While running an E-commerce, you do your best to make your customer experience the best it can possibly be. We’ve talked a lot about how to make your site fast, simple, and user friendly, which is a great way to improve the customer experience.
But that’s just one side of the issue.
How do you present an online catalogue that is attractive to as many people as possible, despite diversity in your customers?
Navigation through your site is an absolute basic key to creating a great customer experience, but offering frigid merchandise is the easiest way to send your conversion rates to the toilet. Your potential customers want to find what they’re looking for rapidly and easily, so your product needs to appear before their eyes as quickly as possible.
[Tweet “85% of users who don’t find their product in 2 minutes will drop off, and 60% don’t come back.”]
With that in mind, how do you improve your merchandising to adapt to a diverse customer base?
How to Optimize your Merchandising
This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people forget that your merchandise should perfectly link up to your commercial seasons.
Your online merchandising should correspond to the rhythm of your target market’s year:
- New product launch and promotion
- Sales and discounts
- Stocking and Inventory liquidation
- Promoting best sellers
The best way to align your strategy and your product catalogue is to optimize your logistics in a way that’s dynamic and predictive. Your merchandising strategy should allow you to promote your best sellers to drive sales, personalizing the customer experience, and draw back indecisive customers.
Promote your Best Sellers
More than 50% of business is generated on the home page’s category list of products, a page generated from internal search, and products placed on the top banner of pages.
What you need to remember is that the order that your products are found in is incredibly important. Products that are on the very first page of any category are the ones that convert the most. If you want to boost your conversion rate, place your best sellers first. If you want to improve your margins, it’s the same concept.
Personalize your Client Experience
If you want to nail your conversion, you have to put the right product, at the right price, at the right time in front of your client. This presents a marked challenge: each client is unique and is looking for a specific product.
[Tweet “Did you know that 30% of Amazon’s sales come from personalized recommendations?”]
Luckily, there are plugins and companies that can offer your customers personalized recommendations via predictive algorithms. With your clients able to easily find products relevant to their search, they are likely to spend more: your conversion could improve by as much as 15%.
When you personalize the customer experience by offering products that your customers might like, you promote customer loyalty and you improve your overall customer service (which as we’ve seen, starts long before the customer contacts you). This same method can be applied to several channels: cross-selling, similar products, and search history.
Seduce indecisive customers
The majority of E-commerce sales are lost due to a last-minute change of heart, or indecision: in the best case, the customer will abandon their cart and come back later to complete the 
purchase. In the worst case scenario, they’ll head towards the competition or never purchase.
Pop-ups can be a saving grace in this case, which can push your clients to make a decision and purchase, especially when detecting hesitation between two products.
An effective way to test out different optimization strategies is by using A/B testing. In short, you segment half of your audience and show them one configuration, while showing the other half a different one. This can be a really great way to test new features, new products, and generally analyze the punch your E-commerce has.
Merchandising optimization is an integral way to drive conversions and promote customer loyalty. By getting the right products in front of your customers and optimizing your online catalogue, you can be sure to improve your turnover.
More ideas on how to optimize merchandising for E-commerce? Let us know below or Tweet us!