Peculiarities of Online Merchandising in E-Commerce

One of the traditional methods of improving sales that exists in retail trade since the days of street markets is merchandising. When the online shops industry started to grow rapidly the question of merchandising became very relevant for both online and offline retail: how to decorate the shop’s window, how to place the product in order to maximize sales. For this reason, a new management area was developed - online merchandising (it can be also found as "web merchandising" in professional literature). This area deals with methods of stimulating sales of goods in the online store by influencing on the visual design and display of goods using the psychological portrait, social and behavioral characteristics of the user. This paper contains a comparison of traditional and online merchandising and analysis of offline merchandising theories that can be applied to internet shops. However, the distinctive feature of online merchandising is the use of customer data, personalize the storefront for each customer. Therefore, the latest popular tools of online merchandising have been investigated in the paper. At one part of the paper an experiment of moving goods between different places in the online issue was carried out in order to identify the most advantageous product places.