Online shoppers can’t feel the luxurious fabrics, smell freshly ground coffee or taste sumptuous food samples. If you sell online, data can help you spark love at first sight. Immediate visual impact is essential because online shopping evokes fewer senses than in-store shopping. In fact, 75% of shoppers rely on product images when making buying decisions. Visual merchandising provides compelling cues to convert online shoppers.
To know which products to put in front of shoppers’ eyes, retailers tend to look at internal sales and website activity for the answers, always in a reactive mode. Often overlooked are insights that have become a business necessity to maximize sales and profit. Global retailers and brands can improve the effectiveness of their eCommerce decisions marginally by switching to a proactive mode. But often the best of internal data teams fall short, because of the sheer amount of ambiguous data and the lack of tools to process this data fast.
“When online merchandising is done right, it improves product placement, discoverability, and enhances consumer trust. This, in turn, leads to higher conversion rates, repeat purchases, and more sales overall.”
AI-driven merchandising tools can do the hard work for you by parsing millions of product pages, identifying merchandising and product page gaps accurately. This accurate, reliable data can help merchandisers come up with smarter strategies to improve the customer experience. Automated, machine-learned “nudges” have become critical for driving and improving online merchandise decisions for retailers today.
Merchandising metrics can help you boost sales
To succeed in the fierce retail sector, companies need to know what they’re up against. Competitive insights into your rivals’ products inform your own product merchandising strategy.
Stay relevant and stand out: Online Merchandising data helps you understand what your competitors are doing, so you stay on top of key trends and know what sets you apart from rivals.
Using Intelligence Node’s merchandising tools, you can compare items that are identical and similar to your competitors. You can also see which unique products differentiate you. A successful online merchandising strategy includes monitoring the breadth and depth of competitors’ catalogs and tracking products your rivals add, remove, or have out of stock.
Compare product pricing from in-house brands and private labels to spot lucrative areas where you need to shift more resources. You can also optimally price new products, and find where to increase margins on your products, brands and categories for a powerful merchandising strategy. AI also gives recommendations on optimizing prices for products based on variables like competitors’ prices, price histories, inventory levels, and projected demand.
By utilizing these key data points, you can create a comprehensive merchandising strategy that involves the right mix of in-stock inventory, accurate categorization and product details, key product images, right product placement, competitive pricing, and smooth navigation.
Design a trendy offering that sells
Want to know if a trend has staying power or if it’s a fast fad? It’s important to know whether a trend is real (and worth investing in) or whether it’s short lived.
While manual merchandising tools or strategies can be limiting while identifying such trends, AI-driven tools can help you track trending and high-selling SKUs on your website and across your competitive landscape. At a glance, you’ll get an overview of what’s trending at a category, sub-category or product level. Visibility into this data will help you curate the most popular merchandising mix, increasing traffic and sales.
Get the right products in front of consumers
Any assortment planner worth its name can help you plan the breadth and depth of your inventory at the SKU level. However, you need to choose one that helps you monitor point-of-sale data, reduce catalog gaps in real-time, and make data-driven decisions to boost your revenues and efficiencies.
AI-powered tools help you efficiently plan your catalog and assortment so you can identify gaps and track which products your competitors launch. With the right data arsenal, you can pinpoint which products are top sellers, so you can design your e-store layout for maximum visibility.
Effective assortment planning uses data to see which items sold out fast, or at full price, and which products remained unsold. You’ll discover which colors, shapes, and fabrics are hot and which inventory is not moving at all.
Using merchandising data also helps you go deeper, revealing key growth areas by breaking your categories out into subcategories for granular insights and identifying areas of improvement that were otherwise hidden. Big data drives assortment decisions, including specific insights on which items to keep, eliminate, or add to your assortment.
Build trust with online merchandising
Nailing is online merchandising is key to ensuring that your product page offers a seamless experience to shoppers and makes it convenient for them to purchase your products. Here are a few ways to elevate your merchandising game and optimize your online inventory and product pages:
- Tell your brand story in a unique and honest manner. Focus on the customers’ needs and the unique benefits of choosing your company.
- For 87% of shoppers, product descriptions are key to making purchase decisions. Provide detailed product descriptions that allow prospective buyers to find the exact information they need to confidently click “Buy now.”
“Product photos are your number one sales tool in eCommerce.”
Ensure clear website navigation and accurate product categorization for a seamless consumer experience.
Use high-quality product photos to illustrate details, boosting consumer confidence in the online merchandise. (For over 67% of all online shoppers, the quality of product photos is highly crucial while researching any product.)
Showcase user-generated content to encourage consumer engagement and social proof that your company is worthy of supporting.
Share consumer reviews and ratings, as peer evaluations are powerful. Consumers are now more likely to trust and base their purchase decisions on fellow consumers’ feedback than on corporate content.
Conclusion – Data-Driven Merchandising for the Win
Today’s shoppers are well-informed, tech-savvy, and have high expectations from the eCommerce websites they shop at. They are unforgiving and a small bad experience can alienate them from your website, costing you sales. Hence, brands and retailers need to ensure that they bring their merchandising A-game to win shopper trust and conversions. That’s why a lot of retailers today have moved from manual merchandising tools to AI-driven, data-backed merchandising solutions. These ensure that you optimize your assortment to sell the right products to the right audience at the right time. Our retail merchandising software helps you track your competitors’ brands, recommend products your shoppers will love, design your online store and create high-impact planograms that sell. Book a demo to get a custom walk-through of our AI-driven solution and start your merchandising transformation today.
