How Does Merchandising Affect Buying?

From the store windows to the displays on the floor and at the cash register, creative and attractive merchandising makes shoppers want to buy while creating lasting memories for customers. Make it a positive experience, and your customers will return to shop again. Merchandising is so important that it’s second only to strong customer relations when it comes to the success or failure of your store, according to Iowa State University's "Visual Merchandising, A Guide For Small Retailers. "

Imagine walking into a store where all of the merchandise is still in boxes on the floor. No shopper wants to spend hours going through the products to find the one item they need. That’s why merchandising makes shopping easier, since products are displayed in groups of similar products, making it easy to find a product and move on to the next item on the shopping list. When you use point-of-purchase displays, you make it easier for shoppers to make impulse buys, too. Finally, merchandising helps turn a promotion into a moneymaker by moving more product in a shorter time frame, according to a UTalkMarketing.com interview with Karl McKeever of Visual Thinking.

Merchandising helps you increase margins when you set up displays focused on one central product that’s surrounded by related items, according to Philip H. Mitchell, author of "Discovery-Based Retail." This encourages people to buy more products since the display gives shoppers ideas for using the main product along with the add-ons. For instance, encouraging add-on purchases around a display that sells DVDs of popular movies means adding boxes of microwaveable popcorn, seasoning salt, candy and colorful plastic bowls to hold the popcorn, to boost sales.

Many shoppers come into your store for the entertainment value and to educate themselves on new products. That means changing your displays frequently is necessary to provide a new experience for your customers, says Mitchell. Plus, changing displays gives you a way to introduce customers to new products they would otherwise not know existed. If you don’t change your displays frequently, your displays lose their effectiveness, and shoppers pass them by without stopping to grab an item. They may even go to a different store that changes its displays and visual attractions more often to better enjoy their shopping experience.

The atmosphere in your store may affect your customer’s behavior, according to a study conducted at the University of Georgia. The study mentions a report by "Chain Store Age" in which 63 percent of shoppers remembered when a store’s atmosphere increased their interest in spending time at the store or buying more. Setting up merchandising displays enhanced by soft lighting and music that fits your target market is an important component in creating an atmosphere that makes people want to linger and make unplanned buys.