Visual Merchandising Importance: Improving In-Store Operations with Visual Validation Tools

By Jay Hunt, Sales Director, ReStore for Retail

Imagine this: a customer walks into your store in search of a shirt. They see the stack of shirts available, look through the pile in a rush to find their size, and walk to the register to pay, leaving behind a mess where there was previously a neat stack of clothing. 

So, what happens now? The next customer walks in, sees that messy table, and walks right past it. You’ve made one sale but lost another, all because you didn’t have visual validations in place to ensure your store met expectations around appearance and cleanliness. 

Maintaining visual standards is one of the biggest challenges for retail operators, especially those district managers who don’t make daily visits to their physical store locations. This is where visual validation tools come in handy. They provide eyes on the ground and an easy way to ensure potential sales are not turned away due to things like unkempt tables and missing signage. 

Take a quick dive into visual merchandising importance in retail, including why it’s essential and how the right technology can make it happen.   

What is visual validation in retail?

Visual validation is a strategy for ensuring that all stores meet the same standards—and a visual merchandising solution is a must when managing a large and diverse fleet of retail locations.

By visually affirming that stores are set and reset properly, you guarantee a few important things:

• All customers see the same clean store, the same stocked merchandise, and the same promotions
• All customers have their expectations met in terms of what they were anticipating when they walked through the door
• All store locations stay consistent in their appearance

Ultimately, visual validation helps brands set – and live up to – customer and C-suite expectations. In doing so, it greatly reduces the risk of profit loss due to easily avoidable errors in how products are arranged and promoted. It can also be used to ensure appearance standards are met in the parking lot, bathrooms, and changing rooms – basically anywhere that a customer may inhabit while interacting with your store. 

Benefits of visual merchandising technology on a store-by-store level

In most large retail operations, store standards are set at a corporate level and then relayed to in-store employees. From there, it’s usually up to individual store managers to verify that these standards are met and to resolve the problem when they’re not. However, things don’t always go so seamlessly, and gaps in communication can result in standards that don’t get met all the time or at all.

Here’s where technology comes into play. As a visual merchandising solution platform, a tool like ReStore for Retail provides retailers with a step-by-step execution model that can significantly increase the in-store execution of visual strategies. This is a big advantage over more general merchandising software, which may support visual validation to a degree but isn’t explicitly designed for that purpose.

As for how it works, that depends on the tool. In ReStore for Retail’s platform, for example, stakeholders create an accessible playbook for in-store employees around how to set up their individual stores and promotions. They then use built-in reporting mechanisms to visually validate stores in near real-time so they know that things are being done correctly and can provide feedback and direction when they’re not. 

If we circle back to the messy table mentioned at the beginning of this article, visual validation through a platform like ReStore for Retail may look like a store associate resetting the table and then logging a picture of that reset for verification. In doing so, employees are held accountable for meeting store appearance standards, and store managers, district managers, and executives can see at a glance that these standards are being upheld. 

Visual validation in action

• An expansive American department store chain has visual validation practices in place but performs them on-site, leading to serious discrepancies and a lot of missed opportunities for improvement. By adopting tech solutions to do the job instead, managers no longer must perform physical validations and store stakeholders can visually validate across their organization right from their smartphone or other mobile devices. 
• Two competing retailers, both vying for the same customers, struggle to gain the upper hand in the market. One doesn’t employ visual validation and gets a reputation for messy stores. The other does and gains a reputation for clean, predictable storefronts, thus boosting its reputation over the competition and pulling in more of its customers. 

Impact of visual merchandising on sales: the path to higher profits?

A lot must go right for consistent growth in your retail operations. While visual validation isn’t the entirety of it, it does play a massive role in boosting sales and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. 

Our team at ReStore for Retail has helped retailers of all sizes achieve better sales with our visual validation platform. To do this, we engage with corporate stakeholders to come up with a custom plan for the how, why, when, and where behind visual merchandising importance. Then, we enable on-the-ground execution and empower store employees so we can transfer the reins. The result is high adoption rates and successful engagement with visual validation tools, plus stores that use visual validation as a day-to-day practice and see the benefits of doing so.

Get in touch to learn more or sign up for a free demo.