With Black Friday just around the corner, standing out during this frenzied shopping period is crucial. Every online business will be striving to showcase the right products to the right customers at the right time. So, how can you stand out from the crowd?

While personalization engines have revolutionized this process of displaying products to visitors, often, they restrict your control over their results without entirely overwriting the automation, and this can be a problem when you have specific marketing goals in mind. 

Enter Clerk's Merchandising feature, which allows you to align your marketing strategy with only a few clicks while keeping the power and function of AI intact. In this article, we'll explore how Clerk's Merchandising tool can help transform your Black Friday sales strategy.

The problem with e-commerce merchandising

E-commerce merchandising is not a new concept, but in the current digital landscape, a few years can feel like a lifetime. And if you’re using outdated merchandising practices, you run the risk of not converting any sales. And this is something you do not want to be doing on Black Friday.

The main challenge is that it requires a large amount of strategy planning to streamline your website's front page, categories, and shopping carts with your email marketing, and ad campaigns. 

Automation tools do exist to help influence the products displayed, but they often limit you to either fully taking over the results or defining complex algorithms. What do we mean by this? 

It would mean you have to manually take control by specially choosing 3 Nike shoes to display once a customer searches for the brand or always showing one specific camera as the first result within your email marketing. It creates manual work and takes away the individualized personalization. 

And redefining the entire algorithm defeats the whole purpose of using automated tools, as it leaves you with the role of identifying trends rather than letting the system do the work.

So, what is the solution?

Clerk’s Merchandising tool: Smart automation defined by you.

Clerk’s merchandising works within a set of rules defined by you. This allows our AI to combine your business goals while still using its personalization knowledge for each customer. 

The tool empowers you to create simple or complex rules that have a significant impact on your business, all from a single interface. Whether you want to promote your brand in recommendations, add variety to emails, or prioritize high-margin items in search results, Merchandising lets you do it in seconds.

So how do we do it?

‍Related: Handling high-traffic Holidays

How does Clerk’s Merchandising work?

Merchandising allows you to adapt and influence our AI to match your business goals without sacrificing the intelligence behind Clerk. The tool consists of timing options alongside several triggers and rules that allow you to decide where, when, and how your campaigns run. 

Using these during Black Friday can be vital in displaying those high-converting or high-profit margin products for your customers.

You can apply Merchandising to all Clerk elements at once or decide upon specific areas like search results, different recommendation sliders, particular emails, or banner placements on your webshop. Essentially, if it’s shown by Clerk, it can be merchandised.

With Rules, you can control everything from a single product that you always display first to broader categories and products based on filters or searches. 

You can handpick products using a product list, search for specific items, or use filters based on chosen product attributes. Once activated, your campaigns take effect instantly, meaning you will be well on your way to achieving your business goals this Black Friday. 

Four ways to boost your business this Black Friday using Merchandising

Clerk’s merchandising can be utilized in many ways. We are going to run through 4 examples of using it on your webstore.

1. Boosting high-margin items: 

• The first way to use Merchandising is simply to boost your high-margin products throughout your website.
• Most webshops stock large quantities of different items, and some items will generate 10, 20, or even 30% higher margins than others. These are the ones you really want to be displaying first.
• To do so, configure Clerk to recognize margin percentages and use the "Anywhere" trigger to apply it across your webshop. Then, set up a rule that gives a significant boost to products with margins over a certain threshold, say 30%: these products will now be shown much more often.

2. Promoting your own brand:

• The second way is to promote your own home-brand products and nudge customers to buy them, especially as these products tend to earn you more.
• This, of course, helps to increase the visibility of your white-label brand by boosting it when customers browse similar non-branded products. 
• Let’s take phone cables as an example. The best way is to boost your own branded cables in alternatives, especially when customers search for a cable that is not your home-brand one.
• Use a filter to identify non-branded items and set up a rule to elevate your brand in these cases, allowing for a significant boost in their display.

‍Related: Conquer Black Friday with Clerk’s Search

3. Partner Promotion: 

• If you have agreements with certain suppliers, use Merchandising to showcase their products at the top of search results for a defined period of time.
• If you have a partnership with a specific shoe brand, for example, you can ensure this brand is always shown at the top of search results whenever anyone searches for shoes.
• All you need to do is set up a rule for “shoes” or whatever it is your partner sells, pin it to the top, and define the timeframe. 
• Clerk will still rank the products based on what is most likely to sell from within the brand.
• This helps you fulfill your obligations while benefiting from these partnerships.

4. Managing Out-of-Stock Products: 

• It’s vital that you remove out-of-stock items from being prominently displayed. However, sometimes, it can be strategically important to show that you do stock the item, even if it isn’t available right now.
• This means that it’s crucial to remove out-of-stock products from recommendations, but you can still display them at the bottom of search results. 
• To do so, create a rule for recommendations that it should “Remove Any” when the stock amount is 0.
• Then, create a rule for Search by using the filter “Bury Below Others” with the same filter on stock amounts of 0.

Pricing

Clerk's Merchandising comes bundled with any of our products at no additional cost. To maximize your marketing strategy's potential, it's advisable to use the complete platform with all four products, ensuring alignment across your webshop and email campaigns.

‍Conclusion

With Black Friday just around the corner, showing the right products at the right time is a game-changer. Clerk's Merchandising tool simplifies this process, allowing you to influence product listings without compromising the intelligence of AI. 

This Black Friday, if you want to work smarter, not harder, Clerk should be a part of your tech stack. It's the ultimate solution for attracting, converting, and retaining customers. Don't wait; supercharge your Black Friday sales with Clerk's Merchandising to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition.

If you want to dive further into merchandising, watch this video here.