7 Merchandising Secrets Guaranteed to Increase Sales

Effective merchandising is key to drawing customers in, so here are 7 of our top secrets guaranteed to increase your sales this year.

1. Prioritize opportunities

Every item in your online storefront is an opportunity to make a sale and generate profit, so it makes perfect sense to put your new arrivals or consistent best-sellers front and centre. This is also true for items which have a large profit margin. Placing items in view of shoppers increases their sales, presenting excellent opportunities to maximize profits. Data-driven product merchandising is an excellent way to make the best use of your screen real-estate and ensures your online search tools are prioritizing the right products.

2. Innovative visual displays

Although the raw quality of your products is crucial in ensuring the production of repeat customers, it’s the visual impact of your products that can generate new ones. Innovative and eye-catching visual displays are essential to this process, especially when competing with potentially hundreds of other online brands and stores for the same consumer base.

Recent advances in technology also provide ample opportunity to personalize shopping experiences. Online stores have the advantage of being able to tailor personalized product adverts depending on previous customer shopping activity, or such things as the country they’re browsing your store from. This is especially important since the COVID pandemic, with many stores relying on digital sales to keep themselves afloat.

3. Rely more on data

As a human instinct, intuition can be one of our greatest strengths. However, with advances in data collection there is no longer a need to rely solely on instinct to pick product placement and gamble on potential best sellers. Currently, although 91% of companies say that data-driven decision making is important, only 57% currently use their data to drive their business decisions. Data provides an objective viewpoint with which to fashion merchandising decisions, such as where to place best-sellers or the right spot to improve the sales of a product with a high profit margin.

Making data-backed decisions also improves the credibility of the decision to colleagues and counterparts, meaning people are more likely to rely on you to make merchandising calls. It also allows you to back-up initial gut instincts with cold facts, confirming or perhaps denying pre-conceived ideas.

4. Have a solid weekly process

Being proactive with when and how you make your merchandising decisions is key to staying ahead of the curve. Having half a day per week to review product sales and change aspects of your store according to current events not only allows you to optimize sales, but to keep things fresh for customers. This is true for yearly holidays such as Halloween or New Year as well as sudden current events, such as the COVID pandemic or other relevant goings on.

Making these decisions based on previous data means you know exactly what to prioritize and why you’re doing so – optimizing sales and keeping customers happy. Following buyer’s behavior is key to gaining a higher share of retail sales and doing so weekly forms an incredibly productive habit.

5. Collect and store data sensibly

It’s all well and good to collect and store buyer’s data to help with merchandising decisions, but this data is useless if rendered unreadable by poor storage practices. Effective eCommerce data management is key to maximizing data-driven decision making. Another aspect to consider is the safe storage of this data, making sure you comply to all government guidelines.

Usually, the simplest way to do this is outsourcing this process to specific services and companies which specialize in the storage, utilization and protection of user data used in merchandising. This also avoids any headaches to do with customer data, since the inexperience handling of data can often cause more problems than solutions.

6. Effective usage of point-of-purchase

A point of purchase display is a display which is usually set up on the checkout pages of online stores, such as the classic ‘customers like you also bought…’ from Amazon. This is the digital equivalent to placing impulse purchase products near a till in a physical store. These are designed to increase impulse buys of products that usually aren’t the reasons why customers visited your store in the first place. For example, a site selling dress shoes may have a shoe care kit on a point of purchase display, or a pharmaceutical website may prompt customers to buy masks in the midst of the COVID pandemic. This prompts customers to also purchase these kits and items along with their initial products, increasing the sales of otherwise potentially side-lined items.

7. Grouping related items

Grouping related items may sound easy and intuitive, but it is slightly harder to put into practice when discussing eCommerce sales. Of course, dividing products by category may do well enough, but there are some products that go together which can’t be grouped into the same category. For example, a cosmetics company selling red lipstick and red gel nail polish may be tempted to find a way to connect these complementary items despite them belonging to different categories. Promotions which group these items together, such as a weekly curated designer look, are excellent at selling grouped related items.

In an age of ever-increasing use of online shopping and a saturation of brands, merchandising tips and secrets such as these can help your business stay ahead of the competition. This is especially true for brands looking to convert physical stores to online websites whilst retaining their merchandising excellence.