Product Merchandising: Definition, Benefits & 9 Retail Display Ideas

Product merchandising is a group of activities used to promote and sell products in-store or online. The goal is to help customers with product discovery, with strategies ranging from product displays to special offers and pricing. 

Getting it wrong can cost you in the short term and the long term. A 2025 report by OneDoor found that poor visual merchandising cost retailers $125 billion in sales over the past 12 months. And PwC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that more than half of consumers stopped buying from a brand after a single bad experience with its products or services.

This guide covers product merchandising benefits and strategy, with nine product display ideas from real-world retailers. 

What is product merchandising?

Product merchandising is the intentional promotion, display, and sale of products. It’s the practice that lets retailers get the right product in front of the right person at the right time.

What product merchandising includes 

Product merchandising covers:

• Visual merchandising, including planograms, designing, and product displays
• Experiential elements, such as product sampling and interactive demos 
• Promotions and product bundling
• Digital marketing across channels like email marketing, social media, and paid search

Traditional vs. modern product merchandising (in-store + online)

Modern product merchandising is data-driven and dynamic. Unlike static and manual traditional strategies, algorithms can surface products based on browsing behavior, purchase history, inventory levels, and margin targets. 

In practice, that means:

• A homepage can look different for every website visitor
• Retail associates personalize the in-store experience using data stored from a customer’s unified profile

Why retailers use product merchandising

Retailers use product merchandising to:

Build brand recognition

Product merchandising can influence people to try your products for the first time, even if they didn’t intend to.

Frank Mayer’s 2026 report found that for almost three-quarters of shoppers, purchase decisions aren’t fully formed before they enter a store. Some 63% said retail displays have influenced their choice when comparing similar products or brands.

Online, retailers can tailor the customer journey through real-time behavior tracking, semantic search, and AI-driven recommendations. A shopper who’d never heard of a brand can discover it through a well-placed recommendation carousel.

Increase sales

Product promotion through samples, positioning, and grouping complementary items helps with product discovery. This can lead to sales: roughly three-quarters of shoppers have discovered a new product or brand after seeing it on a retail display, per Frank Mayer’s 2026 data. 

Provide an excellent customer experience

Product merchandising covers how items are displayed. This influences the customer experience, including whether they stay long enough to make a purchase.

OneDoor’s 2025 report found almost 40 million shoppers left a mid-market store because a product was hard to find, contributing to a collective $8 billion in lost sales. 

The online experience can be similarly frustrating: 80% of customers report dissatisfaction with online search. Product merchandising focused on discovery can alleviate these issues and improve the overall customer experience. 

Improve inventory turnover

Retailers sit on approximately $1.32 in inventory for every dollar they make in sales, per 2026 Census data. Faster sales influence this turnover because stock is depleted more quickly. 

Instead of passively holding stock and hoping customers find their way to it, product merchandising considers different seasons, customer needs, historic product demand, and upcoming trends to manage inventory and promote products at the optimal time.

Product merchandising strategy tips

• Consider customers first
• Optimize store layout
• Use a variety of display ideas
• Merchandising online

Here’s how to implement a product merchandising strategy for your business:

Consider customers first

Ground product merchandising decisions in customer data. Answer questions like:

• What do your customers need? 
• How likely are they to have the exact product in mind? 
• What information and visual cues do they need to make the best decision? 
• How can you emphasize key details and benefits of products with those needs in mind?

Feed purchase history, browsing behavior, and search patterns into your merchandising decisions show more relevant products. Salsify’s 2026 ecommerce trends report found this type of product recommendation encourages 37% of shoppers to buy more often. 

Shopify helps by building a unified customer profile for every shopper. Any supplementary first-party data you collect feeds back to this profile, which powers dynamic segments. 

Vacuum brand Airsign used Shopify segmentation to gain insights about their customers and encourage shoppers who’d made a one-time purchase to sign up for subscriptions.

“We identified the segment in Shopify, created a discount, communicated with them in a way that was very personalized, and we saw about 30% of those people convert,” says Alex Dashefsky, co-founder of Airsign.

Optimize store layout

A confusing store layout is the top merchandising frustration for 10.6% of shoppers, according to OneDoor’s 2025 visual merchandising report. Almost 13 million shoppers have left a store because of it, costing brands $1.5 billion in lost revenue. 

Combine foot traffic tracking tools like Dor with customer feedback to answer the following questions: 

• Was the customer able to find what they were looking for? 
• Could they easily make sure they’re buying the right product for their needs? 
• Did the store layout and signage make it easy to navigate options? 

