Merchandising tactics are evolving rapidly; an e-commerce platform that provides your merchandisers with more options than static product-to-product cross-sell mapping is invaluable. Novator has embedded Mercado Software’s search, navigation and merchandising solutions into Virtual Retailer to provide our clients with advanced merchandising capabilities.

Virtual Retailer provides real-time decision support and supports merchandising tactic changes with analytics. With Virtual Retailer’s self-managed merchandising module, merchandisers can present products to customers based on the search terms they use, their navigation path, the products they view and their location on the site. Optimize product placement and improve key metrics that drive your revenue by taking advantage of visual merchandising capabilities, product data such as margin or popularity, customer generated content such as reviews, and more.

Key Features of Merchandising
	Create, place and schedule merchandising areas, promotional banners, images and other merchandising-focused content with Site Designer
	Define product merchandising relationships, such as cross-sell, up sell and add-on.
	Place more than one merchandising area on a page, such as on the product details page or the ‘Add to Cart’ page, to customize the content displayed to the customer.
	Encourage alternative browse paths by placing products in multiple categories.
	Guide navigation with user-definable browse paths and navigation attributes.
	Promote high-margin products through search sorting based on user-definable criteria or forced result sorting.
	Schedule pricing and discount events for sales and promotions.
	Include multiple images per product for alternative views.
	Add rich imaging with zoom, 360-degree rotation, colour swatches and hot spots.
	Benefit from customer-generated product reviews. Use review data to place the highest-reviewed products in key merchandising areas.
	Create and schedule promotions with automatic add to cart for free items.
	Display customers’ recently viewed products.
	Create product kits and bundles.

Key Features of Search
	Control natural search ranking and relevancy.
	Control navigation by category, attribute and breadcrumb.
	Manage synonyms by language.
	Correct spelling and stemming.
	Customize advanced linguistics and expert domain dictionaries.
	Provide alternatives to “no search results”.
	Present search results on related documents.
	Merchandise on search results using search term as keyword trigger.
	Run a full spectrum of reports to improve the customer search experience.