Black Friday 2021 Merchandising
By: Ian Mckinnon
Tags: Black Friday, Ecommerce, Conversion Optimization, Merchandising, Best Practices

11 Online Merchandising Tactics For Selling Like Crazy on BFCM

A checklist for maxing out conversions on Black Friday Cyber Monday (2021) Ian Mckinnon Follow Jul 29 · 10 min read

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

Last year’s BFCM was a record setting day for online shopping and many of you, especially all you site merchandisers out there, should already be preparing this year’s day of days.

With this in mind we analyzed ecommerce methods currently used by our clients and other top merchants and compiled this shortlist of 11 online merchandising suggestions for 2021.

How does your site stack up? Does it have the features it needs to turn shoppers into buyers this year? It’s not too late to make changes before the door crashing begins!

11 online merchandising tactics for 2021

Use computer vision for more detailed product tags

Product tags are the foundation of ecommerce merchandising. They are the basis of inventory organization and the means for you to group products for categories, collections and promotions.

Computer vision/NLP (natural language processing) finds the minute details in your product images and automatically labels them for you, granulating your data and saving you tons of time.

With this greater level of detail in your product tags you can merchandise your products according to attributes, providing more detail for shoppers and enriching their experience with more sophisticated product descriptions.

Also, if you have the right tools to assess what shoppers are looking at on your site you can use the extra detailed data to segment shoppers according to what features they like about a product.

When you know customer preferences at this deeper level you can determine why a customer likes a particular product and make super accurate recommendations.

This advantage makes a big difference when it comes to cross-selling and upselling.

Convert more discounts with personalized pop-ups

With this more detailed data in hand, personalized pop-ups can be added to engage customers at just the right time, wherever they are on your site.

Within just a handful of customer clicks, machine learning algorithms can figure out which products individual customers are most likely to be interested in, right down to the color, pattern material and more.

For returning visitors, demographic/transactional/onsite behavioral data also gets collected and individual profiles are automatically created.

Personalized pop-ups can be created based on these profiles, offering both discounts and recommendations that convert more than generic offers.

Cross-sell more with personalized recommendations

Detailed product tags plus and customer data make on-page recommendations much more accurate, increasing your chances on cross-sells.

Browsing behavior is monitored and site visitors end up seeing recommendations that match their preference profile. Recommendations for returning visitors are even more on point

This combined product/customer data is a powerful thing. Using it to engage customers personally has been shown to boost AOV and get 5X ROI.

At the end of the customer journey, on the product page, personalized product recommendations have been shown to increase sales by as much as 51%.

Product page tags

Product page recommendations

Improving the quality of your product tags improves your ability to merchandise your products across all pages of your website.

Keep collections creative, leverage community

You can get creative with a collection theme. Vintage is trending again? Ok. Here’s the vintage collection. In fact here’s a particular vintage, Y2K:

Collections can be themed in a way that communicates your brand values. Australian BOHO brand Tree of life offers collections ranging from “Free Love” to “Mystic Mama.”

Collections can also be user generated. Many brands have membership programs that reward frequent consumers with discounts and exclusive offers, etc., but nowadays brands even get their community to design collections.

Korean multi-brand fashion powerhouse, Codibook, is known for its shopping community of over 800000 “Coordinators,” who create their favorite outfits from an assortment of products from over 70 different brands.

Then they share their creations as shoppable outfits for other users to see. Great outfits are promoted as collections on the website and are rewarded with giveaways, encouraging customer engagement and attracting new users all the time.

Making collections is a great merchandising tactic that eases the customer journey by offering a suggestion and removing difficult decisions.

Collections are easy to set up if your product tags are set up well.

Instead of having someone choose each item to show, you can update a whole group of products based on attributes you want to focus on (price, gender, color, fit, sleeve, neck, etc.).

Embed shoppable UGC (user-generated content)

Besides collections, you can invite your visitors to provide content for you that shows off your brand out in the wild.

A UGC feed from social media on your landing page provides a valuable layer of authenticity to your brand.

Seeing how clothes look in real life (at the park, on the street, at work, etc.) provides social proof that people love your brand, and heightens your trustworthiness, increasing the shopper’s comfort and the likelihood they will complete their purchase.

Making the UGC image shoppable (checkout just a click away) increases the likelihood of conversion even more.

United Colors of Benetton worked with Photoslurp to embed a UGC feed on the homepage shown above. On average, Photoslurp can increase sales by 15%.

While UGC provides the third party authenticity, you can also opt to show off your own IG content to merchandise products.

