Why Do Product Recommendations Need Merchandising Rules?

Introduction

When retail eCommerce keeps rising all over the globe, shoppers get overwhelmed with choices. And that’s when practical product recommendations set a sharp difference in your e-retail success. However, not all recommendations are created equal. Hence, to deliver tailored and relevant suggestions, merchandising rules come and play a key role. In this article, we'll dig deeper into why product recommendations need merchandising rules and how they enhance the online shopping experience to win more sales. 

The Power Of Personalization & Recommendations

Personalization is the cornerstone of an online business. Did you know that about 90% of customers are likelier to shop with a brand that remembers their preferences and brings in relevant offers? And product recommendations are very robust tools to help e-merchants achieve this. Why? They guide customers towards items they might be interested in, then maximize the chance of converting browsers into paying ones without upsetting them. 

Behind the scenes, algorithms work so hard. They analyze a massive amount of data, including shoppers’ behaviors, browsing activities, purchase history, and product attributes, to generate those recommendations on the storefront. Although they're powerful, they still have limitations. Without proper training and guidance, your algorithms might return recommendations that do not align with consumers’ demands and your business goals. 

This is where merchandising rules come into play.

What Are Merchandising Rules?

Merchandising rules are predefined guidelines or instructions set by store owners. In other words, you control how a group of products is presented across your site. Therefore, they’ll provide a human touch to recommendation engines, ensuring the suggestions align with business goals, brand identity, and customer preferences. Here's why they are necessary:

• Maintain brand consistency: Merchandising rules help maintain brand consistency by ensuring that only products meeting specific quality, pricing, or branding criteria are recommended. This consistency builds trust with customers.
• Promotion alignment: You frequently run promotions or need to highlight certain products. Online merchandising enables the promotion of specific items during a campaign, ensuring that shoppers see them prominently in their recommendations.
• Seasonal relevance: Some products are highly seasonal. Merchandising allows online merchants to promote winter coats in winter and swimwear in summer, ensuring relevance.
• Cross-selling and upselling: Merchandising can walk customers through complementary or higher-margin products, boosting average order value and revenue.
• User behavior adaptation: By analyzing user interactions and purchase history, these rules can quickly adapt to changing customer preferences and trends, ensuring that recommendations remain relevant over time.
• Inventory management: Rules help control inventory levels by promoting or demoting products based on stock levels, thereby it helps you prevent overstock or out-of-stock situations.

In the realm of product recommendations, a harmonious connection between algorithms and merchandising rules is essential. While algorithms crunch the data, identify patterns, and create recommendations, merchandising rules then fine-tune these recommendations to meet your business objectives and shoppers' expectations. 

How Merchandising Rules Help You Ace Product Recommendations

Merchandising within a digital store is to guide visitors through an enjoyable buying journey quickly, presenting them with the most relevant products and offers to prevent them from hopping to your rivals’ sites. Therefore, online merchandising is now a must-have strategy that no eCommerce site could go without. 

Let’s see how you can apply merchandising rules to upgrade recommendation widgets. 

Pin

The first rule to try out here is Pin. Store owners often set up a Pin rule to highlight specific items of a group of products at the top of the list whenever shoppers search for any products. This is one of the best practices to boost your AOVs. 

Back to your recommendation blocks, you can manually pick and attach a product to a slot in the widgets. 

(Source: The Inkey List) 

For example, if you're selling skincare products like The Inkey List, and you have a huge stock of Omega Water Cream, you can set up to pin this item to the first slot of best selling widget on the homepage to expose it to prospects. 

Hide

The ‘Hide’ strategy allows you to hide products based on various product attributes. Instead of manually picking up every single product, store owners can set up these merchandising rules by product attributes, for instance, inventory status, product tag, product title, product price, vendor, category, and so on.

To increase the cart size of each shopper, you can make use of the frequently bought together recommendation widget like G2000 is doing on the product page. Also, don't forget to a rule to automatically hide soldout items which will avoid unexpected dead ends, particularly in the holiday season. (Source: G2000) 

If certain products are consistently not selling well or receiving much engagement from customers, it may be a good idea to hide them. This can help prevent clutter on the site and make it easier for customers to find products that are more likely to interest them. 

Filtering

Filtering is another merchandising strategy that online brands favor. Precisely, you use this rule to refine widgets and highlight specific products. For instance, 

during the Christmas season, you want to highlight your dresses with red and green colors. With the filtering rules, you can control and limit the display of clothes to only those with 2 colors. Thus, it’ll increase the visibility of your Christmas-themed apparel and help boost sales during the holiday season. 

(Source: Yesbebe)

Let’s take Yesbebe as an example here. The brand wants to ensure parents arriving on the site are only shown new arrivals that are available for priority shipping in the homepage recommendation widget. Hence, all products presented in the widget will be ordered by those with the tag ‘priority available'. 

Final Thoughts

Online merchants must squeeze every ounce of potential out of every campaign they build to maximize income earned by product recommendations. When it comes to merchandising, store owners like you must know your products (and the characteristics of each product) better than anybody else. Using this knowledge to develop strategies, create rules, and distribute product suggestions will not only enhance the discovery journey but will also assist users in narrowing buying selections, and producing revenue and returns.