Visual Merchandising Management Tips to Boost Sales

Visual merchandising (VM) refers to a practice to use floor plans, lighting, colors, technology, displays and other components to allure the attention of customers. It aims to use the retail space to generate more sales by making stores stand out for attracting shoppers.

In addition to reach the optimal results of VM, it is essential to pay attention to visual merchanding management. The question is, how to maximize the management? Let’s figure it out in the following content.

Impressive product display management is the secret to attracting customers to come

Why Is Visual Merchandising Crucial For Businesses?

Before diving into to know how to maximize visual merchandising management. It is essential to know the importance of visual merchandising.

1. Building Brand Image

Merchandising not only is the task of filling up the counters and shelves at the stores, but also has the effect of building a brand image for the business. You might not know this, but nicely displayed stalls are easy to impress customers, helping enhance brand identity, and effectively spread marketing by word of mouth.

2. Stimulating Consumers' Shopping Needs

Especially in the digital age, everyone owns a smartphone and a social media account. An impressive product shelf stimulates customers' desire to shop and asks them to take photos, share with relatives, or post on social networks.

An impressive booth helps stimulate customers' shopping needs

3. Widen Product Coverage & Market Share

The strong viral effect helps businesses sell effectively, boost revenue, and expand their customer base. Since then, it could become a sturdy base to develop market share and increase brand coverage to customers of all ages.

Nice product display could impress the customers and attract them to come back or turn them into loyal customers. That's why it is advisable to pay attention to visual merchandising at stores.

Visual Merchandising Objectives

The key aim of effective visual merchandising in retail management is to gain the passers-by attention while enticing them to visit stores.

The first thing consumers see seems to be the display window of the stores. That’s why it could be a key factor in if people visit the stores or not. The most important visual that define your store seems to be the great window design.

Nice window graphics could generate a story, involving the customers in, and eliciting a great experience for them. Incorporating the artistic placement, utilizing striking graphics and lighting could wake up the unique feeling in visitors.

Besides to capture the attention, it also comes down to the only thing, which is to create a great experience that could motivate a buy. 

In other words, visual merchandising helps stores allure customers, aiming to drives sales and gain customers’ loyalty while providing the businesses its competitive advantage.

Things To Make Sure When Displaying Products

No matter what business you are in, it would help if you conduct a good merchandising strategy to stimulate customer demand, especially for industries with high requirements for a brand image, such as food, beverage, consumer goods, fashion, jewelry, electronics, and furniture.

1. Ensure the Display Standards Quality

The variety of products in terms of design, color, quality, and the price will easily attract many customers. It is best to avoid the situation that there are few products displayed on the shelves while the number of products in stock are high. The eye-catching display will be an impressive advantage for your stores to encourage customers to buy more.

Additionally, the storage area should not be too cramped as today's customers' habit is to go to spacious spaces to enjoy a comfortable feeling when shopping.

Customers like spacious and comfortable shopping space

2. Provide Full Labels On Products

Products need to come with clean origins with full information of ingredients, how to use, etc.. Particularly, you could check barcodes to check the genuinity of the products.

One of the more important things is to carefully check the product before putting it on the shelf to ensure that the goods come with high quality. In case there are errors in products, it is necessary to notify the sales staff and management immediately.

How To Maximize Visual Merchandising Management

To ensure effective product display management as desired, businesses need to apply professional support tools. They could help take photos, save and take notes, track task history, update information quickly and easily report, and exchange with superiors, etc.

These product display management methods could not solve the root of the problems. Therefore, businesses choose to introduce technology software to optimize monitoring efficiency.

Below are some advantages and disadvantages of traditional merchandising management and FieldCheck that you might want to know.

Traditionally managing product display is gradually becoming obsolete

1. Traditional Display Management

Merchandisers traditionally keep track of the product display via the process:

• Visit assigned stores
• Summarizing and scoring
• Sending reports

1.1. Visiting Assigned Stores

The specific job of the merchandisers when coming to retail chain stores is to count and record all the products on display and in stock.

