Drive more sales with eCommerce visual merchandising | Omi.so
Written by
Miranda Gabbott
Apr 29, 2025
Table of contents
Drive more sales with eCommerce visual merchandising | Omi.so
In the golden age of brick-and-mortal retail, department store owners coined a new discipline: ‘visual merchandising’. This referred to strategies for displaying physical products in a way that makes them more appealing and engaging to would-be customers, by drawing inspiration from the fields of design, museum curation, and behavioral psychology.
As an eCommerce retailer, there’s plenty you can learn from studying the art and science of visual merchandising. Though homepages have replaced window displays, and carousels of product images have replaced glass cabinets, many of the basic principles carry over.
Read on to discover the emerging field of eCommerce visual merchandising, and how you can use it to engage customers and boost sales.
Omi takes your eCommerce visual merchandising to the next level
Omi is a 3D product visualization tool. Use it to bring your most creative visual marketing ideas to life.
What is visual merchandising?
Visual merchandising is the practice of displaying products in a retail space in a way that’s likely to maximize sales.
Its origins lie in the mid-19th century with the rise of a fabulous new retail genre — department stores. They used their windows as stages, creating arrangements of mannequins, products, and props as visually captivating as Broadway shows.
As a practice for brick-and-mortar stores, ‘visual merchandising’ is about turning retail space into an immersive experience that encourages shoppers to make a purchase. It encompasses both cheering customers up with luxurious furnishings — and hurrying them to the checkouts with one-way systems.
Many of the principles of visual merchandising translate to an eCommerce context. Obviously, online stores cannot deliver the same immersive experiences that physical shops can. However, with smart use of UX design and product visualization software, eCommerce retailers can use product arrangement, color, and props to stimulate a customers’ senses, just as retailers did in the heyday of the department store.
6 techniques to drive sales with eCommerce visual merchandising
Here’s 6 ways for how to incorporate visual merchandising principles into your eCommerce business — and why they’re likely to drive sales.
1. Visual storytelling
Visual storytelling is a powerful technique for eCommerce retailers, just as it was for their brick-and-mortar predecessors. Department store owners built little worlds around their key products and brands, using props and decorations to evoke a particular lifestyle. As early as the 1960s, the Ralph Lauren section in one such store was decked out with duck decoys, fishing creels, and riding boots — trappings of upper-class leisure time in the American countryside.
Diffuser, wine, and hair spray in story-esque settings. Where would your products fit best?
Fauchon’s giant chocolate egg in the park is a sight you can’t un-see. (Made with Omi of course.)
As an eCommerce retailer, you can make use of similar strategies by using props and backgrounds in your product photography. Selling pajamas? Include a photograph that shows them in a warm, fireside setting next to a mug of hot cocoa. This will create a narrative around the pajamas for potential buyers, showing that they’re more than just a product — they’re part of a cosy lifestyle.
💡 Pro tip: creative product photoshoots are one of the best ways to show your customers the world around your product — but they don’t come cheap. The average photoshoot costs around €2,000 for ~10 pieces of content. If you’ve got more than a handful of products to make content for, that could blow your marketing budget to shreds. Omi — a 3D product visualization tool — offers a more affordable solution. Better still, it gives you far more creative freedom over your product’s visual world. Here’s how it works:
This intuitive software gives you free reign over your product images. Add your own background photographs and props, or choose from hundreds already available on the platform. Whichever virtual items you display your products with, they’ll look ultra–realistic. No one will know you didn’t just jet off to Puerto Escondido to take pictures of your Mojito on a real Mexican beach. Department store owners could only have dreamed of such easy visual merchandising tactics!
|
2. Cross-merchandising
The technique of cross-merchandising, or cross-selling, is based on placing items that are often bought at the same time physically near to each other to encourage impulse buying and association buying.
Department store owners have been using cross-merchandising tactics since at least the 1920s. However, the idea itself is probably even older, since it’s quite an intuitive one — if someone comes into your shop to buy a walnut cracker, they’re probably going to buy walnuts too. Why not place the items near each other, to make their lives easier and secure the extra sale?
In eCommerce, cross-merchandising is often even more effective, since you can use customer data to make personalized suggestions for which products users might like to buy next. Cross-merchandising tactics to try include:
“Frequently bought together” product recommendations — a module that appears with additional product suggestions when users add an item to their cart
Bundle discounts — e.g. “free delivery if you spend more than $50”
Dynamic product recommendations based on browsing behavior — such as a module on the checkout screen with items that the customer has recently viewed, in case they’ve forgotten to add something to their basket
Bundles are a classic tool for cross-selling. And they’re finally easy to make. In Omi’s Virtual Studio, you just drag-and-drop your 3D products into your scene.
Most big eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce have a wide variety of plugins available for cross-merchandising based on personalized suggestions. This is a time-tested tactic to improve your average order value (AOV).
💡 Pro tip: personalized cross-merchandizing is great, but if you find out some product combinations are absolute classics, you should create a dedicated marketing campaign around them. For example, let’s say your customers very frequently buy your face wash together with your toner. Use Omi to create a gorgeous product image that shows both products together, in the same space — and use this as the basis of a website banner and/or advertisement. With Omi, you can create realistic product ‘photoshoots’ in under 2 minutes, which allows you to respond quickly when you notice new patterns of buyer behavior — and never miss an opportunity to upsell. |
3. Interactive product displays
Interactive product displays were part of the theatre of department stores. Activities like free samples and live product demos encouraged visitors to physically engage with the merchandise on offer, creating a sensorial experience more likely to stick in the mind, and ultimately lead to a sale.
