Knowledgebase

Basic Merchandising:

In your brick-and-mortar retail store, merchandising is pretty simple. You put the products you want to feature in the front of the store, put everything on the shelves or in display cases for customers to see and your done. When it comes to your Ecommerce store, merchandizing can be a bit different, and more complex. We pride ourselves in guiding you along the way to make sure your site stands out from the rest.Here’s some things to keep in mind when merchandising your store.

• Know your customer base: Who are you selling to? What kind of customer do you want to attract? What do your customers want to buy? These are the basic questions you want to ask yourself when you start to merchandize your store.

• When it comes to Ecommerce, content is key. You want to appeal to your customers by providing relevant content that they can relate to and enjoy. The end goal is a purchase, but you also want to have a site that customers will come back to, one they will remember. To do so, provide lots of information to your customers, using information pages, demonstration videos, product write ups and recommendations from your store, information about your business your mantra, etc. You want the customer to relate with you and trust you and feel comfortable in your store so that they make a purchase or come back to the site.

• Go through your site as if you were a customer looking to buy a product, think of what different products you would need to buy if you were to make a particular purchase. By using Related Products you can ensure that if someone is to look at a specific product, they can also browse products related to that field, and make a purchase based off of their needs. (ex. by relating cleaning products that go with a particular item you can increase your chances of more than one sale)

• Customer Experience: Can your customers find the products they want? Are the products organized? Keep this questions in mind when merchandizing. You always want to better your customer experience.

• This can be a simple as the background of your site, studies have found that Ecommerce stores with a darker background distract the customer’s attention and have lower conversion rates than stores with light backgrounds. (Think Amazon, Cabela's, Lowe's or Walmart, they all have lighter backgrounds, there is intention behind that design choice. Here is some solid evidence of the effect of lighter backgrounds)

• Use banners to direct your customers attention towards particular products, you want to call your customers to act on a purchase, banners are one way to promote action on your site. This can be done within the banner manager but express your intent to change the banners on your site, and the design team can assist you in making these changes.

• Use Featured Products to feature certain products that you think your clientele would be coming to your site to find.

• Make sure your site is easy to navigate and clean. You don’t want to overwhelm your customer, you want them to feel welcome and comfortable.

• Reliable Search Results: Most customers, if they know what they want are going to try and search for it. According to a paper from analytics and marketing firm Omniture, about half of a site’s visitors will use search as their primary form of navigation. Make sure that they are able to find what they want!

• You can help the customer in finding a product by using Keywords Manager this feature can be a great tool in optimizing your search results as it can suggest a word that the customer might also want to search for. It’s like a google search when you make a spelling error the search will come up with “Did you mean ….” This is the same concept.

• Categorization: Use your categories to help shoppers find the products they wish to buy. Think about a category structure and hierarchy that resonates with shoppers and makes finding a product simple.

• It’s always a good idea to make a plan before jumping into endeavours. Categorization is no exception. Make a plan, list out what categories you want to sort your products into and in what order you want them listed. What categories can be combined? What subcategories can go under each category?  

• Use Front End Categories to organize your products. This ensures that distributor updates will not affect your categorization. This also makes the categorization process simple and more effective.

• Be sure to sub categorize your products, if you lump everything you have related to archery in one category, you will make it difficult for a customer to find one particular arrow that they wish to buy.

• Perfect your Product Pages: Customer’s want to truly experience a site, not just browse it. They want to clearly see your products, know exactly what it does and possibly how to use it. Improving the look and feel of your product pages can have a significant impact on your conversion rate

• Highlight product features and important specs at the beginning of your product description. Offer a detailed and summary product description, try to avoid copying over the same information from a distributor site on a product. You want to have unique content.

• Avoid hype and over-enthusiastic push on a product description.

• Use bullet points to make information easy and quick to read and understand

• Good photo quality, while it may be difficult to adjust this aspect when distributors control the photo quality. Adding product photos on your own from different angles or in use is a good rule of thumb. Customers in general are more visual, they will look for imagery rather than reading content