I’ve been reading the Internet Retailing Top500 Merchandising report and it’s got a ton of useful information gleaned from some of the biggest retailers in the country.
Whilst some of the report might not be too useful to smaller website and marketplace sellers, a lot of it is. Lessons the big boys paid a fortune to learn can be translated into small business practise for free.
One stand out for me in the report was the section where retailers discussed how you can merchandise from search results. In the report Ian Scarr, a VP at SLI Systems, explains “The latest learning search platforms can learn from information such as customer behaviour on the website to provide the most relevant results”. Using this, he says, “Your users are merchandising your site for your other users. It’s their buying, clicking and their interaction with your keywords that’s re-ranking the most popular products to the top – and making you more money”.
Now we can’t all afford expensive software to do this, but what we can do is look at our site data for our website or check out eBay shop traffic to find out which our most searched for products are. These are the products we should then be merchandising on our shop home page, sharing to social media and perhaps marketing within an eBay Collection.
You may even discover that products buyers are searching for aren’t even available on your website or in your eBay shop. In this case you’ve suddenly got some valuable data to guide your purchasing decisions for the future.
If you’d like to learn more, you can download the full IR Top500 Merchandising Report today (and it’s free).
