“What’s New” in UK Merchandising?

I try to spend at least one week per quar­ter vis­it­ing our retail cus­tomers in the UK. In addi­tion to my reg­u­lar stop for the best Fish ‘n Chips in the out­skirts of Covent Gar­den, I always enjoy hear­ing what our Eng­lish friends are doing to drive their mer­chan­dis­ing initiatives.

First, let me dis­pel any myth that the Europe is still try­ing to catch up to the US as far as eCom­merce goes. Due in no small part to some pretty savvy mer­chan­dis­ing, UK eCom­merce has expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant growth in the past two years (one retailer I know says online sales now rep­re­sent more than a quar­ter of his total revenue!).

So what stands out for me in terms of online mer­chan­dis­ing in the UK? One con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­is­tic I noticed was the use of “what’s new”.

It’s clear that British shop­pers are still very inter­ested in what’s hip and trendy. The British inva­sion doesn’t only refer to music. Whether it’s the hot new train­ers (sneak­ers or ten­nis shoes for us Amer­i­cans) or a recent vin­tage of a South African wine, the Eng­lish shop­per is truly swayed by “What’s New”.

We’re see­ing these prod­ucts pre­sented to the cus­tomer at the top of their pages with promi­nent mer­chan­dis­ing zones that high­light the newest prod­ucts avail­able in the catalog(ue). This not only pro­vides a great con­ver­sion tool for mer­chan­dis­ing, but also pro­vides “stick­i­ness” to your site. While a “Best Seller” will stim­u­late a sale today, a “New” prod­uct will not only pro­vide mer­chan­dis­ing ben­e­fits today (con­ver­sion), but will also act as a cus­tomer reten­tion tool that inspires the shop­per to return to your web site to see what else is “new”. (And hope­fully they will come back soon!)

I am also see­ing quite a bit of tag­ging of new prod­ucts in search results so that if you don’t have the space ded­i­cated to a mer­chan­dis­ing zone, your cus­tomers will be able to scan through either search or browse results to eas­ily find the newest items. You will rec­og­nize these tags as a sim­ple star­burst or high­lighted text on the prod­uct thumb­nails to pop the new prod­ucts on the page.

Tak­ing this one step fur­ther, we have quite a few cus­tomers who have indi­cated to us in their data feed that a prod­uct is “new” or “fresh”. Once this data is in place we can then apply a busi­ness rules to sort the results accord­ingly through both search and browse. The end result is a dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated user expe­ri­ence that pushes your newest prod­ucts to the top of the search results.

So, if you want to boost not only con­ver­sion and sales, but also pro­vide some lift to cus­tomer reten­tion and vis­its, then take a lead from the UK and get trendy.

Cheers!