A good grasp of e-commerce merchandising is essential for anyone looking to build a successful online business. But merchandising is a concept full of different avenues and it can be confusing to get the hang of.
So today we’re going to be covering everything you need to know and some different strategies that you can deploy in order to find success with your online store.
So let’s begin by discussing exactly what ecommerce merchandising even is.
What Is Ecommerce Merchandising?
In short, ecommerce merchandising refers to the entire process of online stores getting people to buy their products. Which is why there are so many things involved in it, such as branding, imagery, finding new ways to display products, and more.
Learning how to do this correctly is important because it will decide whether or not people coming to your store to look around and browse will actually end up buying anything or if they’ll abandon their cart, never to return.
Your homepage, product pages, and categories are all important elements that often get overlooked. With knowledge of the best practices of ecommerce merchandising these things can turn into stand-out parts of your website.
Now that you know a bit more about what ecommerce merchandising entails, let’s look at how you can improve your strategy for it.
Ecommerce Merchandising Tips
Tip #1 – Having An Optimized Homepage
Firstly and most importantly, you need to optimize your homepage. Your homepage is obviously responsible for the first impression visitors have of your store, and we don’t need to emphasize how important first impressions are… they make all the difference!
So you undoubtedly want your homepage to shine, and here are a few ways that you can do that…
- Make sure you’re promoting your best selling products and the ones that are the most likely to entice new customers on your homepage, as well as the products that are currently trending.
- Have your homepage be easy and convenient to navigate. This means having a top-of-the-line search bar complete with predictive searches, and a drop-down menu with well-thought-out categories.
- Go for a simple layout, and let your imagery do most of the work. Include large images that are of good quality, eye-catching graphics, and maybe even a few videos. But don’t let your homepage look too “busy”. Less is more.
- And finally, ensure that your homepage is usable whether the customer is on desktop, mobile, or anything in between. It needs to have a responsive design that includes everyone.
Tip #2 – Give Your Customer A Personalized Experience
One thing that will always make customers want to come back to your store is giving them a personalized experience the first time around. And additionally, when you do end up trying to get customers to come back, doing so in a personalized way will increase your success rate.
But how can you do this? By collecting data from your customers.
There are a few ways you can go about collecting this valuable data including using Google Analytics, getting customers to make an account with you, increasing the number of customers that sign up to your newsletter, keeping track of customers that call customer service, and paying attention to statistics about customers in your niche.
And once you have all this data, you can begin to make each customer’s experience a bit more personalized by doing things like…
- Adding a suggested items section to your website where you’ll display items and products that are similar to what the customer has purchased before on your site as well as items that they might be interested.
- Adding a section at the bottom of a product page with similar items that go well with that product and are often bought together by other customers.
- And beginning to send emails to previous customers with news about sales your running, new products, and more to entice them to shop with you again.
Tip #3 – Make Sure Your Brand Identity Shines Through
This is a short but useful tip to keep in mind as you strategize. Your brand is what sets you apart from your competition and at the end of the day is what persuades many customers to shop with you.
For this reason, it’s important that everything you include on your site from product descriptions, to imagery, even to fonts match your brand voice and cohesively work together. Always keep the big picture in mind with the small details.
Additionally, many sites choose to link their social media accounts within their homepage so that people can browse through them and get a better idea of what their brand is all about.
Conclusion
Ecommerce merchandising is a great thing to learn about since today’s shopping market is leaning more and more towards online shopping and less towards shopping in stores. Because this means that the future of online stores is looking brighter every day.
So hopefully these tips have helped educate you a bit on the matter and have increased your curiosity to find out more about online selling and strategies in general. It’s a new world we’re living in!
