Merchandising in Magento – A complete guide

Merchandising refers to the promotion of a product to increase sales and bouncing up the revenue. There have been a lot of theories that can help design the merchandising strategy. 

Merchandising plays a significant role in eCommerce and is one of the crucial factors leading to the success of the online business.

People have a misconception that merchandising is all about just placing an ad on a random page and prompting the viewers to buy. 

Let us clear the air and guide you through the detailed process of how one can merchandise effectively on Magento.

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Category page merchandising

Magento’s previous versions had a drawback of not promoting the cross-category products. But with the initiation of 2015, they started the process of integration of OnTap’s Merchandise Module, which not only would help place the cross-category advertisements but would also lead to seamless working and reap the higher business than usual.

In the previous modules, one couldn’t select all the products at once. They had to repeat the process multiple times to get the desired layout. And most of the time, the settings were automatically designed, which were un-tailorable. This led to the troubles of time consumption and no customization. 

But with the coming of the new update, one can select the multiple products at a single go and can customize the settings as desired. 

Moreover, now we can add the master product, which should appear on the top, and sort the rest of the products according to the SKU Ratings.

We suggest you establish some merchandising rules so that software knows what to do when a rule changes. The merchandising standards may include the prices and the profit margins, the tax to be charged, stock levels, brands, categories, etc. Many attributes are to be taken into consideration to establish the rules.

Make sure that you use primary colours instead of exotic colours. A viewer can establish a relationship with the site if the colours are central and easy to recognize. 

Moreover, one needs to go with the constant font on all the pages and all the subjects. This would create uniformity on the page and help establish an identity.

Do not forget to add a season-label to inform the customers about the theme of the clothing. Instead of stating the name of the season, one can use the symbols to make the site more alive.

You can also label the products according to their categories or trends. This way, a customer can quickly sieve the choice.

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Category merchandising with Klevu

We can also use Klevu to make our merchandising even more useful. Klevu believes in rule-based merchandising, which boosts the product according to the numeric boosting score.

Here we are sharing a chronological order in which one should promote the stuff:

• Promote the most popular items first
• Second Place for Own-branded products
• Develop the Highest Margin providing products in the third place
• You can negate the rest of the products

The best thing about Klevu is that it uses intelligent machinery. The machinery gets updated in real-time and always provides the best and updated solutions. The mechanism learns as we perform.

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Improving Magento’s site search

Initially, Magento was not good with the searches. It used to have most of the complaints, and the search results were abysmal. Magento tried to improve this shortcoming with their new update. 

Sadly, much wasn’t faded away with the latest update and took many developers towards the third party solutions. The site’s search is ultimately essential for eCommerce stores of varied sizes, and search results are the pivot for the user experience.

• Klevu

As Klevu uses Intelligent Machinery, it can learn customer behaviour accordingly. It can not only show the product; one is looking for but can also provide some of the suggestions to promote prompt buying.

Moreover, with that, comes the better categorization of the products. Now one can search with the type, the colour, the size, and design they desire to acquire.

• Algolia

Algolia is a search engine service provider capable of delivering real-time results through the first keystroke. It has a robust API that lets you implement the searches within your website, mobile, and voice applications quickly and seamlessly. 

It has speed, supports relevance, and works with utmost accuracy to bring out the best results. The integration of Algolia to the Magento store has been evident in bringing out the best and most efficient results.

• Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a high performing open-source search engine capable of text searches and analysis. It allows us to store and search larger volumes of data quickly and that too in real-time. 

It is generally used as an underlying engine that empowers the application’s search features. It also provides indexing and automatic type guessing. 

It is incredibly hassle-free to set up the elastic-search as it comes with sensible defaults and even hides the technicalities for the beginners. It is adaptive to the basics to implement every change quickly and productively. 

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Personalizations

Personalization has become one of the factors to ace the merchandising and getting higher conversions. People today are especially using third-party apps to enhance their game in customization. 

Solutions like NOSTO can be easily integrated with Magento, which in turn can provide personalized and relatable products as the recommendations. The people who have integrated NOSTO with Magento have observed the conversions higher than before.

The solutions other than NOSTO can be Listrak and Peerius. All these solutions charge a little amount of the commission at the time of the conversion. 

To gain more personalization and conversions, one can even look for things like Customer Segmentation to bless personalization to the on-site journey. One can also go for email marketing channels for individual customer level promotions.

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Category tree structure

Segregation and order are two of the essential principles of management and business. Hence, creating a coherent and clear structure of the categories would not only please the standards but would also be praised by the viewers. 

