The Ecommerce Merchandiser’s Guide to Success
Ecommerce merchandisers are the professionals tasked with making online shopping easy and enjoyable. These CX gurus are experts at combining technology, design, and messaging to drive sales and loyalty in an incredibly competitive environment.
If that sounds like a lot of responsibility—well, that’s because it is. Today’s shoppers expect to find products easily, move through the checkout process quickly, and feel confident in what they’re buying. And ecommerce merchandisers are the ones who make all that possible in order to meet (and exceed) customer expectations.
Digital merchandising, when done well, achieves all of this while fading into the background. Of course, that’s easier said than done. That’s why we created this guide.
Whether you’re a one-person merchandising team at a small company or part of a larger collective looking to level up your enterprise brand, we’ve put together everything you need to make your online shopping experience as intuitive as browsing the shelves of a physical store. Let’s jump in!
Ecommerce Merchandising 101
What is an Ecommerce Merchandiser?
An ecommerce merchandiser is essentially a customer experience (CX) architect focused on making retail buying experiences work well online. At the heart of every great online merchandising experience is an ecommerce site merchandiser, putting the necessary pieces in place to connect shoppers with products they’ll love.
Merchandisers orchestrate the digital elements that guide shoppers from browsing to buying. Their toolkit includes visual elements like product images, page layout, and visual cues. They also use technology like personalization, data and data analysis, and AI to make online shopping easier and more intuitive. Unlike traditional retail merchandising which is focused on physical displays, ecommerce merchandising makes products easier to find in digital spaces.
What Does an Ecommerce Merchandiser Do?
Ecommerce merchandisers create intuitive digital shopping experiences that help customers find and purchase products easily. By analyzing customer behavior, optimizing product placement, and using the right technology, they create personalized shopping experiences across an increasingly complex consumer buying journey.
Responsibilities, in a nutshell, include:
- Curating product collections and bundles that align with customer preferences
- Optimizing site search and navigation to improve product discovery
- Managing product recommendations and personalization strategies
- Analyzing customer data to inform merchandising decisions
- Creating virtual product displays and visual elements
- Implementing A/B and multivariate tests to optimize the customer experience
- Monitoring inventory levels and adjusting product visibility accordingly
Data, AI, technology, creativity, and a great eye for detail—these are the essential elements of the ecommerce merchandiser’s skillset. Ultimately, their work not only drives sales but also fosters customer loyalty, shaping brand perception in a competitive digital marketplace. By consistently adapting to trends and leveraging insights, they ensure that the online shopping experience remains fresh, engaging, and aligned with evolving consumer expectations.
Components of an Ecommerce Merchandising Strategy
Like a good recipe, your ecommerce merchandising strategy needs some essential ingredients to work well. The finished product (like a delicious digital pie) will feel seamless and satisfying, from a CX perspective. These ingredients include:
1. Visual merchandising elements
Visual cues are important in digital spaces. High-quality product images, intuitive layouts, strategic use of white space, an easy-to-find search bar—these elements work together to create an environment that makes shopping feel natural. Visual elements should guide customers through your product catalog effortlessly.
2. Personalized search and navigation
Effective AI-powered site search paired with smart navigation helps customers find products quickly. Features like autocomplete, faceted search, and personalized search results reduce choice overload and aid in product discovery. We get into more detail about how search and product discovery tools support effective ecommerce merchandising, below.
3. Data-driven product recommendations
Personalized recommendations, which use data to understand individual customer behaviors and needs, help shoppers discover relevant products. Monetate’s personalized product recommendations draw from a visitors’ browsing history, preferences, and past purchasing behavior to understand customer intent and present recommendations to shoppers as they move through their buying journey.
4. Customer journey optimization
Understanding how customers move between channels and devices like smartphones, laptops, physical stores, and apps, helps merchandisers design cohesive experiences across all these touchpoints—ensuring each one feels connected and personalized.
5. Testing and more testing
Continuous testing of layouts, content, and functionality should be part of your ecommerce merchandising strategy. Testing—including A/B, multivariate, and dynamic testing—should be baked into your ecommerce merchandising approach. Shopping behaviors, product offerings, new customer needs—all of these things change, and testing is the best way to proactively optimize the customer buying experience.
Get a Masters in Merchandising
Looking to level up your digital merchandising strategy? Go beyond the basics with best practices and proven strategies from some of the biggest names in ecommerce, featuring in-depth insights on ways to:
- Increase conversion rates
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- And more!
Challenges of Manual Merchandising
What works in physical stores falls short in digital spaces. Here’s why manual merchandising doesn’t work online the way it does in-store:
Scale is impossible
Creating and sharing product sets across multiple channels including your website, mobile app, and brick-and-mortar locations, requires constant manual updates. Even the most organized merchandiser can’t keep up.
