Guest post by Tagalys
It is a common sight in brick and motor stores to find some products displayed in the storefront, or occupying the prime spots in the aisles. Retailers often replace these products and their positions based on their business insights. This practice is ultimately aimed to generate more sales and is known as ‘Merchandising’.
Online Merchandising is the art of displaying products in the desired positions to increase visitor engagement in an eCommerce store. As online retail is advancing by leaps and bounds, merchandising is now more important than ever. This is because visitors will leave the current store for another if they are not engaged in seconds.
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Merchandising and its benefits
Online Merchandising impacts how you display your products to your visitors. This includes 1) discounting 2) User Interface & Experience on Listing pages & products, and 3) product positions on listing pages like Search, Collections or Categories. Tagalys helps online retailers with the 3rd point using online store data to dynamically determine product sorting in Site Search & Collection pages.
So, what are the key benefits of determining which products should be presented to customers?
Increase CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
To increase traffic to stores, retailers spend aggressively on SEM, Social Media, and other sources. But 80% of your visitors will not scroll beyond the 3rd page. They are likely to see only 60 to 100 products on your listing page. So what products do you display?
Without the right product sorting, visitors will leave in an instant as they lack engagement. This negatively affects the store’s ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), as bounce rates go up, increasing the cost of customer acquisition and reducing profitability.
Getting visitors engaged, all starts with allowing them to quickly find something of interest and view the product. This is the beginning of nurturing online visitors 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 on your site e.g., Search & Collection Pages. This improves the click-through from impressions on the page to the product view, increasing the probability of end conversions.
Increase Visitor Retention
Online stores have less than 30 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. Every other retailer wants the time of your consumers and you are competing with them. Most visitors do not buy something during the first visit, they are more likely to return and make a purchase upon their consecutive future visits. There are chances, the visitors do not return if they aren’t engaged the first time.
Data-driven merchandising helps increase the number of product views per visitor. Each additional product viewed by visitors gets them more committed to your online store increasing the probability of their return. With digital information overload, even remembering what we did 24 hours back is hard, 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 retails are conveniently forgotten if you have not grabbed the mindshare of your visitors.
Increase Store Conversions
In eCommerce, the conversion rate summarises everything at the end of the day. Online merchandising is not done to only improve visitor experience, it’s performed to increase your sales. The effort is minimal when you use a data-driven automated solution like Tagalys.
The results can become inefficient & unproductive if it is done manually. Your online store could be an extension of your offline version. Akin 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. Merchandising enhances the capacity of your store and simply turns you into a virtual salesperson. 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 using your store’s data, it will improve the probability of increasing your store conversion.
Increasing engagement of the top funnel leads to a similar improvement 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 first impressions are the best impressions.
Shopify and Tagalys
Merchandising in Shopify is a manual task since it is inefficient to drag and drop products in the collection pages. Shopify retailers usually spend hours of their productive time analyzing spreadsheets to decide on picking the products for promotions. Tagalys helps Shopify merchants to instantly merchandise their collection pages and gives them visual control of products displayed at their online store. To know more about Tagalys’s solutions and features, get in touch with them now.
