In the world of online shopping, the visual appeal of your product displays can make all the difference in attracting buyers. Just like in a physical store, customers are drawn to eye-catching virtual showcases that demonstrate items in their best light. That’s where e-merchandising comes into play, requiring constant attention and ongoing effort.
Unfortunately, business owners usually lack time for this particular task, for they have too many other critical responsibilities. The result is lost opportunities to increase conversions along with sales.
A simple way to fix the situation is using modern digital technologies, particularly tools for automating your visual e-merchandising work. Let’s discuss such solutions in proper order, starting, as usual, with simple things. It’s the surest way to get going.
The Basics of Visual E-Merchandising
First, we’d like to explain in more detail what value visual e-merchandising brings to online stores:
- Appealing product displays: Visual e-merchandising is all about arranging and presenting your products in a visually stunning way, aiming to grab the customer’s attention and lure them to your catalog.
- Increased customer engagement: Eye-catching displays can enhance customer engagement and provide buyers with a captivating shopping experience. Thus, you have a real chance to keep them on your website for longer periods, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
- Enhanced browsing experience: Visual e-merchandising leads to a seamless and intuitive browsing experience, converting random customers into loyal ones.
- Boosted sales: All of the above results in increased sales, as customers enjoy a memorable shopping experience you created and don’t mind returning to your online store for new purchases.
Why Use Visual E-Merchandising Tools?
In a brick-and-mortar shop, you usually hire someone to monitor product showcases and make them as attractive as possible for the buyer. With an online store, you better entrust this duty to digital tools. It’s much cheaper and more efficient than dealing with managers who can switch their attention to more challenging tasks.
The Role Of Visual E-Merchandising Tools
From arranging items in a visually appealing grid layout to creating engaging product sliders and carousels, e-merchandising tools offer a lot of options to showcase your range in a way that is both attractive and effective. Essentially, you’re turning your online store into a captivating shopping experience, imitating the enjoyable walk through the aisles of a high-end boutique.
Benefits Of Using Visual E-Merchandising Tools
- No human factor: Smart algorithms obey strict rules, so there is no risk that a manager will make a mistake when working with a product display or catalog.
- Time and effort saved: Using tools reduces the scope of manual work, automating routine processes and significantly saving time and effort.
- Greater efficiency: You also get better efficiency since such solutions provide many incredible catalog and product display management options.
- Intuitiveness: Smart tools make visual merchandising not just effective; it becomes an effortless task that goes literally in the background.
- Simplified catalog management: With e-merchandising software, you can organize your products into custom categories and subcategories, making navigating your online store simpler for you and your customers.
We hope we’ve convinced you that a visual merchandising tool is a worthwhile idea. But how to choose the right one that best suits your eCommerce needs?
Criteria for Choosing the Right Visual Merchandising Solution
Let’s discuss what to look for when choosing a specific solution from the huge number available.
User-Friendly Interface And Ease Of Navigation
It all starts with the ease of use of the chosen solution. If you need a long time to understand how it works, what’s the point of putting it into practice? Software should simplify and streamline your visual merchandising tasks, and not the other way around.
Responsiveness
The second factor to consider is the compatibility with various devices and screen sizes. In other words, the solution must have a responsive design, which continues the theme of user-friendly UI. After all, if there is no responsiveness, we cannot talk about intuitiveness, either, since these concepts are related.
eCommerce Platform Support
Make sure the solution you choose is compatible with your e-commerce platform. Ideally, the tool easily integrates with all popular systems, such as Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
Process Automation
As we said earlier, the benefits of visual merchandising tools include eliminating some of the manual work and transferring routine tasks to intelligent algorithms. That’s why you have to be sure the solution from your top list actually offers the option of process automation. Without this feature, it won’t be of much value to your business, right?
Advanced Analytics
Analytics and reporting features will also come in handy to help you understand how effective your visual merchandising efforts are. If you see something not going according to plan, you can adjust your strategy and avoid damage to your business.
Effective Catalog Management
Another critical feature of successful e-merchandising systems is user-friendly catalog management. It involves effective product categorization, wise use of sorting and filtering options, and access to other great features for organizing your assortment in the best possible way.
Ultimately, the catalog is the showcase of your online store, which means it should be attractive to consumers, encouraging them to make repeated purchases.
Feature Set
Visual merchandising tools also have other important features, such as personalized recommendations, user behavior analysis, dynamic product displays, drag-and-drop interface, and more. Review the options offered by the vendor before subscribing to their solution.
Vendor Support
In a perfect world, the implementation and use of software go without a hitch, but our world is far from perfect, right? Even the most successful e-merchandising tool can fail you in one way or another, so you should be able to contact the vendor and ask them for help whenever needed.
Trial Period or Product Demo
Let’s face it: no matter how carefully you study the proposed conditions for using a specific tool, you cannot be 100% sure you’ve made the right choice. After all, just because this solution works great for a particular company doesn’t mean it fits your visual merchandising needs. Therefore, you should test it in practice first, which is only possible if the provider offers a trial period or a product demo.
Sortler for Your Visual E-Merchandising Needs
In this article, we analyzed the most popular visual merchandising solutions for today. But if you have no time to explore them all yourselves, take advantage of our practical experience with Sortler, a tool for smart catalog management and effective product display.
Let us briefly list what makes Sortler so good:
- Cloud access to a virtual catalog that you can configure as you like and then synchronize with the real one
- Automated rules and algorithms for dynamic product displays
- Drag-and-drop functionality for easy product arrangement
- Ability to assign points to products so that high-scored items rise to the top catalog’s positions
- A wide range of options for managing your catalog, including the creation of matching product combinations and effective item prioritization depending on seasonality, customer demand, and other criteria you consider important
- Working with goods depending on their availability in the warehouse
- The ability to improve the visibility of low-selling items and automatically assign discounts to them if required
After working with Sortler on several projects, we can confidently say it fully meets all the criteria we’ve listed in our article. If you want to know more, click the link and read about our experience with this tool.Do you still have questions? Or don’t know what to choose for your visual merchandising strategy? Write to us, and we’ll help you make the best choice.
