A new visual ecommerce merchandise management solution is helping merchants make better decisions and enhance their customers' experiences.
The solution, dubbed Smart Merchandiser, enables merchants, marketers and merchandisers to reduce the time required to create, edit and update online storefronts. The solution features a drag-and-drop interface and overlays analytics, ratings, conversion rates and inventory data from IBM WebSphere Commerce and other sources onto graphical representations from actual product catalogs. The ability to view insights in one place can help merchants make online layout decisions based on updated 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 feature set includes a graphic layout that overlays data like page views, abandonment rate, conversion rate and sales revenue on product images, a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies catalog management as well as allows for mass adding, removing and updating departments, colors, materials and other attributes. In addition, the solution offers visual alerts for low inventory items or out-of-stock items, simplified color sequencing and improved searchability and customer experiences with advanced sorting and filtering capabilities. Additionally, Smart Merchandiser features social analytics overlays, such as likes, shares, views and searches so merchants can measure sentiment across social networks.
"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."