How Merchandising can help you boost your online sales

In retail, merchandising refers to the display of products in such a way that it stimulates interest and entices customers to make a purchase.How do you bring this concept to your online business?

Merchandising Center adds campaign tools to personalization modules and allows you to set up and manage active campaigns. This enables detailed control of which products should take precedence in specific modules, increasing product exposure, exactly where you want it.

Our Merchandising Center utilizes your recommendation modules as advertising space on the channel of your choice and lets you choose specific products right in the customer’s line of sight, combining the ability to merchandise products while maintaining the power of relevance, which in the end will boost your campaign performance.

Merchandising Center automatically tracks campaign performance to let you know what resonates with your customers.

Below you will find some common business critic challenges that our Merchandising Center can solve. However, it is important to mention that these are generic examples, which will vary from business to business.

A quick demo of our Merchandising Center

If you need an introduction to our Merchandising Center, you can visit our landing page. You can also watch the video below, to see an example of how you can use Merchandising Center to boost specific products.

Read more: Merchandising Center

Run vendor funded campaigns and earn extra money exposing specific brands

With the Merchandising Center, you can sell advertising spots to vendors. With the Merchandising Center’s boost level, you are able to sell them the top spots in your recommendation modules.

Just like in physical retail stores, where brands fight to get the best spots in the best eye-level position of the customers, they also want to get as much exposure of their brand and products through their reseller’s digital channels.

You can use Merchandising Center’s boosting level feature to negotiate deals with vendors who are willing to pay extra for the extra exposure on your website or through one of your other channels such as Email, Search and Ads.

Boost products that you want to clear from stock

Unsold stock occupies storage space. Having a surplus in stock means that your invested capital has not given you the return you wanted, and this might result in affecting your future investments.

You need to get rid of the stock before it gets outdated and even harder to sell. In order to clear out stock, you can use your own digital channels to boost the exposure of those products.

This could be useful when a collection or a season is coming to an end, which means that the products will not likely be purchased afterwards.

With our Merchandising Center, you can create extra exposure for products that you want to clear from your stock.

Prioritize high-margin products to optimize profit

High-value brands are great at driving traffic to your website, and they will generate a lot of page views and clicks, which means that they will often be at the top of your recommendations. So, you might need to have them in your assortment, even though your margin is very poor on these brands.

However, you might also have white label products with high margins. These usually don’t generate as much traffic and clicks as your high-value brands, which means they don’t get as much exposure in your recommendation modules. Boost them to get more exposure than normal.

So instead of always optimizing towards revenue, you might want to optimize your recommendation modules towards the highest margin, which is what the Merchandising Center enables you to.

Use the Merchandising Center to sell the products that have the biggest impact on your bottom line.

Boost new products and create awareness about new collections

Usually, when releasing new collections, products, etc., companies use hero banner images at the top of front pages to create exposure and catch the attention of the visitors – but after leaving the front page, they won’t see the message about the new launch anymore. Likewise, a lot of visitors don’t even see the front page, since they enter from Google Shopping, etc., and land directly on a product page. If you have recommendation modules on your product pages, you can use Merchandising Center to control which products should be shown in the recommendation modules, if you want to create exposure about a new launch.

When you add new products to your website, it can take time before they are exposed to users’ recommendations, since they need visits and clicks before recommendation engines see patterns in the user’s behavior.

But with Merchandising Center, you can get the new products at the top of the recommendation modules from the moment they launch on your website.

Align product exposure on your digital channels to support your general marketing campaigns

Support your weekly or monthly marketing campaigns by boosting the products within the campaigns. We see a lot of companies try to create attention about their campaigns by using hero graphics on their front page, but it doesn’t convert very well and when the user has left the front page, they won’t be exposed to the campaign any longer and it will quickly be forgotten.

With Raptor’s Merchandising Center you can create exposure on every page, by boosting campaign products in your recommendation modules. You can choose in which modules you want to boost the products from the campaigns, as different modules are suitable for different pages.

Suppression of products

In some cases, it can be relevant to suppress products, to avoid they appear in your recommendation modules. Some products can be used in most modules, but other products do not belong in specific modules.

Products that are low priced and are often supplementary purchases to the main product should only feature in recommendation modules on product pages where they will be bought together with the main product and not in modules on the front page. On the front page, you often choose inspiration modules such as “Most Popular Right Now”, where you can choose to suppress products below a specific price.

Another reason for the suppression of products could be if you do not want on sale products to feature in your recommendations. This might sound weird, as you often want to create exposure about your campaigns.

But here comes an example of when this might be relevant.

Example (on-sale products):

If you are a high-end brand and want to be very cautious about how products on sale will affect your image, you can suppress on-sale products, to avoid giving them any exposure in your recommendations.

Analytics and insights

When a campaign has been completed, you can report the results and efficiency of the extra exposure, the Merchandising Center has created for the chosen products.

This can be used for internal reasons, but also if you decide to negotiate deals with a supplier and they want to see how much exposure they have gotten for the money they have paid you.

Click count

Click count shows the number of clicks attributed to the products in the current Merchandising Center campaign.

Monetary value

The monetary value shows the revenue attributed to the products in the current Merchandising Center campaign.

We divide our revenue metric into two categories, Direct and Assisted. We divide this metric into two categories because it is important to know when a click on a product in the recommendation module is the direct reason why a user has purchased a product and when a click on a product in a recommendation module has assisted the purchase.

Direct

The direct metrics shows the sum of all sales where users have clicked on a product in a Raptor recommendation module and bought that exact product.

Assisted

The assisted metrics shows the sum of all sales where users has clicked on a product in a Raptor recommendation module and bought a different product.

Why do you need a Merchandising Center?

A Merchandising Center is a need if you want to be able to tackle the above-mentioned business critic challenges and take control of your recommendation modules in your digital channels.

Combining the ability to merchandise products while maintaining the power of relevance in your recommendations can be the key to solve many of your business critic challenges.

• Run vendor funded campaigns by selling top spots in your recommendation modules
• Support your marketing campaigns with extra exposure
• Prioritize high margin products to focus on your bottom line
• Boost products that you want to clear from your stock
• Suppress specific products if you don’t want them in your recommendation modules