A few months ago a few of my new co-workers and I ventured off to Chinook Mall to see if the good old bricks-and-mortar stores had anything to teach us about how to do online merchandising. I’ll be honest, I had never thought about merchandising in an online context before. I’ve thought about marketing or promoting products on a website. I’ve worked with UX people who know how to create the right user experiences for customers. I’ve thought about branding on a site and conveying personality and creating emotionally engaging experiences. But I’d never considered merchandising on a site. But … it totally makes sense!

Here’s what we discovered:

1. Human faces can be tricky: Sometimes they draw you in and sometimes you focus too much on them that you lose sight of the product that’s being sold. Let’s take Old Navy and The Gap as examples. Old Navy uses mannequins with goofy faces from TV campaigns to tie in their offline brand campaign. These faces distract me from the clothes (the product). The Gap, on the other hand, uses headless mannequins which put more emphasis on the product instead of the brand.
   

   Old Navy mannequins with goofy faces that tie into television campaigns

   

   Headless mannequins at The Gap

   Lessons for online merchandisers: be careful about the images you choose for your site. Ask yourself if the human faces draw site visitors in and then lead them to the primary call-to-action/message or whether they just draw your visitors in then leave them hanging in eye contact. Often times, we’ll spend time looking at faces and judging them. They look old, they look young, they don’t look like they’d use this product. You know what I mean.

2. Place your products based on where the customer is entering the storefront: With stores that have both mall entrances and outdoor entrances, this lesson becomes really obvious. You’ll notice that stores like Chapters place totally different products at the mall entrance versus the outdoor entrance. The storefront entrance is geared for the person who is more task-oriented and shows depth of the product. What you’ll see at Chapters, for example, is that the outdoor entrance is filled with books and topics/categories that show depth. The mall entrance is more for browsers and gives shoppers a look at the breadth of products. At Chapters, they do an amazing job with three tables with different types of merchandise that are seasonally based: Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Vampires, books, iPods, chocolate, local books, magazines, etc.). The three tables have three different offers/sales to draw customers in and the mall entrance displays at least 10-15 different products whereas the outdoor entrance has just books.
   

   Chapters entrance from outdoors; books everywhere showing depth of product

   

   Mall entrance to Chapters showing breadth of product and attracting shopping mall browsers with all sorts of products

   

   Mall entrance to Chapters displaying breadth of products; notice how much larger it is than the entrance from outdoors

   Lessons for online merchandisers: ensure you tailor landing pages (virtual storefronts) based on where the customer is coming from. For example, use a different landing page for “new” customers (someone who has only made between one and five visits) and offer them a brand description, a search bar and product categories to familiarize themselves with the breadth of your product offer and core value props. Or, if your customers are coming from a partner, display both of your logos to strengthen the trust that the customer has in your brand based on the trust that they have for the referring partner brand.

3. Demonstrate use and inspire your customers with ways to use your product: Apparel stores are really good at this. The Gap, especially. The Gap shows mannequins wearing separates/combinations in lifestyle poses throughout the store and at the back of the store there are these beautifully lit-up boards that show people wearing the clothes in photos. These lit-up boards draw you into the back of the store. So if you are standing out front, you might walk right in to the back of the store. The Gap also conveys their classic/simple brand by keeping the palette relatively neutral with the only pop of colour being the big blue nameplate. This really emphasizes their product – the clothes. Old Navy, on the other hand, just has shelves and tables full of stuff that you put together yourself with mannequins only at the front of the store and in the middle aisle. They are less about lifestyle and more about the volume of choices and coordinates that you can put together yourself. It’s the DIY of fashion.
   

   The Gap's inspiration boards - lit up images of models wearing their clothes draw you into the store

   

   The only pop of colour is the signature Gap blue

   Lessons for online merchandisers: consider showing how your product can be used or showing it in use. Showing customers with your product with testimonials is a great way of conveying use.  A few great sites include “Ideas” sections where you can test drive products or get ideas on what an outfit or car would look like. This is a great way of introducing new customers to your product and having them “engage” with the product online where they can’t smell, touch or feel it like they could if they were in a store or a showroom.
   

4. Grab your cart, then shop: This is a fascinating lesson. Think about your local grocery store. What’s the first thing you do? Grab your cart, right? And after you grab your cart, you shop like hell, fill up your cart and then head to the till and only then do you find out how much your groceries cost. The great thing about this is that there are no barriers to browsing and adding items to your cart. You don’t have to have a Safeway membership before you grab a cart. You don’t need to open a Bay account before you browse around.
   
