Cross Merchandising in Your Retail Displays

Cross Merchandising in Your Retail Displays. Cross merchandising is a great way of introducing customers to the breadth of merchandise in your store. When done right, cross merchandising is a great tool that easily increases sales. It’s a straightforward concept, but there are also plenty of ways that it could go wrong.

It’s just as easy to overwhelm and confuse customers with cross merchandising instead of encouraging add on sales. The right approach is essential, especially to high impact areas like a store’s point of purchase displays.

For retailers that would like to get better acquainted with cross merchandising and understand why it’s an important strategy that benefits both you and your customers, we’ve put together a quick guide.

Cross merchandising is a display tactic that places different, but complementary, types of products together in one spot to influence customer purchases. Great cross merchandising introduces new products to the customer, but also makes their shopping experience easier by displaying complimentary merchandise together.

Effective cross merchandising provides added value to the customer while encouraging the additional sales that retailers love.

Sometimes, creating display areas with multiple types of merchandise is challenging. It involves planning, finding just the right products that work together and possibly reconfiguring the display space to accommodate different types of merchandise.

In retail, the costs to your business are measured in more than just profit from sales, but also in how efficiently work hours are allocated. It’s fair to ask if the effort put into cross merchandising is worth it.

The answer is without a doubt, yes. Here’s 3 reasons why.

We’ll start here because this is the benefit that retailers are the most interested in. If a customer comes into your store for just one thing, but finds complimentary items displayed with it, they are more likely to make an additional purchase. Let’s look at a mobile phone display for example.

A customer might come in looking for a new phone, or maybe a protective case. When they reach the display they also find paid cards for pay-as-you-go plans, chargers, screen protectors, selfie sticks, etc.  The customer was already planning on purchasing, so it’s easy to encourage an add on sale with complimentary merchandise.

Cross merchandising works especially well for stores that have an incredible selection, but customers that don’t spend a ton of time browsing. An attractively designed display grabs attention and introduces customers to the fact that you offer more than they realized. Cross merchandising encourages customers to go deeper, browse and eventually buy.

Customers appreciate displays that are designed with convenience in mind. For example, if a retail POP display features flashlights, adding batteries to it means that the customer doesn’t need to wander back through the store. This is the type of convenience that customers appreciate and come back for.

High quality shelving and display fixtures will make your cross merchandising efforts more impactful, and effective. We offer a range of solutions for your retail space. Contact PFI today to learn about our prebuilt and custom designed merchandising solutions.