In physical retail, merchandising is all about product displays, signage, and shelf placement. If you’ve ever taken a marketing class in school, you’ve probably heard of the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place (or Distribution), and Promotion.

Online, it's no different — just digital.

In ecommerce, website merchandising pertains to the strategic presentation of products on a virtual storefront. The goal is to optimize the visibility and positioning of product listings and relevant content to maximize engagement and conversions.

This may not seem like a big deal for ecommerce brands with a small product catalog. But for enterprise ecommerce where you deal with a long lineup of products, it can be a headache without a proper strategy.

Remember, modern audiences expect nothing less than seamless product discovery, personalized shopping experiences, and buttery-smooth website performance. 

None of these things are easy if you have hundreds, if not thousands, of products in your catalog. 

This guide will walk you through the intricacies of website merchandising, from foundational principles to advanced techniques — all while keeping website performance top of mind.

What is Website Merchandising?

Website merchandising is the art of arranging, organizing, and presenting your ecommerce product catalog to maximize user engagement and generate more sales.

It focuses on a number of components, including but not limited to: 

• Product sorting and filtering
• Home, product, and category page layout design
• Site search optimization
• Product bundling and seasonal promotions

In modern ecommerce platforms, certain tasks related to website merchandising can be automated with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is called AI-driven merchandising, which can be extremely effective and efficient with the right tools. 

Manual merchandising, on the other hand, is when you get your hands dirty and implement the necessary optimizations through human labor.

As an enterprise ecommerce brand, you'll need a little bit of both.

AI-powered merchandising automation is crucial for optimizing thousands of SKUs, multiple regions, and a diverse mix of target audiences. At the same time, you can't entirely discard the human element to personalization, presentation, and data-driven decision-making. 

It's also important to understand the desirable results you need to aim for when executing your website merchandising strategy.

Why Website Merchandising Matters for Enterprise Brands

Before we get to the nuts and bolts of website merchandising, here's a quick rundown of the main benefits and objectives you should prioritize:

• Increased Product Discovery — One of the biggest problems of large product catalogs is the amount of buried SKUs gathering virtual dust. Effective website merchandising ensures customers who need those products have a quick and intuitive way to find them.
• Higher Conversion Rates — Website merchandising and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) go hand in hand. By strategically promoting high-demand products and highlighting key conversion elements (e.g., CTAs, trust badges, and discount banners), you're fast-tracking the customer's path to a purchase decision.
• Improved Customer Experience — Today's online consumers are all about smooth and intuitive shopping experiences. That's why website merchandising includes the use of elements like product filters, in-site search bars, and dynamic recommendations in Product Detail Pages (PDPs).
• Omnichannel Consistency — Enterprise ecommerce relies on a variety of touchpoints to bring in customers with different online shopping preferences. With enterprise website merchandising, you need a sweeping approach that maintains a consistent level of optimization and polish across channels (e.g., your website, social media profiles, mobile app, and email campaigns).
• SEO Impact — It's worth noting that website merchandising strategies, particularly on-page navigational and structural optimizations, directly impact SEO. Streamlining product discovery through internal links, for example, maximizes your crawl budget by pointing search engine crawlers to more relevant pages to index and rank.

Lastly, every website merchandising strategy should be created with performance optimization in mind. 

Remember that your ecommerce website can have a ton of flashy, attention-grabbing merchandising elements in the book. But no matter how well-designed your product sliders, carousels, or grids are, it's difficult to turn customer attention into sales with a slow website.

The good news is, there are solutions like Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine that will help you effortlessly achieve top-tier performance even with the added load of merchandising modules. 

Tip: Click here to book a demo and see the power of cutting-edge edge delivery firsthand.

Core Elements of Effective Website Merchandising

Now that you know why you need website merchandising, it's time to roll up your sleeves and get your storefront primed and ready to generate some sales.

1. Strategic Product Placement

Effective product placement is one of the pillars of website merchandising.

The key is to maximize the visibility of product types that are proven to rake in conversions. Some examples are new arrivals, best-sellers, and trending products or offers that recently saw a spike in demand.

A great example would be the featured products on Jones Road's homepage. The site also clearly labels the listings as best-sellers, which taps into FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to get clicks.

Above all, be sure to use data to decide which products to highlight.

As an enterprise ecommerce brand, you should have tons of useful data at your disposal. Just be sure to prioritize your goals when determining which metrics to use as a deciding factor, be it your margins, stock levels, or demand forecasts.

2. Personalized Product Recommendations

A surefire way to streamline product discovery is to include dynamic product recommendations based on the customer's activity history, previous purchases, and real-time interactions. 

Not only will this help bring traffic to less popular products, it can also directly lead to a measurable increase in Average Order Value (AOV). 

The most efficient way to present personalized product recommendations, especially for large ecommerce brands, is to use an AI-powered solution like Dynamic Yield. This leverages contextual data, predictive targeting, and your own first-party data to automatically present customizable product recommendations to your customers.

3. Optimized Site Search and Filtering

An optimized in-site search feature and product filters are two non-negotiables on any enterprise ecommerce website.

You don't want customers clicking through layers upon layers of menus just to find a product they want. If you have hundreds or thousands of products in your catalog, give them a direct line to the listings they need.