   Lessons for online merchandisers: so many online sites force you to have an account before you can put stuff in a cart. Consider making a cart available to all browsers and allowing visitors to put stuff into the cart. Show them the tally somewhere so they know how much they are spending and only at the point of purchase ask them to create an account. Make it part of the same process. What’s even better is that you now know what interests new customers and you can make recommendations on other products before they checkout or provide them with incentives to buy more (like Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping).
5. Are you all about breadth? Or are you all about depth? Some places show you the breadth of the product offering and some show depth, depending on where you enter. Grocery stores show you breadth by using signage at higher heights; these help you know where you need to go. But at eye-level, now that’s where you will see sale tags and promotional offers. That’s because they are now trying to demonstrate depth to you. Choose this brand and save, or choose another.
   
   Lessons for online merchandisers: think about whether you offer lots of kinds of products or just one product with lots of variations. If it’s depth you are going for, help customers find that right product for themselves. If it’s breadth, then help customers find the category they are looking for first, then focus on the specific brand they need.
   
6. Help customers find their way with clear paths: Old Navy and grocery stores does this really well. At Old Navy, it’s clear that the men should go to the left and the women to the right (and children’s clothing was with women’s because women often shop with and for children). At Co-op, they almost force you into the produce section as soon as you enter so that you don’t get lost in all of the tills.
   

   At Old Navy, the path is clear: ladies & children to the right, men to the left

   Lessons for online merchandisers: help customers decide where they want to go and provide “doors” to those areas that are more visual. Think about what they need as soon as they land on your page and provide doors that help them easily get to parts of the site where they can search or learn more about what is offered in that area.
   

7. Place low-margin/high-volume products in high-traffic areas: With some products, you gotta sell lots to make a little. Smart retailers like The Bay place cosmetics at the centre of the store near the mall entrance where people will browse and may just end up purchasing a discretionary item or two. The reality is that you need to sell a lot of these products, so you gotta put them in high traffic areas like mall entrances.
   

   The mall entrance to The Bay is all about cosmetics, a low-margin item that requires high traffic

   Lessons for online merchandisers: if you have some little add-ons that you need to sell a lot of, think about where you get the most traffic and visibility and put them there. Perhaps if they are low-priced items, you promote them right at checkout (just like donation boxes at grocery tills). Or if they aren’t necessarily low-priced, maybe you should have a dedicated place for them on your homepage or your highest traffic entry page.

8. Take every opportunity to cross-sell your shoppers to similar products: At The Bay, they put cosmetics, perfume and handbags near each other. And handbags flow into shoes, because every woman knows that bags and shoes need to work together. At Chapters, you’ll find science-y type games near the sci-fi and kids sections. Have you noticed that discount books and magazines are always located near the Starbucks in a Chapters? Maybe they are suggesting you enjoy a cheap read while you are drinking coffee.
   

   Cross-selling recipe books along with cookbooks at Chapters

   Lessons for online merchandisers: think about offering “recommendations” or similar products on search results pages. Don’t clutter what the customer was looking for, but offer them up in a sidebar that says “similar” or “you might also like …” And if you can do this based on their past behaviour or the behaviour of their segment, even better!

9. Place similar items near each other and use category labeling: Again, Chapters does a good job here. You’ll find the categories/sections are placed very strategically so you can just float from one section to another and it’s likely you could end up in a single section of the store for a few hours. You’ll wander from sci-fi to mystery to thriller without even noticing. Also, categories are often labeled in ways that would pique a customer’s desire to linger like “Hot & New” or “Editor’s picks.”
   

   Fantasy and Sci-Fi hang out together at the bookstore as "adjacent" categories

   Lessons for online merchandisers: Similar to the last lesson, think about putting adjacent categories or navigation items next to each other. Don’t categorize drop-down items or lists alphabetically, but do them thematically. People might expect to see things like Spring, Easter and Religious Holidays all together in a category list.
   

10. Some don’ts: The two stores that are great examples of what not to do are Jacob and HMV. Jacob has stupidly large posters in the front windows that show head/shoulder shots of women laughing and sharing drinks; the product isn’t shown or highlighted, and if I didn’t know the store, I wouldn’t be sure if they were selling the pill or clothing. Even worse, the posters block your view of products and entrances so they don’t pull prospective customers in.
    

    Massive posters block your view into the Jacob store; no product, no interest

    Lessons for online merchandisers: be careful about the imagery you choose and make sure that it emphasizes your product or its use and that it doesn’t detract from it. And when naming product lines or writing about them on your site, try to stay away from jargon and internal terminology. Instead of putting the name of your premium line on your website, just say something like “premium products” and introduce them to the name of the premium product line on the landing page. Be descriptive for new customers.

I have to admit, I was surprised at how much offline merchandising could inform online merchandising. It’s a really interesting way to think about a site as a store. Do you have any lessons you’ve learned and applied? I’m all ears!