The familiar grid layout feels natural to shoppers whose browsing time is primarily spent on Instagram. You can control your content to include memes, collections, influencers, settings, and really whatever you post on your Instagram is fair game. Verge Girl has it figured out:

Product reviews are another form of UGC. They convert best when they’re shoppable (with Buy Now or Add To Cart just a click away)

Stay relevant with your product imagery

While luxury brands struggle with the predicament of how to remain exclusive and still be relatable online, they are the minority!

For most brands, ultra-realistic, everyday-looking product imagery is what sells these days because it’s what people are used to seeing from influencers, friends, family, work, hobbies, entertainment, news, etc.

Instagram image trends in 2021 gathered by WGSN (12 trends in total) include “less filtered perfection as new pandemic-era content places an emphasis on unfiltered perspectives.”

Beyond the filter. Over the past year, Instagram influencers began to develop content that reflected emotionally turbulent times (Source: WGSN).

Messy bedrooms. As the world locked down in 2020, the culture of Instagram changed almost overnight (Source: WGSN).

The WGSN Instagram Styling 2021 list goes on, including Blurred Imagery, Purposely Poor Photoshop, Sink Stories, and more.

Japanese multi-brand retailer, Baycrew’s, presents professional but low-key imagery. They also add the height of the model to give the shopper a clear reference when choosing the fit.

Shein presents more glamorous models wearing sexier styles, but still keeps imagery relatable in terms of image production value.

As the Shein example shows, relatable doesn’t have to be dull. It’s what the younger generations (Gen Z, Millennials) expect to see this year.

Present products in the inverted pyramid style

This style of presenting information is a standard in journalism but it also works well for merchandising products because it maps to the classic AIDA marketing strategy (attention, interest, decision, action). In journalism it breaks down like this:

Most important information first (who, what, where, when, how)

Important details next

General/background information last

Birchbox is a good example of the inverted pyramid for ecommerce merchandising:

Make product categories that guide shoppers

A clear list of categories lets shoppers see your entire product range at a glance. This high level view of what you’re offering is comforting to shoppers because it lets them find what they’re looking for with maximum efficiency.

It’s a very basic thing but, but big brands like Adidas do it well because it makes for very good CX.

Implement detailed faceted search

Faceted search is another way to help your shoppers search for products quickly. It improves the customer experience in the same way that good categories do: by easing the experience.

Being able to search for products by brand, department, size, color, etc., reduces friction and keeps your shoppers shopping.

Popcorn, a multi-brand streetwear ecommerce site from Hong Kong uses faceted search because they have a large inventory of products and brands to choose from.

This advanced search option makes it easier for shoppers to find what they’re looking for, increasing CTR and overall conversion.

Reward shoppers who complete the customer journey

How good is the cheap pizza/hotdog at Costco after you’ve made the full trek through the store? That’s their reward to us and we love it!

Ecommerce merchants have figured out plenty of ways to do this as well. The Sephora checkout page has freebies and promotions, encouraging us to keep going at this last stage of the purchase.

Besides incentivizing us to complete our purchases, this tactic makes us appreciate the offer and that feeling leads to brand loyalty.

More traffic means more abandoned carts, prepare your remarketing/retargeting

A big part of ecommerce merchandising revolves around the opportunities presented when shoppers add to cart but don’t check out, because it happens a lot.

There are actually lots of things you can do to prevent shopping cart abandonment in the first place.

But when it does happen, the best thing to do is to have a well-thought-out recovery plan for Email/SMS remarketing and retargeting ads.

Send personalized remarketing emails

So remarketing emails for cart abandonment convert at a high rate compared to other forms of email outreach.

If you schedule them to be sent right away it’s best, within a couple hours of the cart being abandoned to remind shoppers while the experience is still fresh.

Use SMS remarketing

While email remarketing gets high open and conversion rates, the rates for SMS are super high at 98%.

One reason is that we often see an SMS before an email. When an SMS pops up, we read immediately because it’s so short and usually easy to read in its entirety as a notification.

Pay for retargeting ads

Retargeting ads also work well for recovering abandoned carts. The most effective way to run a campaign is to base it on specific segments.

AI-driven solutions can help identify these segments, right down to their browsing/spending habits and product preferences at the attribute level.

Conclusion

Ecommerce competition is intense and merchandising can make or break your success. Good merchandising engages customers, making the experience interesting and comfortable and guiding them along the customer journey.

The key takeaway is that setting up your backend with accurate product tags is a critical first step that gives you more control of everything you want to do.

About Rosetta.ai

Rosetta AI offers image-based personalization for more engaging shopping experiences, detailed shopper data for email marketing/SMS campaigns, and preference analysis insights for better business decisions.

On average, our clients double their order value and triple their conversion rate because shoppers on their websites are more engaged by the industry-leading accuracy of our personalized recommendations.

Rosetta AI has been featured in Forbes Top 25 ML startups and Analytics Insights Top 10 companies.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial today and start growing your business on day one!