Here are a few additional tips to reap the full benefits of on-site product discovery tools:

• Include robust filter options (e.g., size, color, price, and ratings) 
• Provide search autocomplete suggestions (including typo correction suggestions)
• Weave product recommendations into site search tools

4. Seasonal & Promotional Merchandising

Sometimes, it's easy to predict which products or categories will sell well in the near future.

By factoring in seasonality in your website merchandising, you can tap into your market's shopping cycles to generate a huge spike in sales. 

Brands like Boarderie regularly curate special collections in line with holidays and events (e.g., Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Black Friday). That said, it should be easy for an enterprise ecommerce brand to put together a bundle that can capitalize on customers' shopping moods.

Don't forget to spread the word through touchpoints like email, social media, and PPC ads. These channels are still part of website merchandising, so be sure your content follows the same principles in terms of product placement and personalization.

5. Visual Merchandising & Content 

Finally, remember that visual content plays a huge role in website merchandising.

Online shopping, after all, is a visual-first experience. And it's not just about image quality, either — it's also about strategy, including the positioning and types of visual content you incorporate into your virtual storefront. 

Here's a quick rundown of ideas for presenting ecommerce products in the best possible light:

• Lifestyle photography — Present images that showcase the product in a real-world scenario or use case.
• "Photo zoom" images — Include at least one high-definition, zoomable product photo to enable customers to inspect finer details.
• User-Generated Content (UGC) — Build trust by showing UGC like customer reviews, user-submitted product photos, and community-sourced short-form images.
• Size and fit guides — Make customers feel more confident about their purchase by offering a visual size and fit guide.
• Comparison charts and tables — Help customers choose the perfect product variation with a side-by-side comparison of features, dimensions, price, and other distinctive details.
• Video demos and tutorials — Include a short video demo that shows product features and functions in action.

Performance-Driven Merchandising: Why Speed Matters

There's one thing you should be mindful of when doing some website merchandising work: the speed trap. 

As you inject more visual content, dynamic product feeds, and other modules to enhance the shopping experience, your hosting solution works hard in the background to keep up with your growing bandwidth demands. 

Don't forget that page speed and performance have a direct, undeniable impact on user engagement and conversion rate. 

The slower your site, the more likely it is for customers to abandon your website in a heartbeat. But the faster it is, the more you can convince customers to make a purchase. 

Remember, we're not talking about tiny changes here. 

In fact, a tiny 0.1-second improvement in loading speed can have a big difference on your ecommerce website's conversions. 

Apart from loading speed, you should also pay attention to how performance translates to real-world user experience. 

That's why Google created the Core Web Vitals metrics, which also track how stable and responsive your website is to user interactions. 

How Nostra Helps

Ecommerce website performance optimization isn't a weekend project. 

It requires a multi-faceted approach that targets your images, videos, scripts, and other assets — keeping everything lightweight and loading without a hitch. 

For enterprise ecommerce websites, you're looking at potentially a couple of months to complete all the necessary optimizations. That translates to thousands of website visitors not getting the best experience you could offer.

Fortunately, there are turnkey solutions that can lead to measurable performance gains in less than a day. 

For example, Nostra’s Edge Delivery Engine and smart caching technologies automatically optimize your entire website — including merchandising content (e.g., product grids, images, and dynamic recommendations — to achieve near-instant loading speeds in roughly an hour.

It works by tapping into a network of 310+ edge delivery servers around the world — pushing website data transfers and processing near users to eliminate latency. 

Tools & Technologies for Website Merchandising

Ready to get some work done?

To implement effective website merchandising, you'll need the right tools. 

Here are our top recommendations:

• Product Information Management (PIM) systems (e.g., Contentserv Product Experience Cloud, Salsify, Akeneo, and Pimcore) 
• AI merchandising engines (e.g., Algolia, Constructor, and Bloomreach)
• Real-time personalization platforms (e.g., Dynamic Yield, Nosto, and Adobe Target)
• Performance optimization tools (e.g., Nostra, PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix)

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Website Merchandising

Before we wrap up this guide, below is a checklist of the mistakes you absolutely need to avoid for effective website merchandising:

• Avoid relying on manual updates and optimization. Taking website merchandising into your own hands can lead to some creative results, but it could lead to inconsistencies and missed opportunities for automation. 
• Overlooking the mobile experience. Don't forget to optimize your mobile touchpoints, be it your ecommerce app or mobile-responsive site, to make sure more than half of your customers get a conversion-optimized experience. 
• Cluttered category pages. Cramming everything into the top of your category pages does nothing for product discovery — consider other website merchandising tools instead (e.g., in-site search, filters, and product carousels).
• Not tracking loading speed. Regularly track your website's performance, especially after implementing updates or adding new products, to keep loading speed and responsiveness in top shape. 
• Not listening to your data. Whether you're tracking loading speed or optimizing for conversions, you need to let data guide your merchandising decision-making — not assumptions or gut feelings.

Conclusion

To sum it up, website merchandising is a crucial aspect of ecommerce that deserves the attention of every brand — regardless of size. 

It drives product discovery, stimulates conversions, enhances the user experience, and optimizes your websites for search engines.

Just remember that great merchandising only works if your website loads fast. After all, there's no point in creating flashy, elaborate shopping experiences if customers are too annoyed from waiting for the page to load. 

Want merchandising that's beautiful, effective, and fast? 

Partner with Nostra to deliver instant-loading product pages — no matter how much content you add. Book your free demo here to get started!

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