E-commerce Merchandising: What It Is and Why It Matters for Growth

What Is E-commerce Merchandising?

E-commerce merchandising comes from traditional retail, where it refers to the way products are presented and positioned to encourage sales — through window displays, shelf layouts, signage, and in-store promotions.

In e-commerce, the environment is digital, but the objective remains the same: guide attention, influence decisions, and improve conversion. E-commerce merchandising is the practice of structuring and presenting products across digital touchpoints to support discovery and purchasing decisions. It combines catalog organization, visual signals, and product relationships to help shoppers find relevant items faster and with more confidence.

Unlike physical retail, digital merchandising operates at scale — often across thousands or millions of products. This makes data quality and consistency essential. How products are organized, grouped, and surfaced across an online store directly impacts revenue, customer experience, and brand perception. As catalogs grow and expectations rise, e-commerce merchandising becomes a foundational capability — not a cosmetic one.

Common E-commerce Merchandising Techniques

There is no single merchandising strategy that fits every business. Tactics depend on product type, audience, and commercial goals. However, several approaches are widely used across e-commerce platforms.

Product placement

Product placement determines which products appear on key pages such as the homepage, category pages, or dedicated landing pages. Strategic placement helps prioritize high-impact products and shapes the customer journey from the first interaction.

Labels and badges

Labels like Sale, New, Best Seller, or Best Value draw attention and provide decision shortcuts. To avoid visual overload and confusion, merchants often define rules — such as limiting the number of labels per product or making certain labels mutually exclusive.

Clear labeling improves usability and reinforces trust.

Product relations

Product relationships help expand baskets and improve relevance:

• Up-sell: suggesting a higher-end alternative
• Cross-sell: recommending complementary products or services
• Related products: offering similar options to broaden choice

When supported by accurate product data, these relationships increase average order value while improving the shopping experience.

Product bundles

Bundles group multiple products into a single purchasable item, often with a pricing incentive. In the catalog, a bundle behaves like a standalone product, with its own attributes, images, variants, and price. Bundling simplifies decision-making and drives incremental revenue.

Product sets

Product sets, such as Shop the Look, suggest products that work well together without forcing a single purchase. Unlike bundles, products in a set can be bought independently, and the set itself has no price or catalog record. This approach supports inspiration-driven shopping.

Why E-commerce Merchandising Is Critical at Scale

Effective e-commerce merchandising improves product discovery, conversion rates, average order value, and customer satisfaction. As catalogs expand, manual merchandising becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

Without structured, consistent product data, even well-designed merchandising strategies struggle to scale. This is why modern e-commerce merchandising depends on strong data foundations — where products are enriched, categorized, and connected in ways that systems can understand and act on.

What Comes Next: Searchandising

One important extension of e-commerce merchandising is searchandising — using on-site search results to actively promote products based on shopper intent. Instead of simply matching keywords, searchandising turns search into a merchandising surface of its own.

We’ll explore searchandising in a dedicated article.

Takeaway for E-commerce

E-commerce merchandising is no longer just about visual placement or manual curation. At scale, it becomes a data challenge. The teams that succeed are those that invest in structured, enriched product data that allows merchandising strategies to evolve with customer behavior. When the data foundation is strong, merchandising becomes easier to manage, more relevant for shoppers, and far more effective at driving sustainable growth.