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. Instead, 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 e-commerce 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.
“When online merchandising is done well, it may lead to higher conversion rates, larger orders, and more sales overall.”
The right AI can do the dirty work for you, so you can replace guesses with facts, and spend more time coming 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.
Using our Incompetitor’s Analyse tool, you can compare items identical to your competitors’. You can also see which unique products differentiate you. Successful merchandising strategy includes monitoring the breadth and depth of competitor’s catalogue, and tracking products your rivals add, remove or have out of stock.
Compare product pricing from in-house brands and private label 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 powerful merchandising strategy. AI also drives nudges on changing prices for products based on variables like competitors’ prices, price histories, inventory levels, and projected demand.
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.
It helps you identify what is currently selling and trending by monitoring the popularity of attributes on your e-commerce shop. In one glance, you’ll see what’s hot because give you a list ranging from the top trending to the least trending products.
Get the right products in front of consumers
Any assortment planner worth its name helps you plan the breadth and depth of your inventory at SKU level. Choose one that helps you monitor point of sales data, reduce catalogue gaps in real-time, and make better decisions to boost your revenues and efficiencies.
AI-powered tools help you efficiently plan your catalogue 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.
Using merchandising data also helps you go deeper, revealing key growth areas by breaking your categories out into subcategories for granular insights and improving online merchandising henceforth. Big data drives assortment decisions, including specific insights on which items to keep, eliminate or add to your assortment.
Build trust with online merchandising
To further fuel online sales:
- Tell your brand story in a unique and honest manner. Focus on the customers’ needs and the unique benefits of choosing your company.
- 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 e-commerce.”
- Use high quality product photos to illustrate details, boosting consumer confidence in the merchandise. (When one store added customer photos to their product pages, checkout increased by an impressive 24%.)
- Showcase user-generated content to encourage consumer engagement and social proof that your company is worthy of supporting.
- Share customer reviews, 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.
Data can improve your online merchandising by grabbing customers’ attention, and helping them feel at ease and confident about buying from you. Optimize your assortment with data 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.
