Automated home page product recommendations is key to e-commerce Merchandising
Posted on January 29, 2018 by
One of the most commonly executed tasks at any retail store (brick & mortar), is to merchandise the stock visible to consumers. The dictionary defines Merchandising as “the activity of promoting the sale of goods, especially by their presentation in retail outlets.” This is exactly why retailers do this religiously at their stores because the consumer psyche believes “what you see, is what you get”. The purpose of Merchandising is two fold
- For the window shoppers passing by the store often it creates a sign of freshness, helping them believe that there is more to see inside the store if they step in
- For retailers, this exercise also gives them a chance to promote items, collections, categories that they may want to drive sales or inventory turns, depending on their goals for the month
This task of Merchandising requires the store to understand data – what products are new, best selling, trending by category, collection etc., it is more significant than just picking pretty looking products; and involves knowing which of these products meet the data requirements for the merchandising activity in mind.
This exact same user experience is expected by visitors even in the online world, but why do most online retailers have the same homepage for weeks together? Our data suggest that most visitors who have an interest in your online store are likely to visit the store more than 3 times before they purchase. Your store is just a click away and that is exactly why everyone loves online shopping: It’s convenient! It’s another channel for your customers to reach out to your store and they expect the same experience from your online store. But, online shopping is a lot harder on retailers because walking out of your store is also a click away.
The need for the art of Merchandising is more important at your online store and should be executed with the same goals as your physical store. Keep it fresh and engaging, show something new every X days on your homepage. As a retailer, your core competency is to figure out the Merchanding plan for the week and leave it to tools like Tagalys or BlueFoot to execute this strategy in the easiest manner. You have to also understand that Merchandising tools like Tagalys and Bluefoot are geared to keeping the Merchandiser in mind. They are easy to use with visual & interactive tools that allow your online merchandising team to focus on Merchandising and the technical requirements also imposed by platforms like Magento, Shopify etc.,
At Tagalys, we help our customers with a suite of features that helps you merchandise your online storefront. Some of the most popular features used by our customers are homepage recommendations like – Personalized Recommendations, Bestsellers, New Arrivals & Trending that constantly change based on the data generated by your online store. The same strategy is used by leading online retailers like Amazon, Target, Walmart where they continuously change their home page, as first impressions are the best impressions. Our customers also use the Merchandising feature from Tagalys, to create product listing pages in less than 60 seconds, that is anchored to the home page. And with all these features, we also provide real-time analytics, so as a Merchandiser you can evaluate if the strategy is actually working.
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