Tips for Ecommerce Retail Merchandising
Many of us spend time optimizing our homepage with great imagery, promotional messages and making sure we are featuring the newest or most popular items, but too many of us stop our merchandising practices there. It could be that we are too busy or don’t have the right technology, but if you did here are some top ways you can better merchandise your ecommerce store.
Importance of Filtering
Don’t make the mistake of putting the onus on your potential customer to have to sift manually by scrolling through items on a product listing page to try to determine what they want or need. With typical scroll depth of only 50% you are also negatively impacting your conversion rate. Optimize these pages by empowering your customers with easy to use filters also known as guided navigation to narrow down their selection quickly. These filters should also be unique to attributes related to the products within the category. For example, if I was browsing shoes I should only see filters for things like size, color, price, etc. and the choices available should only show if a product with that selection is available. We have all experienced making a selection just to have all products disappear and see the dreaded “no products meet your selection” message. Never give your user a dead end!
Promotional Messages
It is important to keep in mind that not all of your website visitors landed on your homepage, so it is a missed opportunity if you are not carrying those promotional messages into internal pages. Make sure to utilize this messaging on category pages, the product page itself and even the cart page to help lessen the scary statistic of almost 70% abandonment rate . Additionally, make sure to use a powerful site search option that allows for promotional banner placement within the search results based on customer keyword search behavior. Wouldn’t you be more likely to click through results after searching shoes if you saw a % off banner for shoes displayed within those results?
Order of Display
Did you know the order in which you display your products can significantly impact your conversion rate? Most users will not scroll to see all the results on the page so placing your best sellers in the top page position can have a great impact on your conversion rate especially if coupled with featured flags noting that the product is a “best seller” or “going fast”. Make sure your pages are optimized to put your best selling products at the top and there are technology solutions to help automate this process.
Personalization
Did you know that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that are providing relevant offers and recommendations? There are so many ways to give a personalized experience and although it can seem overwhelming the best way to tackle this strategy is to crawl, walk, run. Start with finding a technology solution that allows you to automate personalization through widgets and easy to use builders. The right technology can also allow you time to build up the data and show default products if a visitor is new to your site and then being to present personalized items as data is collected through their journey.
Show Results Based on Keywords
Have you ever searched for “black shirt” to see results showing clothing of all different colors? How confusing! Having high quality photos is extremely important to purchasing behavior, but it is critical to optimize the consumer experience by showing them the relevant photo to their search. To avoid consumer confusion and to give a more personalized experience adapt a technology that allows your products to show the correct alternative image based on the consumers keyword search.
Are you looking to improve your website experience, but also want a powerful and easy solution to get you there? Sign up for Mezereon free trial to experience the technology to provide your visitors with an optimal experience and drive additional revenue for your business.