3 Advanced Merchandising Strategies to Test in 2024

Are you looking to upgrade your online merchandising and product sorting strategies to the pro level? You’ve come to the right place. 

In this quick guide, we highlight three of the most important advanced product sorting strategies every online retailer should be implementing this year. These are: 

Grab that coffee and let’s jump in. 

Strategy #1: 1:1 Personalized Product Recommendations 

When it comes to eCommerce marketing, personalized segmentation is not new. 1:1 personalization takes this segmentation a step further, tailoring marketing messages on an individual level. 

In terms of product recommendations, this means presenting products that are customized to each potential customer individually. This strategy can be applied to most product recommendations across your store, including: 

• Best-selling product recommendations 
• Interaction history product recommendations (recommendations that change based on customer interactions on catalog views, purchases, etc.) 
• New-arrival product recommendations
• “Frequently bought together” product recommendations  

For true 1:1 personalization, you will need the help of AI tools to leverage real-time interactions and drive an advanced recommendation strategy.

Regardless of how you drive your product recommendation strategy, you will want to ensure that you regularly test and tweak, paying close attention to data and insights. You will also want to factor in inventory optimization metrics — which brings us to the next advanced product sorting strategy.

Strategy #2: Enhancing Merchandising with Inventory Optimization 

Yes, personalization is great, but it’s not enough if you want to drive long-term profitability. Why? It doesn’t factor in vital retail KPIs to help you prevent dead stock or stockouts — both play havoc on your overall revenue and profits. 

We know that having the right inventory optimization practices in place boosts long-term sales, reduces operating costs, prevents overstocking (while still satisfying shopper needs), and improves overall efficiency. 

But what you may not know is how those retail KPIs can be incorporated into your marketing metrics to take your digital merchandising to the next level. To do this, you should be factoring a multitude of parameters into your product sorting at the same time. 

Why? Because relying on only one metric, such as bestsellers or personalization, is just not enough to stay competitive. Some of these parameters can include: 

• Profit margins
• Variants stock ratio
• Inventory value 
• Number of days in stock 
• Days to finish inventory (based on product daily sales rate)

…as well as bestsellers, product pageviews, conversions, and more. Ultimately though, to achieve multi-parameter storting, you will need a combination of technologies to streamline your inventory optimization — which brings us to the third strategy.

Strategy #3: Investing in Advanced AI and Product Sorting Automation 

Last, but not least, if you aren’t already building a merchandising tech stack that includes advanced product sorting, you are going to find yourself being left further and further behind your competitors. 

Investing in AI and automation will help you:

• Increase revenue and conversions  
• Boost marketing campaign performance 
• Improve backend efficiency 
• Gather better data and insights to drive all strategies 

Ideally, you need to invest in advanced AI and product sorting automation that can handle the implementation of the first two product sorting strategies we discussed in this post — three strategies for one, if you will! 

Introducing Kimonix, the only holistic eCommerce merchandising tool that uses advanced AI to enable merchants to run ROI-driven merchandising strategies based on their real-time business needs.

Key features include: 

• Advanced multi-segment collection management 
• Smart collection restoring based on real-time analytics and personalization
• AI product recommendations based on 1:1 personalization (and more) across the store
• Collection A/B testing to test setups before running new strategies 

Wrap Up 

There you go, three key product sorting strategies worth investing in this year. Still have advanced merchandising strategy questions? Reach out here.