Growing Sales with These Merchandising Tips

E-commerce is more popular than ever before and many customers are still wary about in-person shopping, but despite these challenges for retailers, brick-and-mortar sales remain strong with the right in-store experience. This starts with how you merchandise your store — the goal is to help shoppers locate what they want quickly, while also increasing your bottom line.

If you already know anything about merchandising, you know it starts with a floor plan that facilitates shopping. Whatever your store’s footprint ends up being, you need to give customers plenty of space to move around and maneuver their carts through aisles. Also, try to avoid merchandising the front few feet of the store to allow for a “decompression zone” when shoppers first walk in.

Think about putting the most popular items in the back of the store. That way, your shoppers have to walk through aisles to get what they buy frequently instead of just running in to grab what they need and running back out again. Put new products where they’ll be seen, use calls to action that create a sense of urgency, and educate them on something they may not have tried yet.

Bending over to reach a product might be out of the question for customers with mobility issues and not being able to reach products could prevent shoppers from buying something altogether. Keep your important signage and merchandising displays between knee and eye level, ensure important signage is visible, and put slow-moving inventory front and center to help make room for newer items.

Keep your cash register or check-out area clutter-free so shoppers have room to spread out their products, purses, and sometimes even children as their hand over payment. Create customized displays to encourage impulse purchases and add signage that makes your return policy clear. This is where you can put business cards or other marketing materials that can be easily slipped into shopping bags with the receipt. 

It may be tempting to arrange your merchandising displays in perfect rows, but this could prevent customers from picking up products to examine them and disturbing the order. Just as bland, unappealing merchandise can turn off a customer, so too could too many bells and whistles or an aesthetic that seems too precise to “mess up”.

Studies show that shoppers move through stores like they drive; they walk through the front door and take a right first. They scan with their eyes from side to side instead of up and down, similar to how we move through vehicle traffic. With this in mind, keep merchandising displays under 2 feet apart so that customers can see more of your store and its products with one glance.

Use custom merchandising displays to inform and educate shoppers about product use, precautions, or brand news. It empowers them to make purchasing decisions without having to find an employee, who may or may not have the product knowledge to provide details like prices, ingredients, uses, or warnings.

Bundling similar, supplemental, and complementary items together so shoppers don’t have to travel a complicated path to get everything they need. Keeping some cohesion makes your store layout familiar, a big factor when shoppers decide which stores they’ll shop at regularly and loyally. Isn’t it nice when you know where everything is within your favorite store?

Your optimized floorplan layout and stellar merchandising displays don’t mean much if everything is covered in a thick layer of dust and grime. Make a daily, weekly, and monthly checklist for cleaning tasks that keep your store sparkling and appealing, without dirt, grime, and disorganization. 

While you may not know what kind of merchandising your store needs to succeed, a team of professionals that do this every day will be able to lead you in the right direction. We are committed to transforming great ideas into even greater examples of the finest quality merchandising equipment while maximizing the visual impact of our customers’ products.

Ready to start talking about your next merchandising project? We help drive customer’s brand preferences and ultimately, sales. From concept through distribution, our capabilities are not limited by the medium, retail channel, customer size, or delivery requirements — let’s get started.