Numerous factors contribute to a brand’s success, but there’s one common trait that most leading online brands share: strategic digital merchandising excellence.
Over the past couple of years, the online marketplace has become increasingly competitive. High consumer expectations demand constant innovation. Online shopping is no longer just about convenience but about experience, consistency, trust, and personalization.
Research shows 88% of consumers feel the shopping experience is just as important as the products. In addition, 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across all online and in-store channels and departments. To stay in the game, brands need to deliver personalized, connected experiences regardless of where consumers make their purchases.
We explore how Smart Merchandiser helps online brands build experiences that captivate, convert and retain customers. We’ll also walk through the platform’s newest features to learn how they can set your brand apart from the crowd.
Bringing Digital Merchandising to More Brands
Digital merchandising curates and presents products in a way that maximizes sales. It focuses on factors such as visual appeal, product placement, pricing strategies, and personalized recommendations. In the digital realm, merchandising plays a key role in creating a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for customers. Ultimately, this leads to increased conversions and customer loyalty.
Smart Merchandiser’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) visual eCommerce merchandise management solution is now supported by four major platforms. It seamlessly integrates with HCL Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and soon Shopify Plus. This new support enables you to take full control of your online storefront.
A Single Source of Truth
Digital merchandisers have to manage a variety of data types, such as SKUs, sizes, and colors, and also incorporate information from social media, web analytics, and sales reports. This data is often underutilized.
From inventory analytics to customer behavior, Smart Merchandiser gives brands a single source of truth. Now, there’s no need to waste time switching between multiple programs, databases, and spreadsheets to track performance or use costly graphic design tools to mock up websites. With this simple integration, you can make real-time online merchandising changes in one platform.
This increases efficiency and saves time, so you can deliver the personalized, seamless experiences that modern consumers expect. Enhance website layouts, improve customer experiences, and respond quickly to market trends from a single hub.
More Features, More Services: What’s New With Smart Merchandiser?
Smart Merchandiser recently added new innovative features to help you set your business apart from competitors with effortless digital merchandising.
The third-party data integration tool efficiently combines external data sources such as web analytics, ratings, reviews, and social media sentiments. It then dynamically displays this data on product thumbnails. This helps direct data-driven sorting and product ranking to guide consumer purchases. It also provides valuable insights for strategic supply management and marketing.
The SaaS solution includes a special heat map feature based on key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. This lets you easily pinpoint areas of opportunity for more effective digital merchandising.
“Leading Color” and “Leading Image” further enable you to craft compelling narratives. By evoking emotion through thoughtful visual display, you can foster a customer connection with your brand and products. The features allow you to choose a primary color for each product and swap out the original product image with lifestyle images specific to each category. While this promotes consistency and coherence across category pages, it also offers a unique opportunity to create engaging brand stories.
With Smart Merchandiser, you can now cross-reference and link categories. This improves both product discoverability and cross-selling opportunities and streamlines operations across multiple storefronts. With Facets and Filters Management, you can also optimize and customize the browsing experience more intentionally for your customers. When customers can see the products they’re interested in and looking for, you’ll notice a noteworthy difference in their purchase behavior.
How to Bring the Benefits of Smart Merchandiser to Your Digital Store
Regardless of how much data you have, strategically reorganizing your catalog can be frustrating and intensely time-consuming. Smart Merchandiser automates processes and enables one-click bulk changes to significantly simplify and fast-track purposeful digital merchandising efforts. In addition to drag-and-drop functionality, you can effortlessly reorganize your catalog by setting automated business rules.
Because it relies less on manual work, Smart Merchandiser users experience a 70% boost in productivity and a 50% decrease in human resources costs. In addition, the software’s data-driven eCommerce product merchandising strategy has shown to yield an average 20% sales revenue increase with users.
The software does more than just help eCommerce retailers build robust storefronts and headless, mobile-first shopping experiences. It also recognizes the importance of a unified visual merchandising approach for brands that operate across both brick-and-mortar and digital storefronts. The powerful sales tool is designed to foster emotional connections between consumers, products, and brands through:
- Consistency in brand image, merchandising design, and strategy
- Compelling imagery to enhance the overall visual impact of category pages
- Optimized point-of-sale presentation, product visibility, and category coordination
But this isn’t where the innovation stops. Founder Teresa Zobrist has announced the release of a revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) addition to the software later this year. The group is aiming for a mid-year beta release of a smart merchandising AI assistant to improve the eCommerce merchandising process like never before.
Outshine the Competition: Elevate Your Digital Merchandising Strategy
In the dynamic world of eCommerce, visual merchandising is a pivotal way to captivate and motivate consumers toward making a purchase. Traditional retail environments have long embraced the art and science of visual merchandising. Its significance in the digital landscape is equally profound, but with unique methodologies.
Trusted by leading brands like The North Face, J.Jill, Vans, and JanSport, Smart Merchandiser revolutionizes visual merchandising in the digital space. By harnessing advanced features and data-driven insights, this cutting-edge solution empowers brands to captivate and influence customers. As a result, it drives higher conversion rates, productivity, and cost savings.
Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your online presence and boost sales. Book a demo today to discover how to elevate your brand’s online shopping experience.
