation) a more expensive model with more features and benefits.

Add visually appealing elements

Visual media is key to e-commerce success as it captures user attention, ensures engagement and keeps more users engaged.

Consider the following points to increase visual appeal:

Adding dynamic images: Dynamic images are those that move, like a carousel of products, or images that expand the product. This draws the customer’s eye to the item they’re looking for and makes the browsing experience more intuitive.

High quality images: Invest in high-quality, engaging visual elements such as product shots. This gives customers a clear idea of ​​what product they are looking at.

Try video: 73% of customers indicate they are more likely to purchase a video after watching it. Leverage how-to videos, such as customer product reviews and tutorials on using specific products.

Provide personalized recommendations

Personalized product recommendations involve collecting customer data and using predictive analytics to help target customers.

You can adopt the following methods:

Collaborative filtering: This works to provide customers with recommended items based on the preferences of other customers with similar interests.

Content-based filtering: A filtering method that provides recommendations to customers based on what is in their profile. This is done by analyzing user data such as gender, location, etc. to identify user interests, likes and dislikes.

Hybrid filtering: This method of e-commerce personalization turns customers into recommended items based on a combination of collaboration and content-based filtering to create a more personalized experience.

Recommendations based on evaluation: Customers talk about their positive or negative experiences with your product, which can have a big impact on prospective customers’ decisions. Word of mouth is therefore a powerful marketing tool that helps you acquire new customers by demonstrating the credibility of your business and the quality of your products.

summary

These e-commerce merchandising strategies are essential in driving sales. Employ product selection, pricing, promotions and customer engagement to create a balanced strategy. This will improve your conversion rate and increase your overall profitability.

Hazel Raoult is a marketing manager with PR mentions.