eCommerce Merchandising

[FactoryBacked]

I've posted on here before seeking guidance from the PH digital crowd and I received some very encouraging and helpful advice. As a result I have been doing some freelancing off the back of my jack of all trades 20 year career in ecommerce. But the original issue of being too broadly focused in my offering still exists.

After lots of scribbling it is clear that merchandising is the area I have enjoyed most over the years and the stuff I always gravitate towards in a given role. The mix of data and creative seems to work for me.

The question is, is there enough demand for this service? Merchandising roles do exist but a lot of the time it's bundled into other departments such as marketing, website admin or buying.

I would ideally like to kick things off alongside my current full time job so I am thinking of productising things. A fixed price merchandising review of a website.

I know I will struggle to get business owners to give up much on the trading side of merchandising initially but I could ask them to give me a couple of their problem products to review in more detail alongside the overall.

I know this is a very AI driven aspect of ecommerce but a lot of those solutions are still too expensive to implement for many SMEs so a more manual approach is required.

After the initial review there's then the option to spin off the work into a 'done for you service'.

I welcome the thoughts of PHers who usually have some great takes on the ideas of others.

[skwdenyer]

Speaking for myself only, merchandising usually has a requirement for domain experience. Do you have that (in an area with proven ROI on merchandising)? Or is it Jack of all trades there too?

You also have to adequately define what you think merchandising is in terms potential clients will understand. Full disclosure: I employ a merchandiser

[akirk]

I think that a lot of eCommerce store owners find it hard to understand the need. If you talk to them about a high street store, they instantly get the need to plan products / promotions / stock levels / etc. they understand that it is useful to analyse that blue tops sell and red ones don't - because they see instinctively the need to maximise the value of each bit of shelf space... however, a lot of online retailers work on the basis of it being no cost to add to the website, so why bother - the software will tell you which ones are selling, and (esp. if you dropship) what does it matter if I have 1000 lines sitting there doing nothing!

So, I think there i a journey that is needed to understand the value, and it needs to be tied in with their business strategy (usually, set up shop / make millions!) so that stock is continually held up against that to decide priorities, and then those priorities used to drive advertising / mailing / promotions / banners / etc.

I think it is a role which can be difficult to sell initially, but is valuable and is overlooked in many / most cases...

[FactoryBacked]

skwdenyer said:

Speaking for myself only, merchandising usually has a requirement for domain experience. Do you have that (in an area with proven ROI on merchandising)? Or is it Jack of all trades there too?

You also have to adequately define what you think merchandising is in terms potential clients will understand. Full disclosure: I employ a merchandiser

Thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciate it.

For some context, my experience is 20 years in B2C ecommerce selling everything from food, motorsport parts, ski wear, hiking clothing and equipment, gym stuff, equine stuff and garden landscaping materials. I've established stores from scratch and taken UK based stores worldwide. The product mix has included seasonal items and products that are very fashion driven which I feel are where a merchandiser really comes in handy.

In my experience many business owners had a gut feel for their stock and shape of the sales but struggle as the business grows to keep tabs on it and have always been very surprised when I've presented them with data to show them the seasonality, best sellers, slow movers, zero sellers, stock run outs etc. This has then allowed them to make better buying decisions, optimise stock, often improving their cash flow position and the margin.

I've built sales and KPI dashboards and built forecasting tools to identify and track all of the above.

Plus all of the usual on-site merchandising of copy, images, videos, cross-sells, up-sells, collections, categories, landing pages, site search, product data for website filters.

And very often the marketing too.

Always aiming with the above to improve conversion rate, average order value and lifetime customer value.

In terms of ROI, some of the stuff I would class as wins have been;
- identifying and reducing overstock by £300k in two months and still maintaining some margin.
- grew a new product category from £400k to £1.5m within a couple of years.
- refined the product range to grow a category from £1m to £2m using a third of the products.
- distilled an expensive and space consuming 3000 SKUs in one product line down to the 140 that were driving 80% of sales.

And lots and lots of researching new products and brands, putting together collections, size / colour profiles etc and then launching and growing sales.

Edited by FactoryBacked on Tuesday 12th July 21:59

[FactoryBacked]

akirk said:

I think that a lot of eCommerce store owners find it hard to understand the need. If you talk to them about a high street store, they instantly get the need to plan products / promotions / stock levels / etc. they understand that it is useful to analyse that blue tops sell and red ones don't - because they see instinctively the need to maximise the value of each bit of shelf space... however, a lot of online retailers work on the basis of it being no cost to add to the website, so why bother - the software will tell you which ones are selling, and (esp. if you dropship) what does it matter if I have 1000 lines sitting there doing nothing!

So, I think there i a journey that is needed to understand the value, and it needs to be tied in with their business strategy (usually, set up shop / make millions!) so that stock is continually held up against that to decide priorities, and then those priorities used to drive advertising / mailing / promotions / banners / etc.

I think it is a role which can be difficult to sell initially, but is valuable and is overlooked in many / most cases...

Thanks for the reply, really appreciate it.

This is pretty much how I approach things. Always using data to make informed decisions (usually having to create, clean and process that data first) and that usually tells you when to buy and sell stuff, what you need to get out of, what to look into that should be selling but isn't, what you need more of and then you can build the marketing and creative out around those points.

Very often I have joined a business (always pure ecommerce) that is trying to force products on customers out of desperation to generate some cash or sell through large overstocks and it is the wrong time of year, at prices that are way out, throwing resources at decent enough products which are really badly presented or they have had a really half-hearted or disjointed approach to a new product or brand launch that has then flopped.