What’s eMerchandising ?
How to use it ?
As an e-merchant, a good digital marketing strategy is essential. Optimizing the quality of a user’s browsing experience on your online store is one of the key elements that should not be overlooked. E-merchandising brings together all of these techniques. In this article, you will find out what it is, what are its challenges and how to use it.
What is online merchandising?
Before you understand what it is, the first thing you need to know is what traditional merchandising is. It is a method of increasing sales, which combines different techniques to optimize the way in which the products offered by a merchant are presented. When we talk about e-merchandising, it is therefore a question of techniques for enhancing the products sold on e-commerce sites.
It is used with the aim of improving the sales of an online business, seeking to meet the expectations of visitors, to give them a pleasant browsing experience. However, online merchandising can also be used to increase the average viewing of editorial content on a website.
To showcase products on the shelves, Charles Kepner’s 5B method is very popular. It consists of presenting :
- the right product ;
- at the right price ;
- with a good store ;
- at the right time ;
- at the right place.
E-merchandising is also inspired by this rule, with one small difference … Indeed, tracking tools make it possible to obtain data to which physical stores do not have access. Online merchandising adds another B to the 5Bs: presenting a product to the right person.
Knowing the profile and the purchasing path of customers leaves the possibility for website owners to optimize many performance indicators, by improving the different stages of the sales process: access, research, presentation, etc. .
E-merchandising is therefore not simply a use of merchandising techniques for Internet commerce: it has unique issues and problems.
What are the goals of e-merchandising?
Like all sales methods, the ultimate goal of e-merchandising is to increase the turnover of a given company. To do this, he focuses on increasing the transformation rate.
To achieve this, it relies on many elements. Here are a few :
- improving internal research:
- improving product catalogs and tree structures;
- product recommendations;
- cross, up and pack selling;
- highlighting products directly on the home page;
- the optimization of product sheets, in particular through the use of comparison tools;
- the improvement of the presentation of the products (possibility of zooming, videos, 360 ° vision, good quality image);
- good stock management;
etc.
All of these methods converge towards a single goal : to present the customer with the products he is likely to buy. Thus, the order in which products are highlighted on category pages is of great importance, especially when it comes to mobile users.
Mobile navigation is done on smaller screens, the scroll is also less efficient than on a computer. As Internet users only have one click to leave your site, they are naturally impatient. To maximize your sales, you need to get them to a platter with the products they’re looking for.
From a longer term perspective, online merchandising can also help develop good relationships with customers. Indeed, if a customer easily finds what he is looking for, likes the aesthetics of the site and feels his desires taken into account, it is likely that he regularly reuses your site for his purchases and that he talks about it around him.
How to promote the improvement of your conversion rate with e-merchandising?
The majority of CMSs provide you with various management rules that allow the implementation of an almost automatic e-merchandising. There are more and more algorithms that aim to help you increase your conversion rate and make your e-commerce site more enjoyable. However, some CMS do not allow merchandising other than manual.
No matter what method you use, effective online merchandising will always depend on three criteria.
First, there is strategic thinking. The latter consists of choosing the different points that define the order in which products appear and how they are featured on your online store.
Next comes product information. Product information is the definition of the various attributes characterizing your products and allowing you to filter your offer. An attribute of a product can be its price, margin, stock, category, customer reviews, size, brand, possible reduction, etc.
Finally, customer information. Here the objective will be to analyze different information about customers and analyze them in order to improve the sales process. For the same customer, you can for example seek to know:
- whether it was logged in or not;
- what keywords it entered in your internal search engine;
- what pages he viewed;
- what he bought;
- whether it was logged in or not;
- how long it was on different pages;
- etc.
Now that you know what e-merchandising is, that you understand why it is interesting and how to profit from it, all you have to do is apply it to increase your turnover! Online merchandising is a very broad subject : do not hesitate to contact us.
If you want to know more about our themes, you can read our article on e-retail media juste here !
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