Top 10 merchandising tips for the holidays

The holidays are a busy time for everyone, including your customers. Use our list of 10 merchandising tips to make it easy for customers to navigate your site, view your best products and deals, and find all the information they need to make confident purchasing decisions.

1. Make a Good First Impression: Focus merchandising efforts on your home page, key category pages, and other popular landing pages. Remember that slow page loads may drive customers away, so avoid heavy merchandising that slows these pages down.

2. Eliminate Clicks: Highlight your best sellers and deals on popular landing pages to reduce the number of clicks to see a buyable product.

3. Promote! Holiday shoppers expect deals. Free shipping options or promotions (like “free shipping on all orders over $100”) are always popular.  Increase your deal’s visibility by featuring it on the home page and cart page if not site-wide. Dollars off, percentage off, and “buy x, get y” can also work well. Consider creating a “sale” category, then update it regularly and let customers know about it.  A regularly updated “deal of the day” can be another great way to keep customers coming back to your site.

4. Customers Shop by Price and Brand: Help shoppers find items in their price range by enabling filtering and sorting of search results by price. Brand specific pages and filtering search results by brand both help customers quickly find the products they want.

5. Visual Appeal Matters: Consider investing in high quality imagery and site design. Including video on your site (home, category, and product pages) can help boost conversion. Customers expect to find and purchase the items featured in merchandising imagery and videos, you can avoid customer frustration by only including products you sell and keep in stock!

6. Organization: Professional looking, well organized sites inspire confidence. Organize your products into clear and distinct main categories and consistent, well organized subcategories. Empty categories waste customers’ time and cause frustration, remove them from your site.

7. Reduce Scrolling: Keep critical site features and product information visible without scrolling.  This applies to search results, products on category pages, and the buy button, product images, and price information on product pages. Provide additional details lower on the page.

8. Clear Messaging: During the holidays customers are overwhelmed with messaging. Effective merchandising and promotional text is descriptive and accurate while being brief, to the point, and with a clear call to action. Keep things simple and easy to understand, avoid repetition and don’t mix messages.

9. Shipping: Fast shipping is always important, but especially during the holiday season; customers need to know their gifts will arrive on time. Eliminate this worry with clear, site-wide messaging around delivery timeframes, shipping cut-off dates, and contact information.

10. Returns: Returns are part of the holiday experience. Make sure your return policy is available on your website and very clear, especially about any limitations.