Your company has a lot of products. Some are popular, some aren’t, while others are core to your business. How do you know which is which? You need product data: sales volume, average price point or margin contribution, seasonality trends, and more… all helpful nuggets of information when trying to determine how well a specific item sells within your company’s larger catalog. This way, you can quickly identify your best-selling items as well as those that are underperforming.
Core items are the products that you sell well and have the highest profit margin. Identifying these key elements allows for better marketing campaigns and provides a clearer path to purchase. It’s the main offering or reason why people shop with you. The rest of your portfolio supports this product. It creates value for your customers who then spend more money on your other products. You may have more than one core product, but they represent your brand more powerfully than any of your other offerings.
Some of the most successful eCommerce companies have built a strong base by focusing on core items. By identifying your key products, you not only make it easier for shoppers to find what they’re looking for in your store fast, but you also identify which products are driving revenue. With the right knowledge of your products, companies can also create targeted marketing strategies built around these core items. Buyers then associate your brand with its core products, so it’s important to market these well.
Determining which items are most profitable can be difficult and confusing without using robust product data solutions. Luckily, there are tools you can use to optimize your core inventory that will help you discover the best-selling and highest-grossing products in your store.
Use eCommerce Analytics to Identify Core Products
Many tools are available for tracking website traffic, click-through, and conversion rates, but it can be hard to find one that does it all. This can make it difficult to keep on top of everything because you have to log in and out of several different apps or plugins to get all the product data you need.
At Smart Merchandiser, we realize the importance of integration with third-party platforms to make things simpler, faster, more effective. That’s why Smart Merchandiser integrates with Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Coremetrics, and many more.
With Smart Merchandiser’s Analytics Overlay, you can easily discover your core products. This dynamic eCommerce analytics tool tells you which products sell well. This feature gives you key performance indicators (KPIs) on each of your products. These figures can include sales numbers as well as how often people look at the product information. Each product page contains an analytics overlay which makes the information more accessible and displayed in one place, while each product in your shop smartly displays relevant data right over the image.
Monitor click-through rates to see which products people are browsing, while conversion rates determine how often people go through with their purchases. If people aren’t clicking through to a product, add more appealing visuals, but if visitors aren’t making purchases, adjust the pricing. Analytics Overlay can tell you exactly how many of each product you have in stock, including the numbers for specific colors and sizes. This helps you quickly assess whether you need more stock to keep on top of demand. It can also tell you the number and rate of abandoned carts, critical for identifying any shopper obstacles.
Engaging with social media is an integral part of any modern business. Integrating social media with your website, just as important. Smart Merchandiser connects both of these elements, displaying social media stats for each individual product page. When a customer clicks on a product page, Smart Merchandiser displays the number of Facebook likes and tweets for that product. If people are talking about one of your products with their friends, then it probably qualifies as a core product. Leverage this shareability to spread the gospel of your business.
When customers shop around, they typically want to know how the product is performing before buying. This makes customer reviews, potentially, a valuable sales enabler. But the problem is that some customers may have to leave your website and look elsewhere for reviews. Definitely not ideal, because you want to keep customers on your website for as long as possible. Solution: Smart Merchandiser. It allows shoppers to review your products directly on your site. In addition, you can integrate third-party review sites to provide genuine reviews for customers to read, supporting integrations with BravoRatings, BazaarVoice, and PowerReviews, among others.
While a super website or selling great products are good places to start, they aren’t enough to drive your business forward. What you want, what you need, are cold, hard facts to make more informed business decisions going forward.
Pin Core Products Using Smart Merchandiser for Maximum Impact
You can “pin” or attach core products to the top of each page on which they appear. This ensures that shoppers will see the pinned products. As such, you’d want to do this for your hot products to boost sales.
Smart Merchandiser includes a pinning feature, which allows you to maintain core products in specific page locations. This prevents the items from moving even if you do an automated sort on the basis of different criteria.
Anyone for a pancake?… Suppose your brand has a super popular “Pancake Flipper.” By pinning it to the top of your “Cooking Utensils” category (similar to pinning a Facebook post to the top of your page), you dramatically increase the likelihood of people seeing it. Then you may auto-sort the rest of the products in the category according to conversion rate and page views. Since you pinned the “Pancake Flipper” at the top of the page, it remains there even after the new sort.
Pinned products, typically, go “above the fold.” This allows shoppers to see these products immediately when opening the page. By contrast, other products may fall lower on the page, where a shopper would only see them if they scroll down.
Identify It, Pin It, Sell It
Many businesses put off gathering the data they need or do not check it as regularly as they should, partly because gathering that mountain of data can be tedious and time-consuming. With a wide range of metrics to monitor and measure, KPIs to fulfill, and different third-party tools to use, staying on top of it all can be tricky.
Smart Merchandiser’s simple, yet dynamic interface solves this problem by bringing all that product data together in one place to ensure your website is performing optimally 24/7. Smart Merchandiser‘s analytics overlay feature is designed to take the hassle out of monitoring different KPIs so you have a firm handle on all that data. This way, you are better placed to make smarter decisions to create exceptional customer experiences.
Identifying your core items through data-driven product analysis gives you a huge advantage in marketing your wares. You’ll instinctively know which products sell so you can take action like pinning them above the fold.
Powerful eCommerce analytics can reveal how you should design your online shopfront to drive sales, engagement, and revenue. Find out how Smart Merchandiser can get you there, fast!
