Merchandising, in ecommerce, is the work of deciding which products a shopper sees, in what order, how they are presented and what is shown alongside them. Online it covers category page sort order, homepage and menu features, on-site search results, product recommendations and the way each product is pictured, named and priced.
How merchandising works
A physical shop has windows, end-of-aisle displays and a counter. An online shop has a handful of equivalent spots, and merchandising is the job of filling them on purpose. The main levers are:
- Sort order. Which products appear first on a category page. You can pin products by hand, or set rules such as bestsellers first, newest first, or most stock first.
- Collections and navigation. Groupings built around how people shop rather than how the warehouse is organised: “gifts under £50”, “new in for autumn”, “back to school”.
- Search results. What comes up when someone types into your site search, including synonyms (a search for “sofa” should find your “settees”).
- Recommendations. “Frequently bought together”, “you may also like” and other cross-sell placements on product pages and in the basket.
- Presentation. Product images, titles, badges such as “back in stock”, and how prices and savings are displayed.
Most platforms let you do this manually; apps and larger platforms add rules and algorithms that reorder products automatically from sales, stock and browsing data. In practice, the best results usually come from rules for the bulk of the range and a human deciding the first row or two.
A simple example: a homeware shop with 400 products leaves its cushions category sorted by “newest”. A cushion added last week, with no sales yet, sits above the bestseller that has been reordered every month for two years. Nobody chose that order; the platform did.
Why it matters
Shoppers look hardest at the first few products on a page, and on a phone only two products usually fit across the screen. Whatever sits in those positions gets most of the attention, so the order is a commercial decision whether or not you make it deliberately.
Merchandising also decides profit, not only revenue. Promoting a cheap, heavily discounted item may lift order numbers while lowering margin, and promoting a product with a high returns rate can look good in sales reports and bad in the bank account. Good merchandising weighs margin, stock depth and returns alongside popularity.
For UK retailers the calendar matters. Mothering Sunday falls in March or early April here, not May, Boxing Day and January sales follow Christmas closely, and Christmas last-order dates for Royal Mail and courier services shape what you can promote in December. Pricing presentation also has rules: any saving you show must be genuine, which is covered under was/now pricing.
There is an SEO side too. Category pages are often the pages most likely to rank for broad product searches, so merchandising changes should not strip out category copy, and sort options should not create thousands of crawlable URLs. That overlap is the subject of faceted navigation.
Common mistakes
- Never touching the default sort order, so the platform decides what sells.
- Out-of-stock products sitting in the top row, wasting the best position on the page.
- Sorting purely by revenue, which keeps promoting low-margin or high-return items.
- Recommendation widgets that suggest the product the shopper is already viewing, or something unrelated.
- Seasonal collections left live long after the season, such as a Christmas gift page in February.
- Changing several things at once, so nobody knows which change helped.
How to act on it
Start with your own data. In GA4’s item reports, compare how often each product is viewed with its add-to-cart rate. Products with many views and few basket additions usually have a presentation problem: weak images, an unclear price or missing detail. Products with a strong add-to-cart rate but few views have a visibility problem, and they are the ones to move up.
Then set simple rules for each main category: in-stock bestsellers first, strong-margin products pinned near the top, out-of-stock items at the bottom. Add a short review to your calendar before each key trading period. Where traffic allows, test one change at a time and compare the results over a few weeks rather than a few days.
Merchandising sits close to how category and product pages rank, so I review it as part of ecommerce SEO work for online shops, alongside category copy, internal links and crawl control.