As retail is advancing by leaps and bounds, merchandising is now more important than ever, and this is even more critical in online retail because your visitors can leave your store for another in a click. Merchandising is any practice that contributes to the sale of products to a retail consumer. It refers to the variety of products available for sale and the display of those products in such a way that it stimulates interest and entices customers to make a purchase. With the rise in online retail in the COVID-19 aftermath, the need for online retail merchandising is much greater. This is the second boom for the eCommerce landscape. This includes strategies like:
So, what are the key benefits of determining which products should be presented to which customers? Let's find out.
Think of your users as guests. When we are expecting guests at our homes, don't we decorate and tidy up to ensure our homes look good? It makes them feel welcome. Similarly, online retail merchandising attracts users and creates interest. It allows you to have control over the user experience. It also lets you customize a page according to what your customers want, maximizing the user engagement, revenue, and performance of your eCommerce store.
Retailers spend aggressively on SEM, Social Media, and other sources to increase online traffic to their store. The objective is to increase the top of the funnel, but these visitors are not necessarily engaged. Without engagement, visitors are more likely to leave in an instant, increasing your cost of customer acquisition, and reducing profitability. To get customers engaged, it all starts with allowing them to find something of interest fast and then enabling them to view the product. This is the beginning of nurturing your online visitor towards the end sale. Increasing product views is the most important goal of online merchandising and is done by placing the right products in the right positions at your site, e.g., site search&product listing pages. This improves the click-through from impressions on your page to the product views, increasing the probability of end conversions.
Now, you might have already read in several blogs about how online stores have less than 30 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. You are competing with other retailers and every other mobile app that wants the time of your consumers. Chances are, your visitors might not buy something during the first visit; hence they are unlikely to return without being engaged the first time. Fundamentally, data-driven merchandising helps increase the number of product views per visitor. Each additional product viewed by a visitor gets them more committed to your online store, increasing the probability that they will return. Let’s face it, with digital information overload, even remembering what you did 24 hours back is a challenge, hence unless you have grabbed the attention of your visitor, they are unlikely to return to their journey at your store. Online shopping is convenient, but a retailer is conveniently forgotten if you have not grabbed the mindshare of your visitors.
With online retail merchandising, you can prevent first-time users from exiting the website and visiting your competitor's website because they don't get what they are looking for. It boosts your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and increases the probability to get a higher Average Order Value (AOV).You can also boost product discoverability as people explore more, and don't "bounce-off" your website.
Online merchandising is not only done to improve visitor experience; it is performed with the end goal of increasing your sales. The effort is minimal when you use a data-driven automated solution like Tagalys as it can become inefficient & unproductive if done manually. Your online store could be an extension of your offline version.Similar to the sales folks, who showcase your products to your prospects, online merchandising could help automate the sales processes in your e-commerce store and enhance your ROI based on data. With analytics, you can instantly understand your shopper’s patterns and show them what they want. Unlike the offline world, where you have to rely on a human, if you analyze and predict consumer behavior based on your store’s data, it will improve the probability of increased store conversions.Increasing engagement at the top of the funnel, leads to a similar improvement at the bottom of the funnel, even if you have done no changes at the bottom of the funnel. And unlike improving the bottom of the funnel metrics like “abandoned cart”, which involves multiple touchpoints off-site, merchandising improves engagement on your site, when the visitor is present and when you have the best shot at making that impression. Because, at the end of the day, first impressions are the ones that last the longest!
Tagalys's intelligent solutions allow you to improve CTR by 25%. It is a great way to channelize human plus machine intelligence to improve your eCommerce store. With Tagalys you can:
Tagalys maximizes conversion rate & gives merchants visual control of products displayed in site search & category pages at their online store. To know more about our solutions and features, get in touch with us now or schedule a demo.
Similar to aisles in offline stores, merchandising is the science and art of displaying the right products at the right places in eCommerce stores to generate maximum user interest and ultimately increase sales.
Yes, with solutions like Tagalys, merchandising automation is possible and easy. It saves time, increases productivity, and eliminates human error. It is data-driven. You also don’t need to have in-depth technical knowledge to do so.
An easy example of online merchandising is sorting product listings by a T-score (Tagalys algorithm) or trending score. This displays the trending products (products that are already popular with the users) at the top of the product listing page.
Vanja S
Sheike
"Tagalys makes merchandising effortless. Their data driven sequencing and sorting drastically improves our effectiveness. Tagalys takes the guesswork out of merchandising and product recommendations."
Ryan R.
Camilla
"I love that Tagalys listens to customer needs and has an innovative + agile team around them which can support addressing those needs and adding improvements to the roadmap."
Rafaelle C.
Blue Bungalow
"Tagalys is the powerful and reliable data-driven solution that we were looking for when it came to search & merchandising for our Shopify Plus store. There is no limit as to how custom you can get with your merchandising, which is exactly what we were after!"
Tiarne Warren
Meshki
"The dedication of Tagalys team is evident from the feature developments. I appreciate their effort in understanding our business needs and feedback. We have saved numerous working hours and achieved great performances."