What is Visual Merchandising? Unraveling the Pathway to Maximized Sales

Think about it: How many times have you opened a web page and read 100% of the text on your screen And, how many pictures do you notice?

That’s how most of your customers behave too. While they may not read all your product descriptions and reviews, they will stop to look at the images you have chosen to display.

Clear product images are the most important factor when it comes to curating a great online shopping experience, and the statistics are there to prove it. Visual merchandising with elements like photos and videos helps e-commerce brands capture their brand identity and immediately create an impression on potential customers.

In this blog post, we will discuss what your e-commerce brand should do for effective visual merchandising, what advantages you can gain, and what the future will look like.

The Psychology of Visual Merchandising

Visually, product sales are all about crafting customer perceptions that fit your brand. Cues like brand colors and layouts influence how your customers feel about your brand. For example, an eCommerce brand targeting young women tends to use shades of pink with neatly organized web pages.

Color psychology can also help you position your brand in a new light and align your layout to impact your customers’ purchase decisions. For example, a red ‘Sale’ sign can incentivize customers to purchase items from their wishlist.

Once you know how you want your brand to be remembered, you can use visual merchandising to associate positive emotions like creativity or trust with your products. An understanding of human psychology becomes key to maximizing sales in a competitive eCommerce industry.

So, placing products that are in high demand or nearly sold out at the top of your page can create the fear of missing out (FOMO) and prompt customers to buy immediately.

Personalization in Visual Merchandising

All customers want to feel special when shopping for their favorite brands online. Forming a personalized connection with them can help increase repeat buyers and improve the customer’s lifetime value. 77% of customers are even willing to pay more for a brand and recommend it to friends in exchange for personalized service.

Personalization in visual merchandising means communicating to your customers that you care about their likes and want to make their experience smooth and easy. For instance, your home page can recommend products similar to their recent purchases. This proves to your customer that their wishlist is at the top of your mind and helps foster a sense of connection.

You can also increase their average order values by making product discovery easier with personalization methods like outfit recommendations.

Customization also enhances the relevance of product displays, making customer data useful when curating tailored displays. You can employ these data points efficiently by using AI.

AI-powered Visual Merchandising Strategies

With the power of artificial intelligence, you can track customer activity and predict their preferences with greater accuracy. When browsing your website, AI-powered tools can automatically add real-time updates to your product display and reduce the chances of cart abandonment, ultimately maximizing sales.

Such two-way interactions were only possible in offline settings earlier, but AI-enabled strategies can now recreate that feeling for your customers online. With searching, browsing, recommending, and purchasing, AI can boost your brand presentation to adapt to every customer’s unique liking.

When crafting visual merchandising strategies for your brand, AI can also help you tap into the latest trends.

Data is at the forefront when it comes to executing AI technology, so gathering and harnessing data-driven insights is the key to optimizing your product display.

Data-driven Insights: Optimizing Product Display

Your customer’s behavior when scrolling through your website is the most significant marker of your display’s effectiveness. If a product is too difficult to find or there is a lack of a call to action, you could lose potential sales. Data-driven insights are hidden within the product metrics you can analyze, including click-through rates, conversion rates, and product-wise sales.

For example, if you find a product with high clicks but low conversions, changing its display location or adjusting its positioning might help improve its sales. Similarly, you can curate your product display based on insights your customers share with every interaction with your brand.

Your goal with your product display is to invite customers and align your storefront with what they are looking for. By finetuning your layout, you will not only help amplify product sales but also cross-sell and upsell more effectively.

Cross-selling and Upselling Through Visual Merchandising

Visual merchandising is about more than the aesthetics of your display. Strategic positioning when done well can lead to stronger brand loyalty and consistent sales despite unpredictable market conditions. For example, if a customer is browsing through smartphone or laptop options to buy, you can push complementary products like compatible accessories to increase their order value.

Smaller gadgets like headphones or a sturdy phone cover can feel like the perfect add-on to their purchase, so customers are more likely to add them to their carts. This curiosity is easy to tap into and can lead to high revenue generation for the brand.

Visual merchandising is an effective way to cross-sell and upsell products. Investing in it can help customers feel valued and seamlessly integrate product purchases that are otherwise not as popular.

For instance, Apple is much more likely to sell an Apple pencil along with an iPad, so the brand doesn’t need to push the Apple pencil as an individual purchase.

User-generated Content and Social Proof

Today, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, making both user-generated content and social proof extremely valuable for your brand. Potential buyers want to see how your products will integrate into their lifestyle, and your customers can be that missing piece of the puzzle.

Positive customer reviews, photos, and testimonials add a layer of confidence to your brand and make it the obvious choice for a new customer. Integrating UGC (user-generated content) in visual merchandising can be as simple as displaying your best customer reviews for every product on its display page.

Case Studies: Successful Visual Merchandising Examples

Every brand’s success story with visual merchandising is unique to its goals, and one such example is that of Yotpo. This eCommerce marketing platform wanted to make their UGC shoppable and ideally shorten their customer’s path to purchase. In this fast-paced world, they realized the importance of maximizing sales across social media platforms.

The answer?
Visenze’s Visual AI solution.

With it, Yotpo’s customers could curate 33% more shoppable UGC as part of the catalog in the same amount of time. With this faster go-live along with scalable visual merchandising abilities, Yotpo could drive more consistent output for their customers and have maximized sales as a result.

Future Trends in eCommerce Visual Merchandising

eCommerce is a booming industry, growing at 7.4% year-over-year to billions of dollars in revenue. This is the perfect time for you to think deeply about your visual merchandising strategy.

The future of eCommerce will offer real-time updates, immersive experiences, and interactive elements to help customers engage with your brand. Visual merchandising can be an important tool for you to stay ahead of emerging trends and curate brand-customer relationships that help you optimize your eCommerce sales.

For smart product discovery solutions that take your brand to the next level, Visit Visenze and get a demo today!