In continuation of the Product Collection article and Landing Page article, this article talks about how to visually merchandise the product collection. If you're a merchandiser and want your products to be curated to increase sales and merchandise complementary products and want to utilize placement strategies, strategically place products through pinning and deliver intelligent, relevant recommendations - then this feature gives you the capability to achieve the desired objectives.
About Visual Merchandising (VM)
We tend to think about visual merchandising in terms of how products are displayed in a store but with the rise of omnichannel retail, strong visual merchandising must also extend to online channels. Visual merchandising is the practice of designing and displaying the products on the eCommerce site with the goal of engaging shoppers and boosting sales. This is done by creating displays that spotlight a product’s appearance, features, benefits, and uses in a visually compelling way.
The ultimate role of the visual merchandiser, then, is to design spaces that combine the unique selling points of the individual products, and the overall brand aesthetic in a way that communicates the value of each item and the brand as a whole. It’s about orienting the customer experience across all channels in a way that conveys what you want your customers to know about your products and the brand without relying on large amounts of text.
Some of the direct key benefits of Visual Merchandising includes:
- Reflect your brand
- Engage the shoppers
- Grow sales
How to Visual Merchandising
In addition to the ability to sort your product collection by 5 different parameters, the platform provides the capability to have full control on how the products are displayed in the collection on website. You can manually drag and drop for positioning of the respective products or by simply updating the display position of the product in a simple list format.
Products with the pinned position maintain their position irrespective of any global rules defined. It gives you the ability to override the standard search and promote the products that you want. This could be done for various reasons - you want to sell out all the old stock, you want to organize the top 2 rows more aesthetically or you just want to put the low stock items at the top to finish them off.
You can pin the product position by either drag / drop or simply updating the display order in a list format as below
Business Benefits
The VM capability can be used in conjunction with strategy keys / merchandising rules to curate the product collections and promote specific content and manage the customer experience.
- Empower the business users to manage the merchandise strategies to ensure better alignment with business goals and priorities to increase average order value, improve conversion rate, improve customer engagement and loyalty.
- Reduce your dependency from developers and manage the customer experience yourself thus allowing your developers to focus on innovative features.
- React to the market / business needs faster by simply pivoting the strategies as needed.