Using product attributes is highly beneficial in structuring the product category tree. It can help you design the subcategories with preciseness. 

For example, if you have the main category of men’s clothing, you can add the subcategories of size, brand, design, stuff, etc. Making the category tree is also very good from an SEO point of view as it can give more in-depth pages with more keywords to target. 

The process mostly followed is making the top-level category within Magento and then adding the subcategories with layered navigations. The subcategory pages are kept static to allow dynamism in case of another keyword targeting. 

The static pages should be given the same amount of consideration else they won’t be crawled and indexed by the Google Bots.

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Product detail page merchandising

The product detail page is one of the essential pages on the eCommerce website. It is the main page where a buyer makes his final decision. 

Excellent images, some hands-on videos, and precise details, along with the reviews, can make the conversion counts increase. 

One can even hire an in-house photographer to keep updating the pics and the videos to earn the desired conversions. A rich media becomes one of the most selling factors, and this is what creates a difference between you and your competitor. 

Make sure that the images are large and of the best quality so that the buyer can even zoom into the picture without distorting the pixels. Magento allows you to upload multiple photos with a product. So make sure that the product is equipped with a good number of images from almost all the angles.

Videos, as mentioned before, play a significant role in increasing conversions. The hands-on experience, the teaser, and the instructions of use are some of the examples for the videos that can be uploaded. Magento allows you to upload the videos, which can provide a fortune for your business.

Product descriptions play multiple roles. They not only tell about the product but also help in the conversions and prove to be the boon for the SEO eye. There are fields for a short description and long description which can be used to explain the product targeting the top keywords. 

Make sure your content is not plagiarised and is unique to earn more of the Google favours.

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Upsells and cross-sells

Upsells can be defined as the recommendations which one gets, which are either on higher price or have higher specifications. The main aim behind the upsell is to recommend something better than what the buyer is buying. 

This increases the sales return and lets the customer know what else better can be bought for the same thing.

Cross-sells can be referred to as the recommendations of the related products, which can be used along with what the buyer is already buying. 

These recommendations are shown either on the cart page or after the product descriptions. The main aim behind such promotions is to enhance the quick sales. The sales will ultimately add on to the revenue and conversions.

For the same purpose, we would recommend NOSTO for its intelligent machinery. It can monitor customer behaviour and can suggest the best stuff according to tastes and preferences. It may lead to increased prompt buying and better conversions.

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Layered navigation in Magento

It is indeed one of the most significant parts of eCommerce stores and product listing pages which allows the users to categorize and segregate the products on their variations. 

The answer to why it is one of the most critical aspects of merchandising of Magento is because it can influence a person’s buying decision. It needs to be done correctly, and it can attract a lot of business and can prove to be fatal if gone contradictory. 

Magento has brainstormed with the layered navigation but failed to provide the desired speed as compared to other services being provided by it.

To compensate for the loss of Magento, many developers take the aid of the third-party modules like bubble shop, Amasty or Manadev. 

These modules also bless with additional features like AJAX sorting, scroll bars, visual filtering, multi-select options, etc. But yes, if you opt for these modules, stay ready to compromise with the SEO efficiency. 

To ace the game of layered navigation through the solutions provided by Magento, you need to be careful with the use of product attributes. 

If your hand goes out of the track, the layered navigation will become challenging to understand and ultimately complex for the users, which is more than enough to shoo them away. Attributes should always be defined at filterable if they are of any use to the end-user. 

Instead of proper layering, visual attractiveness shouldn’t go anywhere. The developers also make the usage of various colours and iconography to segregate between the types and brands. 

It is also of equal importance to set the attributes and attribute sets efficiently and effectively such that the user can filter the categories in a way it should be. Another thing to consider important is that separate attribute sets are needed to align different product types. 

Magento has been offering multiple ways to merchandise effectively. The mantra for effective selling is to simplify the buying process as much as one can, to make the customer experience convenient and stress-free. Gradually, it will increase user favourability and higher conversion rates.

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Improving the store navigation

Magento would want your navigation to be managed by a category tree, which is pretty okay with most of the product types and is relatively simple for the admins as well as users. 

But, we would suggest the creation of more complex navigations via static blocks to allow the users to insert attachments, promotions or custom links, which hence would be a long-term solution from management.

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Closing comments

Magento is a platform with a million possibilities. You just need to dig a little deeper. And once you are down, you’d see the profits and the conversion rates touching the horizon. 

Insert the links, images, videos, structures, and substructures, and the product you’d get would solve all the eCommerce problems.

But, if you face any trouble in making such changes, worry no more, for MagnoStack is right here to help you get out of the fix. Contact us right away!