Covers intermediate / advanced approaches to effective and competitive online retail merchandising and converting visits to sales.

1. Strategy, Management & Delivery
Charles Burrows

2. Summary
 Basics
 Objectives
 Prioritisation
 Efficiency
 Creativity
 Other objectives
 Enablers & Dependencies
 Data, Analysis & Reporting
 Further Q&A

3. Five basics
 Availability on-site:
 In-stock page views – report conversion, evaluate, benchmark then improve.
 Price on-site:
 Ensure within 1% or 5p of key competitor(s), but not normally below key
competitor (does not apply to own-brand).
 Ascertain if high-level quartiles are close enough to key competitors.
 Avoid negative margin except where written-down/clearance.
 Traffic:
 Understand and plan all major traffic points/levers (on and off-site exposure) to
support category sales plans and objectives, and optimised user journey.
 Remove high-maintenance activities that don’t deliver proportionate traffic
levels.
 Product content:
 Identify content impact on conversion and take action to ensure images and all
other key elements are present on product pages. Innovate product content.
…All underpinned by good staff/team and technical capabilities.

4. Objectives – conversion &
engagement
 Availability:
 >90% in-stock page views across all categories
 >95% available for store collection page views across all categories
 Price:
 Within 5-10% WPDI range of key competitor(s) in each product quartile in each
category. Within 5% in top quartile. Reduce and sell-through on end of line.
 Planning:
 Understanding and planning merchandising and product >=3 months in
advance for all major (~90% of) digital channels
 Product content:
 95% coverage of extensive imagery and other benchmarks tbc for other content
elements such as descriptions and
 High-quality site experience supported by analytical rigour, continuous testing
and benchmarking program.
…Not intended to be black and white but common sense…

5. Top-priority promotional points
 Main homepage (banners, products)
 Category & sub-category homepages (banners,
products)
 Super-dropdowns (browse)
 Site search results pages (boost, banners, promotional
search results – search tags)
 Landing pages (bespoke or existing, dynamic, pages)
 All can use matrix for promotion plans: single point of
reference for all on-site and marketing channels.

6. Other/Dynamic promotional points
 Recommendations & cross-sell – ensure components
increase ABV and Conversion ideally via MVT.
 Sub-category list views – don’t need to be maintained
but can be used to promote specific product.
 Site search results (unmanipulated) – explore all
“errors” (e.g. no results) and benchmark synonyms,
spelling and punctuation variations. Develop more
conversion-efficient rules.

7. Efficiency
 Stress at manual or creative points in the
merchandising process – needs to be minimised.
 Maximise effective exposure with minimum
intervention: plan promotions effectively as far ahead
as possible, know your levers and enjoy good
teamwork/communication with all departments.
 Cut out broken links and technical issues like slow-
loading preventing conversion, and test as much as
possible – one small change (e.g. copy tweak) can be
very valuable and/or last for years.

8. Creativity
 Take good risks; try out new promotional mechanisms
and learn from poor promotions
 Ensure high-quality creative executions and strong,
on-brand calls to action
 Continuously identify potential improvements to user
experience and ways of improving online buying and
other goal funnel experiences.
 Look for range gaps and new promotional
opportunities, backed up with data/analytics.

9. Other objectives
 Visit conversion (and reducing bounce) – main factors of
which are price, availability and traffic.
 Increased basket value, e.g. via recommendations cross-sell
and migrating low-margin category shoppers into high-
margin categories.
 Demonstrate and surface range – long-tail awareness.
 Right balance on shared areas, between exposure of growth
categories, cash cows and other merchandised and
multichannel-supporting initiatives (e.g. non-core
commitments).
 Strong, well-prepared planning with buy-in from product
directors/buyers and marketing.

10. Enablers/dependencies
 Everyone understands what is technically or creatively possible in the
environment and in what timeframes – fundamental last-minute
demands/changes and continual focus on small levers should be
unnecessary. This principle should guide immediate priorities but not
affect getting all details basically right.
 Good data and reports and being “data-driven”. This will also help get
the basics of price, availability, product content and browse and site
search pages at maximum achievable.
 Good technical systems, e.g. MVT, analytics, merchandising
capabilities.
 Admitting when a mistake was made or a promotion or initiative is
failing. Learning from it.
 Good, open communication, asking the question and trusting/helping
team-mates.
 Resources in terms of price changes, product content, technical
changes/improvements and ecommerce system developments.

11. Data, analysis & reporting
 Deserves special mention because digital is especially data-
heavy.
 Trading/Merchandising analysis reports should:
 Demonstrate whether price and availability targets are being
met
 Demonstrate potential site traffic levers and their relative
value
 Indicate contribution to total from promotions and other site
merchandising activity, and ideally benchmark it
 Enable easy identification of incremental sales or conversion
opportunities for collation and discussion, including via MVT
 Indicate strategic areas of growth/contraction such as long-
term category traffic trends

12. Thank you and Q & A
 Some further questions & talking points:
 What is the marketing funding model/process, if any?
 How established are the team and how do they like to work?
 What are the merchandising systems used, are they being used to the full and
what needs to be done to get more from them?
 How many SKUs are live on the website, and which categories have most SKUs?