• Take photos of products available on shelves
• Take photos of competitors' products, and save them on your phone
• Make suggestions and discuss the product displays with the merchandisers or the shop owners to create competitive advantage
• Collect data with pen, paper, and books and continue moving to the next location

1.2. Summarizing and Scoring

Supervisors will collect data and make reports of merchandising. Then they filter photos, evaluate product display booths, enter data into excel and make PowerPoint reports to supervisors.

Additionally, it is critical to make suggestions to increase the brand's image at the point of sale. Managing visual merchandising by traditional methods takes a lot of time and effort and wastes staff resources.

It causes a delay in data transfer, leading to the boss deciding to adjust the plan slowly, and missing the opportunity to act on change.

On top of that, it also leads to inadequate coverage of point of sale, limited employees' working time, limited resources, low efficiency of product display, affecting revenue, etc., are common inadequacies of the company's traditional management methods.

1.3. Sending Reports

It is usual that merchandisers make paper-based reports to inform about the results of inspection. This approach makes it quite time-consuming for the merchandisers to write a report day in and day out.
On top of that, you might have difficulty in storing and saving paper reports, not to mention searching for the necessary data.

2. Managing Merchandising Items With FieldCheck Software

Visual merchandising management with FieldCheck software is the optimal choice to help businesses overcome all disadvantages of the conventional monitoring method.

The application helps businesses save costs and boost work efficiency. Simultaneously, businesses will no longer have to hire many independent merchandisers. It is easy to install the solution on mobile devices to keep track of visual merchandising without mobilizing many people.

All employee activities will be recorded and updated in real-time. For example, they have to check in, report working locations, and check stock available. Then it is necessary to take photos of product displays at stores and report directly to the system with a few simple steps.

FieldCheck software application in product display management

Images are recorded and saved in separate files in real-time. All data such as product status and photos are recorded with different notes in each photo. They could be uploaded accurately to the system.

Supervisors easily control all merchandising activities anytime, anywhere. Simultaneously, our solution also supports reporting problems that arise immediately, enhancing the communications between team members.

The integrated reporting feature on the app helps employees communicate with the stakeholders quickly without waiting too long. Here are some outstanding features of FieldCheck software in visual merchandising management.

2.1. Setting Visual Merchandising Standards

With FieldCheck, supervisors or managers will actively set up a product display program on the website. There are some standards of visual merchandising that you should know.

• Merchandising name
• Scoring criteria
• Execution time
• Reception department
• Take notes
• Time configuration
• Number of photos to take

2.2. Take Photos

The software integrates the visual merchandising photo capture feature to help market staff easily check-in at the point of sale. At the same time, it allows users to update the booth image on the system. The scoring features are automatically updated on the mobile app.

Impressive feature of taking photos to display products at the booth

2.3. Visual Merchandising Evaluation

The software allows you to monitor and evaluate visual merchandising directly on the application through pre-set criteria. The analysis is also provided on the web-based tool for Admin to take actions.

2.4. View Scoring Report

The solution aims to digitize the entire reporting system while providing automated statistics and the evaluation of the merchandising items through pre-set criteria. Through the reports, the managers could know if the stores are working on this task well or not.

Merchandisers could know which visual merchandising items bring the most positive results for the stores.

Digitize the entire reporting system and make accurate and fast statistics

2.5. Track Merchandising Performance

The management of merchandising with technology software helps businesses prevent employees from cheating on images. You could also save time compositing images. The system to quickly update data makes it easy for management to evaluate and track merchandising performance.

Through the visual merchandising standards of each program, products and industry, the management department will accurately evaluate the effectiveness of the product display. Also, it is best to know the market coverage compared to competitors.

2.6. Analyze Current Merchandising Situation

The tech-backed solution also allows you to get an in-depth analysis about the deployment of merchandising items. Accordingly, you could get a comprehensive overview to take timely actions if needed. Through data analysis, it is available to adjust the strategy and distribution of goods accordingly.

In-depth analysis of merchandising

Wrapping Up 

Above is some information to help businesses maximize visual merchandising management more effectively. We hope this information will be useful to you. If you want to experience the application directly, please contact us to arrange the earliest schedule!