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You need a good definition of merchandising? Cockpit brings you all you need to know about this key factor in retail execution. Merchandising gathers all the techniques to better display your product and optimize your store layout in order to maximize the purchase rate in your points of sale. Merchandising processes and store implementation may vary according the kind of POS you manage (food, do-it-yourself, fashion, etc.) In an nutshell, a short definition of merchandising is simply all sales and marketing techniques aiming at promoting your product: product display, in-store advertising, signage, and communication, windows dressing, space allocation in shelves and of course customer flow in the shop in order to sell more.

Visual merchandising, from its conception to its execution is the way your stores are organized in terms of visual impressions through different design like store and mass plans but above all, plans describing all specific product displays and arrangements. In this process, a planogram is nothing else than a visual merchandising tool that provides you with a graphic representation...

In less than 20 years, Apple has become a giant in physical distribution with over 500 retail stores opened throughout the world. What are the keys to understand how a product-oriented company, with no direct physical distribution until 2001 manage to open huge and expensive stores in the very best locations that are generating the highest $ per square foot among retailers? (more than $5.500 per square foot according to Costar in 2018). It is all about execution!

Building a visual merchandising strategy is one thing but making sure it is well implemented in your whole store network is another. How can one be sure that its visual merchandising strategy produces its return on investment when they don’t even know if it is correctly executed in all their stores?