Nail Visual Merchandising On Your Shopify Store

Visual merchandising is one of the richest areas of product discoverability because it’s where UX, conversion strategy, and brand storytelling intersect. Through intentional visual merchandising we can guide the customer’s eye, communicate product value, tell your brand story, evoke emotion and facilitate connection through the contextualisation of your products — bringing light to their purpose and how they enhance the customers lifestyle.
Merchandising goes beyond aesthetics. It’s about applying a strategic hierarchy of visual storytelling, educational content and product placement to enhance product discoverability and increase engagement. 

 

Here are some studio tips on how you can nail your visual merchandising across key pages and sections on your online store..

 

Home Page Merchandising

Your home page is where most of the visual storytelling should happen, it's often the first impression of your brand and the first landing page potential new customers experience — woo them!

Image: Mejuri

Use this window of discovery to invite customers to immerse themselves in your online world and learn about all you have to offer at a top level. Through the use of intriguing visuals, punchy, informative copy and strategic content hierarchy, your home page introduces the narrative layer to online shopping, helping customers realise what resonates with them. 
Your home page should encapsulate all that your brand has to offer — your personality, your purpose and dedication to serving your customers, your unique selling propositions, and of course, your product catalogue — merchandising all of this key content using inspiring lifestyle visuals that entertain and educate so that customers feel an instant pull to dive deeper into what excites them. 

The layout of your home page should guide users through an intended flow of content thats purpose is to inspire and motivate, helping them take their next step in the purchase journey based on what hook resonates with them the most, ultimately guiding them in an entertaining, intuitive manner toward the product they want. 

When plotting that flow of content, think about the way you scan a physical store the minute you walk in — taking in the displays, scanning the room for what collections are available to you and allowing yourself to be teased and excited by the potential lifestyle improvement you'd see if you were to make these products your own.
Think about how you shop and what encourages you to pick up multiple items at once — mixing, matching and bundling items together.. This behaviour is encouraged by strategic merchandising, the kind that sets the scene and pairs products in a way that completes a look or a routine — products that make more sense, and are more appealing paired together than they are on their own.
There's a reason you walk into a travel store with the intentions of buying a suitcase and end up leaving with the passport wallet, neck pillow, and eye mask.. It's because the merchandising team created the experience you crave in their displays — they silently convinced you that your travels would be so much more pleasant and easeful, that you would feel more "complete" if you purchased the set. You could see yourself living that narrative, so you invested in it. 

This is the experience you want to create for your customers on your home page — the kind that builds trust in the fact that you're an industry expert who gets them. You're considering their needs and desires and using those to set the scene they want to invest in. 

Top tips to weave storytelling into your home page merchandising:

• Use good quality lifestyle images: Keep the catalogue shots for the product pages — use inspiring lifestyle imagery on your home page that helps set the scene and bring a premium feel to the brand overall.
  
  
• Show off your newest collections and introduce these properly — don't just plonk them right below the fold, write a short spiel about what makes this collection special and support that with alluring imagery to build intrigue before the call to action to shop the range. 
  
  
• Provide your brand promise and USPs early in the piece, assuming newbies don't know your brand or product yet. If you're using graphics for this, make sure they're on brand.
  
  
• Utilise sections that allow you to bring imagery and video in alongside compelling text to educate your customers around USPs, introduce collections and showcase hero products. This helps avoid scroll fatigue caused by repeatedly stacking collection summaries down the page. Make sure you break up your collection summaries so they don't get lost among one another. 
  
  
• Provide a summary of your top categories by linking appropriate collections on your home page, outside of and in addition to including these in your header navigation. Use the home page section to ensure potential new customers gain an instant understanding of all of the categories you conquer in the market so that they know what to turn to you for. 
  
  
• Don't forget to introduce the brand properly — this doesn't need a priority spot early on the page, but a brand introduction outlining what you motivations are, why you're devoted to serving your customers and why you believe so deeply in the value of the product is important. It gives your brand legs from the get go by building trust in your brands integrity. 
  
