Merchandising in storefront retail is a way of displaying merchandise in on the sales floor in such a way as to entice the customer’s attention, and stimulate interest in purchasing the product. Showcasing your merchandise to best advantage can boost sagging sales, and get you back on track for success.
What is Merchandising?
Any time you shop, even if it’s just grabbing some breakfast cereal from the grocery store shelf, you are the target of product merchandising. Think about how the shelf is filled with product and how it’s organized. For instance, in the cereal aisle, why are the brightly packaged sugar and vitamins kiddie cereals on the lower shelves, and the adult-targeted cereals on the upper? Think about the packaging of the cereal, and how it appeals to you to pick it up and examine it further. Learning to sell products online is no different, and with a few tips under your belt, you can really pump up your sales.
- Make the Product the Star: If you were in that hypothetical cereal aisle, you wouldn’t pick up the plain white box tucked in the corner that just says, “Cereal. Just like that one there. Trust us.” You want to showcase your product in a way that gives the customer an incentive to learn more. The main page should have a quick view option, and a link to a product page that’s packed with information and a unique, colorful description of the item being offered. Make your product photographs the best you can, with plain backgrounds and good lighting.
- Keep It Simple: The design of your website should be simple and clean, without a lot of clutter of distractions. Pop-ups are annoying enough that people use browser extensions to block them, and get between the customer and the product. Invites to Pinterest, Facebook, and other social media sites invite the potential customer to browse away from your site in favour of seeing what Aunt Lucy’s up to and watching some cat videos. Do everything you can in order to keep the flow of browsing within your own site, and oriented towards similar product or items often purchased together by other customers in order to sell products online .
- Keep It Updated: Nothing is more frustrating for the customer than finding a product and then finding out that it’s out of stock. Yes, it can be difficult to stay on top of inventory if you have a lot of products on offer, but practicing simple inventory control can save money, time, and a lot of aggravation on both sides. Inventory tracking software or plugins can be a bridge between your online store, your invoicing and bookkeeping software, tipping you off when you’ve sold out of an item and removing it from view, and even giving you the ability to set reorder alerts before you sell out.
- Let Your Customers Do the Talking: Learning to evaluate customer reviews and feedback impersonally can teach you where you need improvements, but can also give you invaluable word-of-mouth advertising. People tend to trust reviews by other customers more than tooting your own horn. Even traditional media outlets like Forbes agree that the reason most businesses fail is a failure to engage the customer at the customer’s level. Marketing is no longer a media to consumer to business flow, but is a cacophony of Yelp, Twitter, Google, blogs, and other user-driven web media. Invite your customers to openly review, and make them a part of your voice.
- Check Out the Checkout: Back to that hypothetical cereal aisle. You have your cereal in your shopping cart, and off you go to the checkout. When you get there, there’s only one open, they don’t take your debit card, you have to sign up for this, for that, wait, then say you don’t want any coupons, no emails, and just forget it. You walk out and leave the cereal and the cart right there. According to a study by UPS (yes, that UPS), 81 percent of customers wanted ease of checkout. In fact, it was their number one concern. Evaluate your checkout procedures to make sure they’re fast and efficient, and save the offers for after the transaction’s been completed.
- Location, Location, Location: Evaluate your hosting service and time how long your pages take to load. Ideally your page should load within three seconds on all browsers. If it’s not, it may be time to consider a new virtual location for your store. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that ensures fast distribution and quick loading of your pages, no matter where your customer happens to be accessing them or how high your traffic is on a given server. The closer the server, the faster your customer is able to access the product pages and check out.
Nobody Said You Had to be Amazon
Small businesses account for 56 percent of all sales and have added eight million jobs to the economy since 1990 even as big business eliminated or outsourced twice as many. With the economy and consumer confidence improving, according to Internet Retailer, online sales are projected to increase in 2014 with as much as 87 percent of consumers intending to shop online. Tuning up your eCommerce site now will pay big dividends come Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and throughout the year.
