Organize Shelves & Racks to Portray Variety

There are two sorts of product lines where you are especially likely to realize sales increases when your shopper perceives large variety in the merchandise mix:

• Product categories where you’re already seeing a dramatic increase in sales. These increases are a sign you could be a destination location for that category of merchandise. If you’re selling lots of soccer equipment, expand the merchandise assortment to draw even more soccer equipment buyers. 
• Product categories which are underperforming in sales compared to what you’d expect. If you’ve evidence that other retailers are selling more baked goods than you are per square foot of merchandise space, consider expanding your variety of baked goods. 

     For these and other situations where you want to portray a large variety, here are shopper psychology tips:

• Research findings from University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois suggest that if the actual range of alternatives is relatively small, you’ll portray the assortment as larger if you organize the display by a dimension of interest to the shopper, but not of primary interest. Organize by price, for example. It takes time for the shopper to run their eyes over whatever is there. The increased time translates in the shopper’s mind to the impression of a larger item assortment.
• If the actual variety is large, organize your display by a dimension of primary interest to the shopper. This is according to findings from University of Southern California, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Texas-Austin. The trick is to identify this dimension. Take the case of shoppers who are familiar with the product category. For luxury products, their organizing rubric might be brand name. The consumer’s eyes home in on their favorite brand. For high-technology items, where the latest versions carry more features or more status, the shopper’s organizing principle, and therefore your rule for organizing the items in your store, might be release date or operating system generation. 
• Now let’s take the case of the shopper who has limited familiarity with the product category. They’re purchasing the item like a carbon monoxide detector or a patterned scarf because someone told them they really need one. How should you portray that you do, in fact, have a large assortment? Here the researchers would recommend you organize your selection by circumstances of use. For the CO detector, it might be residential versus commercial. For the scarves, it might be formal versus informal wardrobe. 

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more: 
Sell More by Adding Variety 
Randomly Arrange Limited Product Sets