Ecommerce merchandising is an opportunity for a retailer to enter business logic and curate the search and browse results displayed to its customers. This includes managing promotions, curating search results, and testing each of the steps to ensure they increase sales and conversions. For the sports industry, seasonality has a significant impact on the business. 

Seasonal promotions, sales events, seasonal products, and specific sports event or sport-related influencer/personality-promoted products are common for sports & goods retailers and should be reflected and updated at a lightning pace on the website. Hiding out-of-stock or out-of-season products, or promoting current sale events, is a type of business logic that needs to overrule the regular search relevance. 

Pin, hide, boost, bury search results: Sport24, Gymshark

Sports retailer Sport24 merchandises its search results. When users search for “horsens”, certain products are pinned at the top of the search results while others are hidden.

When users search for “hat” on sports retailer Gymshark’s website, selected products are pinned to the top of the search results for more effective merchandising.

Gymshark’s success indicators:

• £2M a year in extra sales due to relevance strategy improvement
• £3m a year in extra sales due to full size range products prioritization
• £1.2m a year in extra sales due to hiding out-of-stock products

 

 

 

Promotion banners: Lacoste

Lacoste uses search merchandising to highlight product collections. Specific search queries show promotional banners promoting seasonal items.

 

 

Dynamic landing page: Culture Kings

Streetwear fashion retailer Culture King uses dynamic category landing pages to promote their products. When users click on the “Old Golfer” promotional banner, they are taken to a separate landing page where can check featured new Old Golfer headwear.

 

 

Read more about best practices for eCommerce merchandising: 

How to increase online sales with Search merchandising

How to boost online sales with Category merchandising

Conclusion

Configuring merchandising strategy on search results pages and category pages of the website is vital for highly competitive industries, such as the sports & goods ecommerce. Companies have to be able to rapidly iterate, ship campaigns instantly, and react fast to any changes in their business environment. A well-defined merchandising strategy enables sports & goods retailers to not only increase their revenues and conversions, but also allow them to evolve and adapt to any new trends in the future.