Experiment with different store layouts, such as:

• Grid. A pattern of long isles, typically seen in grocery stores and pharmacies, with staple items at the back.
• Loop. A predefined path a customer walks through, as seen in Ikea.
• Boutique. A free-flow layout that groups products by brand, category, or complementary items.

Choose a store layout by defining what you want customers to do in-store. If your overall goal is to increase basket size, for example, consider a layout that groups complementary products together. 

Use a variety of display types

Product displays can help you draw customer’s attention to specific products. Some 58% of in-store shoppers actively notice displays, according to Mood Media, with 36% of those aged under 40 making a purchase because of display content. 

For example, you could:

• Display clothing on mannequins, garment racks, and display tables 
• Position smaller accessories like bags, jewelry, and fragrances on freestanding displays, display cases, or glorifiers
• Use window displays to highlight bestsellers or seasonal collections

Merchandising online

Online shoppers can’t pick up a product, feel its texture, or try it on. 

This can lead to returns: DHL’s 2026 returns landscape report found 54% of products are returned because they were the wrong size. Some 39% return because the item didn’t look like the image, and 33% because it didn’t suit them. 

Remove as much uncertainty as possible before the purchase decision:

• Use logical category and collection structures.
• Add high-quality product imagery that shows scale, texture, and detail.
• Offer personalized recommendations that display relevant products a shopper might not have found on their own, using first-party data you’ve collected from them.

9 product display and visual merchandising ideas

1. Turn your products into art
2. Create a full body experience
3. Take advantage of technology
4. Use flower power
5. Create upcycled product displays
6. Offer guidance in-store and online
7. Use your customers
8. Build seasonal collections
9. Offer omnichannel product experiences

Here are nine product display ideas to consider for your retail business:

1. Turn your products into art

Some of the most effective merchandising treats products as striking works of art. Take Glossier, for example. Rather than a standard product release for their Boy Brow Arch, they partnered with the Shop app to place eye-catching, shoppable posters across New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Glossier turned product discovery into a physical scavenger hunt. Fans who found and scanned the posters got early access via the Shop app before the wider release. The display format—unexpected, location-specific, interactive—became the main story.

“Our goal with this campaign was to be disruptive, find a fresh way to bring a new brow product to the market, and generate engagement within our community,” says Kleo Mack, chief marketing officer of Glossier.

2. Create a full body experience

Merchandising that engages customers beyond their sense of sight influences shopping behavior. Create an immersive experience that draws shoppers in through:

• Sound. Melodial’s 2025 report found 41% of shoppers spend more time in physical stores with suitable music. Think about speed and ambience: the same report found a supermarket that switched from fast to slow background music led to a 38% jump in sales as customers spent more time in-store.
• Taste and touch. Brands who offer samples increase product sales by 95.2%, on average. Place yours at the store entrance, next to a complementary bestseller, or at checkout.
• Scent. Studies show that ambient scents improve both recall and recognition of familiar and unfamiliar brands. Choose a scent that reflects your brand—or have your products do it for you, like Neom does in their brick-and-mortar stores. Diffusers and candles are open for customers to try before they buy:

3. Take advantage of technology

Retail technology lets you control how products are presented both in-store and online. It also offers data on what’s working, so you can adjust your product merchandising strategy in real-time. 

Interactive elements to consider adding to your merchandising strategy include: 

• AI to surface the right products. AI-powered search and recommendation tools automatically rank products based on real-time sales data, stock levels, and browsing behavior.
• 3D and AR on product pages. For products where size, fit, or scale drives returns, AR lets customers visualize before they buy. Gunner Kennels added Shopify’s native 3D and AR support to let buyers virtually place a kennel next to their dog to check sizing, resulting in a 40% increase in order conversion rate and a 5% reduction in returns. 
• QR codes to bridge in-store and online stores. Placed next to a product display, QR codes can link directly to product pages, reviews, how-to content, or a checkout. 
• Near field communication-enabled packaging and signage. Use tap-to-learn labels or smart tags to open product pages, brand stories, or exclusive offers.

Technology doesn’t have to be solely customer-facing. Shopify Sidekick, the AI assistant built into Shopify, lets you analyze your own sales data in plain language. Ask which products are frequently bought together, which items have the highest conversion rates in different seasons, and spot patterns that inform what to stock and how to display it.

“The empowerment of day-to-day marketing and merchandising teams is a main unlock,” says Gregoire Baret, VP of digital product at Aldo Group. “Whether it's content management, defining flows for specific segments, or using Sidekick for data analysis—that autonomy is out of the box and part of the platform.”