Whilst you can’t invite eCommerce visitors to physically touch your products, creating interactive experiences on your site can make users feel more connected to them, and improve your engagement levels. You could:
Create 3D product viewing experiences that allow your customers to see zoomed in and 360-degree views of your products
Launch augmented reality (AR) try-on experiences for items like clothing and accessories
Let users change the settings on products with visual product configurators — that is, tools that allow users to customize product settings, such as changing the color of items.
💡 Pro tip: With Omi, you can easily turn your product into an interactive 3D Viewer that customers can zoom in on and turn around. Our research shows that customers love this interactive feature — eCommerce retailers who use 3D Viewers (also known as 360° viewers) on their product pages see often see up to a 20% higher conversion rate and a 16% increase in cart value. |
Use Omi to create interactive 3D products renders
Omi lets your customers explore your products from every possible angle.
4. Color psychology
Colors are often considered one of the most influential variables in visual merchandising, since they have the power to subtly change customers’ moods in ways they may not be aware of.
Indeed, research shows that users make subconscious judgments about people, environments, or products within 90 seconds of seeing them — and up to 90% of that initial assessment is based on color alone.
Warm colors like red, orange, and yellow often generate a sense of excitement — hence why sale signs are often associated with the color red. Conversely, cool ones like greens and blues instill calm and security.
To use color psychology as an eCommerce business, pick brand colors that evoke the mood you want your customers to feel when they see your product. Think pastel tones for lifestyle brands, to create a soft, premium feel, or hot pinks and oranges for activewear brands where the customers’ hearts should be racing.
Warm colors enhance heat and evoke emotion.
Cool color palette creating a sense of calm.
5. Visual organization
In the heyday of department stores, arranging products was serious business. A new hero product might get its own podium, and a display that took up considerable floor space.
Those in charge of the displays used tactics such as:
Pyramiding — creating triangles of products, which draw the eye towards a focal point in the centre. This is visually engaging and useful for showing which item in the display is the most important.
Symmetry and balance — which creates strong visual impact and offers a pleasant viewing experience
The power of 3 — a display that depicts 3 similar items as focal points in a group, creating a sense of harmony
As an eCommerce retailer, you can use these same principles in your product photography to create dynamic images that successfully capture customers’ attention.
Do you want pixel-perfect symmetry or a natural lifestyle setup? Omi’s alignment tools and drag-and-drop UX give you total creative control.
💡 Pro tip: design tactics like the ones above will be familiar to anyone who has studied design. But what if your marketing team doesn’t have its own dedicated designer yet? That’s where Omi can help. Our Virtual Photo Studio has a library of artist-designed templates for you to simply drag and drop your product into. You can see what your products look like arranged artfully in a pyramid, for example, without needing the expertise to know exactly which angle that pyramid should be. |
6. Memorable branding
If you were led, blind-folded, into a famous retailer, then had to guess which one it was, you’d probably guess correctly. A Zara always looks and feels like a Zara; a TJMaxx always looks and feels like a TJMaxx. And that’s not even to mention Apple.
Branding is a fundamental part of visual merchandising — when people know what to expect from your company, they can start to build a relationship with it, and eventually become loyal customers. Whether you’re selling on or offline, you should be displaying products in a consistent way.
Site visitors should be able to look at your products and the digital space around them, and know they belong to your brand. You should:
Use a cohesive color palette and typography
Maintain consistent product image styles
Ensure uniformity in promotional banners and call-to-action (CTA) buttons
Repeat key messaging across different pages to reinforce your brand voice and values
Fauchon uses Omi to make sure their visuals across all channels express a consistent brand.
💡 Pro tip: unless you’ve had a rebrand, your product photography should have a consistent look and feel. But, historically speaking, recreating product photoshoots meant taking painstaking care over ensuring lots of small details were consistent. Omi offers everything you need to guarantee continuity between product images, whether you’re “shooting” them a day apart, a month, or a year. In the Virtual Photo Studio, you can:
|
Black Honey’s website features a beautiful mix of abstract and lifestyle product photography, all made with Omi.
eCommerce visual merchandising: a powerful digital marketing strategy with a rich history
By borrowing tried-and-true visual merchandising techniques from traditional retail and adapting them to eCommerce, businesses can create engaging shopping experiences that drive sales.
After all, whilst online shopping might be a phenomenon from the last 2 decades, human psychology hasn’t changed for hundreds of years — consumers are just as easily hooked by interactive experiences and smart color choices as they were in the early days of retail culture.
eCommerce brands that prioritize visual merchandising stand to gain higher engagement and increased order values — and, with a tool like Omi, you can implement it without burning through your whole marketing budget.
Omi takes your eCommerce visual merchandising to the next level
Omi is a 3D product visualization tool. Use it to bring your most creative visual marketing ideas to life.
About the author
Miranda Gabbott
-
Content Writer
Miranda Gabbot.