  
• If educational content is something you deliver to support your brand story, vision and purpose and/or educate customers around your product best practices, introduce it on your home page as a value add that positions you as a trusted source for information around your niche.

Collection Page Merchandising

So long as your collections are well optimised for SEO, they will show up in your brands search engine listing as a result of a branded search (a search query that includes your brand name, for example: The search term "Incu Womenswear" in Google will return Incu's primary domain/home page with their top collections nested below on the search results page). Between branded search results and your marketing efforts to reference your collections in your campaigns, collection pages can often be the the landing page your visitors end up on when entering your online world, instead of your home page or going direct to a product. It's important that you don't treat these as simple summary pages where potential customers come to sift through your range without first understanding the nature and purpose of the collection. You need to make an effort to set the scene on these pages — make sure they feel intentional and purposeful so that customers can see they have been curated with intention. 

Use a small space above the fold to introduce each collection with its own narrative — talk about why the products exist here, why your team have paired these items together and what customers should expect to get out of the products in the collection.
If you've created a collection for event wear, talk about why the outfits featured in here will make your customer feel and look the part.
If you're a multi-brand store, create branded collections and talk about the designer and brand here — explain why you believe this brand is worthy of your customers attention and investment.

This is your chance to set a scene for the products in the grid and encourage customers to shop entire sets that complete the look or routine.

For Example: 

If your collection is a Women's Spring launch, use lifestyle imagery to help customers visualise their ideal Spring day, playing on typical happenings at this warm, social time of year filled with time in the sunshine, picnics, outdoor adventures, exciting events, delicious seasonal foods etc.
Tempt their idealisation further to get them feeling excited and inspired with an introductory paragraph that speaks to the scene being set in the imagery, and how your carefully curated collection of products not only fit in, but complete that scene. This evokes emotion and builds anticipation for the collection that follows, helping them visualise exactly how each product that catches their eye will enhance their lifestyle. It's this emotional investment that almost guarantees a financial one, so don't underestimate the power of settings the narrative in the eyes of the customer.

Image: Mejuri

 

Beyond the intro, your collection grid needs to maintain an appealing visual standard. The best way to do this is to ensure you are using consistent image themes and product features in your product cards. 

• Choose a theme for the first image displayed in your product cards. Is it a catalogue shot or a lifestyle shot? Make sure the images used are edited all the same to maintain an even tone. 
  
  
• If you are utilising a hover animation (alternate image or slideshow on hover), make sure the succeeding images are the same for each product. Again, make sure they're the same style and tone. 
  
  
• When deciding how much product information to display in your product cards (i.e colour swatches, size availability, feature callouts, reviews etc.), make sure you're only using what makes sense and is actually useful to the customer before they open the product page or quick add. It needs to help make a purchase decision faster — too much clutter here will do the opposite, as it's overwhelming and distracts from the product image. 
  
  

It's also important to consider your collection filters as part of the merchandising plan. While these may not be overly aesthetic, they do play a role in the visual experience as they determine the order and logical groupings of products that make up a collection — any friction caused by these can confuse the customer and break their flow. Make sure you group products intuitively, make sure products that are out of stock (if returning to the range and are therefore still visible) are pushed to the bottom, and of course, keep these filters up to date — audit your criteria regularly to make sure option sets are relevant and products aren't being left out of important option sets. 

 

Takeaways:

• Use good quality lifestyle imagery, creative and motivating copy and style products that complement each other into 'looks' or 'sets' to set the scene that your customers desire.
  
  
• Curate collection summaries and small product bundles based on buyer intent — think about your customers' motivations, make sure you consider their current situation and the transformation they crave when merchandising products into collections. Collections are designed to make products more discoverable by organising them in a way that makes sense based on their attributes and use case.
  
  
• Create dynamic collections to keep your store fresh and up to date. 
  
  
• Update your home page content regularly. Always ensure new products are given time to shine here and merchandise around new launches just as much as you do sales.
  
  
• While I've only touched on a couple of core pages where there is opportunity for improved visual merchandising, make sure you carry your design language throughout all pages across your website — whether it be shoppable pages or content pages — they should carry the same design language to keep the user experience fluid and intuitive.