Smart Merchandiser Launches Industry’s First Visual Ecommerce Merchandise Management Solution

New tool enables merchandisers to make better-informed, real-time decisions, increase productivity and boost sales by integrating data from IBM WebSphere Commerce and others

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif., January 21, 2015 – Smart Merchandiser, the industry’s only provider of a visual ecommerce merchandise management solution, today announced the launch of the company and its flagship product. Smart Merchandiser is the only commercially available single tool that streamlines the online visual merchandising process based on critical analytics, ratings, conversation rates, inventory and other data. The tool empowers ecommerce professionals to make faster, better-informed decisions about how to improve their online catalog layouts, enhance their customers’ experiences, respond in real-time to changing markets and increase productivity levels to meet and exceed sales goals. 

Online B2C retail sales are projected to reach $414 billion by 2018, according to Forrester Research. Smart Merchandiser enables marketers, merchandisers and ecommerce professionals to dramatically reduce the time required to create, edit and update online storefronts. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, the solution overlays analytics, ratings, conversion rates and inventory data from IBM WebSphere Commerce and other sources within sales and marketing onto graphical depictions from actual product catalogs. This deeper insight all in one place helps merchandisers make online layout decisions based on up-to-date sales reports, color and size inventory fluctuations, social activity and promotions.

“Smart Merchandiser has increased our efficiency from a merchandising perspective,” said Victoria Reuter, eCommerce director at JanSport.  “We’ve seen a 60 percent increase in productivity, which has freed up the team to do in-depth personalization and testing on the site, something our manual processes didn’t allow for previously.”

Smart Merchandiser’s features include:

• Easy-to-use, unobtrusive graphic layout that overlays data such as page views, abandonment rate, conversion rate and sales revenue on product images;
• Drag-and-drop and single-click interface to simplify catalog management, as well as mass adding, removing and updating departments, colors, materials and other attributes;
• Visual alerts for low inventory items or out-of-stock items, as well as missing attributes;
• Simplified color sequencing to quickly downplay or promote items based on seasonality, inventory level or trending and popularity; 
• Improved searchability and customer experiences with advanced sorting and filtering by attributes, inventory, sales and announcement date; 
• Social analytics overlays, including likes, shares, views and searches, to gauge sentiment across social media.

“Smart Merchandiser represents everything we’ve been looking for in a tool that will help streamline workflow for our merchants, as well as provide additional business intelligence to assist in merchandising decisions,” said Greg Pulsifer, vice president, digital development at The North Face.

Smart Merchandiser is the brainchild of Zobrist Consulting Group, a team that drew from nearly 15 years of experience developing fully integrated ecommerce stores to create a solution that combines real-time analytics with visual assets.

“When we repeatedly saw clients clipping items from physical product catalogs to visualize an online store mock-up, we realized there was a need for an ecommerce solution that could manage multiple data sources and provide a visual layout,” said Teresa Zobrist, president and CEO at Smart Merchandiser. “Our mission is to help merchandisers simplify this time-consuming task and make better decisions based on all the available data. We’re excited to launch Smart Merchandiser and are committed to providing innovative ecommerce solutions as merchandisers continue to push the boundaries of web commerce.”