Does your online business offer a wide range of products that cater to the needs of customers? While having a variety of products is an advantage, it alone will not guarantee you success in online space. In order to leverage the benefits offered by e-commerce platform, good merchandising of products on website is very important.
Web merchandising is all about creating a visually appealing product display on the website and making it easier for the user to browse through various products. Listed here are some advantages offered by adopting a good merchandising strategy for your online business that could help you understand its importance.
Creates good first impression
As switching between websites is very easy while shopping online, creating a good first impression is significant for every e-commerce website to attract and engage the visitors. Homepage of a website is like the front door of a brick and mortar store, where things are arranged decently, to give a feel-good effect to customers. Therefore, homepage of your website should be designed in such a way that it persuades visitors to engage and made them buy products/services.
Helps customers in finding the desired product easily
If you just place all your products on your website without proper menu structure, it will frustrate the customer by making it difficult for him to find the product. Web merchandising plays an important role in making product-search easy for the customers. This can be done by providing search filters, and separate search tab that narrows the options and thus makes it easy for the user to choose the product.
Virtual interaction becomes more intuitive
The whole online shopping experience that a customer derives in online shopping is virtual as the customer will never get to see the products in real. Web merchandising should, therefore, help make the virtual interaction more engaging and intuitive.
The website layout should not distract the customer from the main objects that he has to concentrate on. Website should be easy to use: while browsing, the search process should flow uninterrupted. In a nutshell, the navigation on the website should be made easy to make virtual interaction more intuitive.
Provides good experience to customers and builds loyalty
Providing a good user experience is very important to convert visitors to your website into buyers. As users will not have the comfort of checking the products directly, through merchandising we can provide various tools which will help them know about the products better.
Providing a 360-degree view of products and videos that demonstrate the features of a product, can help you furnish almost a real view of products to the customers. This provides a good experience to users and could make them loyal to the business.
Increases word-of-mouth referrals
A good word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire, only when each user that visits the website will have a good shopping experience. Even if the customer does not purchase anything at the moment, your website should offer some value to the customer that encourages him to re-visit the website, whenever he wants to make a purchase.
All these factors combined will provide optimal experience to users, who in turn will tell their family, friends and colleagues to visit the website as it is good. This will provide free publicity to the website.
Supports customer acquisition
Driving more traffic to the website itself will not guarantee improvement in sales. Sales will happen only when customers are impressed by the website and find it reliable for making a purchase. Also, consistent web traffic will come only when customers repeatedly visit your website rather than leaving it after the first visit. All this can be achieved only through good merchandising. Effective web merchandising provides good user experience which helps businesses to acquire new customers and retain the existing customers.
These are different benefits that an e-commerce business can realize by incorporating an effective merchandising strategy. In order to reap the benefits from your online business, make good web merchandising a must-do aspect of your online marketing strategy.
