Merchandising Center

E-commerce visual merchandising is a practice of displaying products to attract your customers’ attention, highlight products, and maximize your sales.

Raptor’s Merchandising Center adds campaign tools to personalize and manage active sales campaigns. This enables detailed control of which products should take precedence in specific modules, increasing product exposure just where you want it.

How it works

Using the Merchandising Center requires existing usage of at least one of the Raptor Advisors  (Web, Email, Ad or Search).  An active Product Feed is also required, featuring - at a minimum - a Product ID and Image URL for each product. See the relevant section for more information about how to set up a Feed.

The Merchandising Center utilizes your recommendation modules as advertising space on the channel of your choice and lets you put specific items right in the customer’s line of sight, combining customer relevance and campaign promotion. Make brand specific campaigns or advertise specific items you want to move from your stock. Sell top spots to suppliers or prioritize high-margin products by boosting them to the top spots.

The Merchandising Center automatically tracks the campaign performance to let you know what resonates with your customers.

Set up

Step 1: Schedule campaign

Name your campaign and specify the campaign time period. Choose a specific period (not todays date) or start the campaign immediately. Both options can be with or without an end date.

Select the checkbox ‘Target CDP audience’ if you wish to attach an audience to your campaign. By targeting a CDP Audience you are able to reach specific visitors and/or customers with your campaign.

To enable Audiences in your campaign, it is necessary to attach an Audience to an Activation. This can be done by going to the Activation tab in the CDP (Customer Data Platform) followed by creating a new Activation or selecting an existing one. The Activation set up allows you to add an Audience to the Activation.

Step 2: Reach people where they are

Choose the channels through which you would like to target visitors and customers. Note that you can only select a channel when it is activated. It is possible to select multiple channels.

Step 3: Select modules

Choose the modules that you want to boost your products in. Note that a module can only be active in one campaign at a time. If you wish to use a module that is already in use, you can manually stop the campaign from running at the top of the page.

Step 4: Product search

In this step, you will select the products you wish to advertise - the most complex and, arguably, important part of the process. As such, we will go into a bit more detail about the hows, whats and whys.

• Firstly, you will be given the option of selecting a basic product search, or the Advanced Search option. If you have more than one valid Product Feed active, however, you will also be able to select which feed to use from a drop-down menu. Keep in mind which Feed you selected, particularly if you intend to use Advanced Search.

• Basic Product Search is primarily useful in cases where you wish to magnify a small selection of hand-picked goods. You can search by Product ID, Name or Category Name, and optionally set a price-range as well. Multiple items can be searched for simultaneously, using a comma-separated list, and once marked for boosting a product will remain selected even if another search is performed.

Note that the 'Select all' button only marks all items on the current page. For larger product-sets, the Advanced Search option is recommended.

• The Advanced Search option lets you create a custom filter, boosting every product it catches - ideal for enhancing large swathes of the catalog. After clicking on Build Now, you can select the what to filter by - such as name, price or category - along with a selection of conditions depending on the chosen term. For example, 'BrandName Contains Adidas' or 'Originalprice GreaterThan 700'.

Note that the filter-options are derived from the ProductFeed you selected in the drop-down on the main selection-screen. Notably, this includes a number of Custom Fields that are set up on a case-by-case basis. By consulting the Feeds section of the Integrations-menu, you will be able to check which Custom Fields your feed is using, and what they are used for.

• In Advanced Search, everything that your filter finds is automatically selected, but it's possible to narrow the scope by adding additional conditions. These always function as 'and' parameters, meaning that only products that fulfill both conditions are selected. A classic example of this might be to select all products with a particular BrandName, but then narrowing it to those that have an OriginalPrice above a certain threshold. Multiple items can be searched for simultaneously, using a comma-separated list.

Once the filter has been configured to your satisfaction, simply validate the search, and whatever is found becomes your new campaign.

Step 5: Choose boosting level

Choose the Boosting level to define how much attention your chosen products will get in the defined modules.

Step 6: Summary

The last step provides you with a complete overview of all your choices during the process of creating your merchandising campaign.