Product sets get old fast
Manually curated collections don’t respond to inventory changes or shifts in customer behavior. Without automation, these sets become outdated almost immediately.
Personalization? Not happening
Manual approaches rely on guesswork versus data. To scale personalization across multiple touchpoints, thousands of customers, and hundreds of thousands of products requires data plus AI to accurately predict what individual shoppers want to see.
Time is finite
Manual product categorization, CX refinement, and pricing eat up great swaths of time that could be better spent on strategy. Automation lets merchandisers make better use of their limited time. Without it, you’re constantly playing catch-up.
ROI suffers
It’s impossible for manual merchandising to maximize revenue potential across a large and complex product catalog. When pricing, sales, and promotions aren’t optimized by data, you’re leaving money on the table.
Building the Digital Customer Journey
Ecommerce merchandisers must be experts when it comes to understanding the buying journey from a shopper’s perspective. Buying just about anything these days is becoming more complex, spanning multiple touchpoints, devices, and channels.
This includes categories where consumers traditionally only shopped in physical stores, like groceries, which are now connected to online purchasing and fulfillment systems (e.g., buy online, pick up in store.) From homepage to checkout, every interaction shapes how shoppers perceive and engage with your brand.
The touchpoints on the right are the most important bits and pieces that form the backbone of a digital shopping journey. However, while these digital destinations are foundational to online buying experiences, the caveat is that shoppers may not move linearly through these spaces. Shoppers may hop between devices, leave items in carts, and return days later. For B2B buyers, the shopping journey can be particularly fragmented, lengthy, and populated by multiple buyers in buying groups versus one lone shopper.
To fully understand how different customer segments experience the buying journey, we recommend creating a customer journey map (or several, depending on how many segments you’re targeting. Customer journey analytics—a feature built into Monetate’s platform—reveal where and how customers are interacting across different buying experiences.
Your Homepage
The homepage sets the tone for a shopper’s initial experience. It’s where first impressions happen and returning customers reconnect. Homepage merchandising relies on a combination of elements—hero images, CTA buttons and text, white space, and, of course, the products themselves.
Home page merchandisers can use personalization engines like Monetate to customize home page content, adapting the products presented (for example), based on whether someone’s new to your site or a loyal customer. New visitors might see trending products, while returning shoppers get personalized recommendations related to their previous purchases.
Category and Product Listing Pages (PLPs)
Your category and PLPs need intuitive navigation and smart filtering options—not to mention gorgeous product images—to move shoppers further into the buying process.
These are the places where shoppers start narrowing down their choices. Product detail pages must balance information with visual appeal—too much content overwhelms and too little leaves questions unanswered.
The Shopping Cart
The final leg in the digital buying journey requires careful thought and planning. Clear shipping information, secure payment options, and strategically placed product recommendations can turn a single purchase into a larger order. Every step in the checkout process matters.
A Tale of Two Customer Journeys
Example of a B2C buying journey
Let’s say one of your customers is in the market for a new coffee maker. They begin typing the word “coff” into the search bar, and immediately a list of potential searches appears—coffee, coffee maker, coffee creamer, etc.
They select “coffee makers on sale” and see hundreds of results which can be narrowed down by facets and filters (brand, cup capacity, features, etc.) Customer reviews and ratings appear alongside each item along with social proof elements (e.g., Only 4 left at your store, hot item, etc.)
They click on a programmable coffee maker and the product listing page (PLP) contains product images, details, delivery options, and other essential information—all at a glance. As they scroll down the page, they’re greeted by a list of accessories and complimentary items—coffee filters, mugs, oatmilk, etc. that they can bundle with their purchase.
A digital merchandiser has expertly curated this experience, using technology to create that satisfying in-store shopping experience tailored specifically for the shoppers’ needs. Everything from the way products are displayed in search results to how the checkout process unfolds is carefully orchestrated. Even moving between a smartphone and laptop is considered—the experience stays consistent no matter which device they’re using
Example of a B2B buying journey
A procurement manager at a manufacturing company needs new safety equipment for their workers. She starts browsing industrial supply websites during her morning commute. On one safety equipment supplier site, she sees personalized recommendations based on her company’s previous orders.
She searches for safety vests and finds options grouped by class type and feature (e.g., hi-vis, flame resistant, etc.) The site remembers her company’s preferences and shows a “Quick Reorder” button for items like disposable masks and safety glasses. When she gets to her desk, she logs in, and her cart syncs automatically across devices.
The product pages display bulk pricing, volume discounts, and real-time inventory levels for multiple shipping locations. Since B2B purchases often require approval, she adds items to a shared cart that routes through her company’s workflow. Other stakeholders can access the cart, add notes, and adjust quantities while maintaining contracted pricing terms.