4. Use flower power

Fresh flowers have been found to have positive effects on mood, morale, and stress reduction. Macy’s caught on to this in 1946 by launching the first annual Macy’s Flower Show. Now it’s a three week exhibition that attracts more than one million people.

Place fresh flowers outside your storefront to greet customers, and sprinkle them throughout your store and near the cash registers. Look for ways to thoughtfully integrate them with your product—maybe you use a pitcher as a vase, or create fresh flower headpieces for mannequins.

5. Create upcycled product displays

Sustainability is important to 78% of shoppers—and they’re willing to pay up to 9.9% more for sustainable products, according to Blue Yonder’s 2025 report. 

Apply this concept to your product merchandising strategy by creating upcycled product displays. Fashion brand Ganni, for example, aims for sustainable materials for in-store displays and decor, including:

• Recycled plastic podiums
• Second-hand stools
• Seats made from scrap plastic leftovers

6. Offer guidance in-store and online

A quarter of customers visit stores just to browse, per TruRating’s 2025 poll. Use wayfinding signs that direct customers to key product areas, category labels that help shoppers orient quickly, or promotional signage that highlights offers along the path to purchase.

The same idea applies online:

• Category navigation organizes products into logical groups so shoppers can browse by intent, such as “men’s running shoes” rather than “all footwear.”
• Filters let shoppers narrow products by attributes—size, color, price, material—without scrolling through your entire catalog.
• Sorting lets customers reorder results by what matters to them: price low to high, bestselling, or newest arrivals.

7. Use your customers

Shoppers look to other shoppers to discover what to buy and who to buy from. BrightLocal’s 2026 study found 97% of customers read reviews for local retailers. Two in five rely on them every time they look for a business.

The same principle applies in-store. A visible queue shows passersby that something is worth waiting for. A sampling station with a crowd attracts more customers than an empty one. Position both at high-traffic points near your entrance or storefront window where people can see them from the street. 

On your website, show what other customers have done by adding “bestseller” or “most loved” badges to high-performing products, and including star ratings and reviews on product pages. 

8. Build seasonal collections

The holiday season is the busiest shopping season of the year. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) in 2025, Shopify stores generated $14.6 billion in sales, up 24% from the previous year. More than 94,000 store owners had their highest-selling day ever on Shopify.

Capitalize on this with seasonal collections that keep assortments feeling current and give customers a reason to return. That might include:

• New landing pages
• Curated product collections
• Seasonal filters

Think about other events in the retail holiday calendar to lean into. Luggage brand BÉIS, for example, launched their Getaway Collection in April 2025—a travel capsule with new silhouettes, accessories, and colorways, timed directly to summer travel season.

9. Offer omnichannel product experiences 

Customers don’t separate online and offline experiences; 80% move between both as part of a single purchase journey. 

Cater to these preferences with omnichannel experiences like:

Buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS)

One-quarter of grocery shoppers say services like BOPIS are the most important factor when deciding where to shop. Home goods brand Parachute does this with Shopify’s unified commerce platform. “This allows us to drive traffic to the stores where we know that customers have a really great experience,” says Meg Marsh, SVP of operations for Parachute.

Consistent product presentation across channels

Pricing, product information, and availability need to match whether a customer is browsing on a phone, in-store, or on a desktop. Pricer’s 2025 data found 79% of shoppers think price consistently directly impacts their customer loyalty.

In-store staff with access to full inventory data

Let your staff see a customer's full purchase history and access the complete product catalog. David’s Bridal does this with Shopify POS. “Being able to show our entire catalog to the bride is something we could only accomplish on Shopify,” says David Bridal’s CIO Ravi Raparla.

Parachute and David’s Bridal aren’t alone in their omnichannel growth with Shopify. A leading independent research firm found brands using Shopify's unified commerce platform saw 150% omnichannel gross merchandise value growth and 22% lower total cost of ownership, on average. 

How to measure product merchandising success

No single key performance indicator (KPI) tells the full story of how well your product merchandising is working. 

Discover whether your efforts are working by monitoring product merchandising metrics like:

Quick merchandising audit checklist 

To audit product merchandising in-store, ask:

• Are products easy to find, and is wayfinding signage clear?
• Do displays reflect the current season or active promotion?
• Is in-store music aligned to your brand identity and set at an appropriate tempo?
• Are sampling or demonstration opportunities in place at peak traffic points?
• Do staff have access to full customer purchase history and catalog at checkout?

For online merchandising, think about:

• Are search, filters, and category navigation returning accurate, relevant results?
• Are cross-sell and upsell recommendations present on product and cart pages?
• Are product descriptions, pricing, and availability consistent across all channels?
• Are bestseller and social proof signals visible?