What is visual merchandising? Meaning and examples

What does visual merchandising mean?

Visual merchandising is the part of selling that shoppers see. Shopify's guide calls it "planning and designing product displays that attract customers and increase sales."

Merchandising is the wider choice of what you stock and which products you push. Visual merchandising is the display that carries those choices. The merchandising definition covers the wider job, and the ecommerce merchandising guide shows how to run both on Shopify. On a small store, the visual merchandiser is you.

What is visual merchandising in retail?

In a shop, visual merchandising turns color, lighting, layout and signs into moves you have walked past many times.

• The window display tells people on the street what the shop sells and gives them a reason to come in.
• The table by the door sits a few steps inside, since shoppers take in little in their first steps past the entrance.
• Eye level is where the shop puts what it most wants sold.
• Color blocking sorts a rail into bands of color, a staple in clothing shops.
• Signs and price cards give a shopper one reason to look closer.
• Cross-merchandising hangs the belt beside the trousers, so the second sale is within reach.
• A planogram is the drawn plan of which product goes on which shelf, so every branch of a chain looks the same.

Where a product sits can change how much of it sells. In a field experiment across 214 stores of a German perfumery chain, eight products moved from their usual shelf to displays near the checkout, at the same price. Their unit sales rose 80% to 478% against the control group, depending on the product. The authors call the extra revenue low and tell shops to weigh it against what the displays cost. On your own store, compare a product's sell-through rate in the weeks before and after you move it.

What is visual merchandising in ecommerce?

It is the same work on a screen. Online the shelf never ends, but the view before a shopper scrolls does. On a desktop screen, people spent about 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold, that first view, in Nielsen Norman Group's 2018 eye-tracking study.

Every shop job has an online twin, with a setting you control on Shopify.

Two things are new online. Visits and orders are counted, and you can test a change against the version you run now. In Rollouts that test is an "Experiment", on the Grow plan and up. Shopify A/B testing covers how to run one you can trust.

Visual merchandising examples on a Shopify store

On a Shopify store, the collection page is the shop floor.

The first row of a collection

You want this week's best sellers up top, and a sold-out jacket sits in the first slot instead. No Shopify sort reads stock, and "Best selling" adds up all-time orders, so a sold-out card or last year's hit can stay in front. Pick "Manually", the order you set by hand, and you can drag products or move the ones you tick "To the beginning".

Sledge is a Shopify app for search, filters and merchandising rules. Its "Pin" rule holds the products you pick at the top, and a boost rule can lift "Best sellers" of the last 7, 14 or 30 days. "Move Sold Products to the end of product listing" keeps sold-out cards behind the ones you can ship. All three work on the collection pages Sledge shows, with its "Product Filter" tool on.

Five merchandising rules that lift sales help you choose what goes first, and the post on pushing out-of-stock products to the bottom has the sold-out fix in full.

Photos that match

One photo sits on white, the next on a wooden table, and the cards come out at different heights. The grid looks messy before anyone reads a price. Shoot every product in a collection on one background, with one crop and one shape.

Your theme's product card usually has a setting for the picture's shape. In Horizon it is "Aspect ratio", with Auto, Portrait, Square and Landscape, and Portrait as the default. It fixes the shape, not a mixed background, so the photo on the wooden table still needs a reshoot.

Badges

This week's arrivals need a New badge, and your theme may offer only two. Horizon and Dawn show Sale and Sold out product badges on cards on their own, and Horizon's "Position on cards" setting picks the corner. Anything else, like New or Low stock, takes an app or a developer.

In Sledge's badge form, you type the "Badge label", pick its corner under "Badge position", and set "Active dates" so a New badge comes down on time. "Inventory conditions" can show it only while a product is in stock, or only while its stock is at least, or at most, a count you set. The badge goes on the products or collections you pick.

For Horizon in detail, read how to add product badges to the Horizon theme.

Color swatches

Your product cards say "3 colors" instead of showing them, or the dots appear only on hover. On phones, 57% of sites leave some colors off their product cards for products people choose by look, Baymard found. Some shoppers then take the colors they see as all you sell.

Shopify's own route is to give each product a category, add color entries for it, link them to the product's color option, and use a theme that shows swatches. Sledge's "Color Swatch" tool maps the color names in your product options, tags, collections or custom product details to swatches in the filter. When you have hundreds of colors, you can upload them in one spreadsheet.

For the filter route on Dawn, read how to show color swatches on Shopify collection pages.

A banner between products

You want a sale banner inside the collection, after the first eight products, and not only above them. Most themes put a collection banner above the grid, not among the cards.

In Sledge, a merchandising rule can place a promo banner you already run at a position number in the grid, and "Position 1 is the very top of the list." The banner sits beside the products and pushes none off the page. Like Pin, it works on the collection pages Sledge shows.

Pin, boost rules, badges, color swatch filters and banner placement come with all four paid Sledge plans, from Pro at $29.99 a month.

Search results are a shelf too, and searchandising is the same work there. The product listing page post takes the collection page apart, piece by piece. To check your own store, collections included, run a Shopify store audit.