A digital merchandiser has optimized this entire B2B experience, considering the complex needs of business buyers like bulk pricing displays, links to compliance documentation, and stock availability. The journey spans multiple decision makers, devices, and sessions, but stays cohesive through personalization technology that recognizes and adapts to B2B buying patterns.
Benefits of Digital Merchandising
Digital merchandising is meant to help shoppers find products, even on huge retail websites that have thousands or hundreds of thousands of SKUs. Ecommerce merchandising works well because:
Good shopping experiences improve sales
When shoppers find what they need quickly, they’re more likely to buy. Clear product information, social proof, and features like free shipping builds consumer confidence. Reviews are particularly powerful—they can boost conversions by up to 270%.
Comprehensive product information equals better CX
Digital merchandising makes products easier to evaluate with compelling images, videos, written descriptions, and strategic page layouts. Modern tools help you showcase items based on data versus gut instinct. While it may not completely replace the in-store experience of holding an item, it comes as close as possible to communicating what that shoe or table lamp looks like in the real world.
Personalization sells more stuff
In physical stores, merchandisers use visual cues to cross-sell items, for example, by placing complementary products near each other or creating bold visual displays. Digital spaces require more subtlety (and technology). Incorporating AI-powered recommendations into a website or shopping app is how merchandisers achieve this. Another is by grouping similar products together (e.g., Shop the Look, Complete the Look, etc.) or using personalized search results to display the most relevant products based on a customer’s browsing behavior, buying history, or both.
Merchandising reduces cart abandonment
A smooth checkout process with clear product information, delivery estimates, flexible payment options, lots of fulfillment choices, a step-by-step checkout layout, and other cues gives shoppers confidence to complete their purchase. Checkout must be easy. It must be mobile-friendly. Merchandisers ensure the checkout process contains every bit of information a customer needs to complete their purchase with confidence.
Merchandising Results
When retailers integrate features like product recommendations and personalized search into their ecommerce merchandising approach, the impact on key metrics can be significant. For example, merchandisers can expect to see a:
Increase in search revenue through personalized search.
Boost in RPS after implementing product recommendations.
Uplift in CVR after deploying automated personalization.
The Value of Personalized Search for Ecommerce Merchandisers
In digital retail spaces, technology works behind the scenes to make products easier to find. Predictive search—a key component of personalized search—is an example of this. It’’s a product merchandising element that’s unique to digital spaces. While autocomplete is visible to shoppers, appearing as they type a query into the search field, predictive search tools analyze customer behavior and context to anticipate what shoppers want.
It’s the difference between suggesting search terms and actually understanding shopping intent. Benefits include:
Faster product discovery
Personalized search displays product links and images directly in the drop-down suggestions, which lets shoppers jump straight to relevant items (bypassing the search results completely).
Smarter recommendations
By analyzing past purchases and browsing patterns, personalized search helps customers find complementary products. This lets merchandisers upsell items, move inventory, and suggest item alternatives that a shopper might be interested in (if the item they want isn’t available, for example).
Mobile-optimized experience
On smaller screens, predictive search is particularly valuable. It reduces typing errors and presents a curated set of suggestions, which minimizes time spent hunting around for the right link or image to click. Mobile shopping is expected to exceed desktop shopping this year, so anything that makes it easier is worth folding into your merchandising strategy.
Interactive guidance
Features like product finders and chatbots use technology to help shoppers refine and discover products through guided questions. This is a tangible example of how technology replicates in-store merchandising experiences—acting as a kind of virtual stand-in for a sales associate.
Help Every Customer Find What They Need With the Right Personalization Platform
Ecommerce merchandisers orchestrate the digital elements that turn browsers into buyers. Their hard work results in shoppers quickly and easily locating products. This requires a mix of technology, creativity, and human experience, which combine to make product discovery feel effortless for digital shoppers.
The best digital merchandising approaches combine AI-powered technology including:
- Personalized search to help shoppers find items based on their browsing patterns and preferences
- Product recommendations that surface complementary items a shopper might like
- Dynamic bundles that group related products together logically
- Social proof, which builds confidence through customer reviews and ratings.
- A/B, multivariate, and dynamic testing to keep the entire experience optimized and relevant
Personalization platforms like Monetate support complex digital buying journeys. They make it possible for ecommerce merchandisers to create consistency across multiple touchpoints and devices through integrations, data unification, and AI tools that analyze and process information.
Monetate also helps retailers align customer buying patterns, behaviors, and preferences across the entire journey. The platform supports an integrated approach to digital merchandising—one that equips merchandisers for success no matter what the journey looks like.
Learn Why Merchandisers Love Monetate
