Merchandising is how we display our products and services online to sell or to get people to do what we want them to do. Where we place items for sale, how they look, the sales messages and the ease we create for the prospects ability to buy. The term merchandising comes mainly from the retail business world. The companies that sell the most revenue per square footage in a retail space are deemed the best merchandisers in the retail world.

What we want to do is be the best online merchandiser for our products and services to our targeted customer.

The #1 mistake that new entrepreneurs make is that they think they have to provide all this information and detail to sell something, when in reality you want to limit the information and focus on getting your core product or service upfront immediately in the eyes of your customer, all the while making it very easy for them to buy or do what you want them to do. We do this by merchandising the home page above the fold with our core product. We create an emotional trigger (image or text) and a call to action (button, option form, video) to get our prospect to do what we want them to do.

The best online merchandiser s are Google and Apple .

I recently joined this new global entrepreneurnetwork called NEURS. See the simplicity and how they merchandise, which in this case is selling me on adding my name and email address to learn more about the service. A great visual of a map showing where all my connections are located is the emotional trigger, two call to actions, a 3 minute video to learn more and the email option form. The ease of use is basic as well. Click a play button, fill out a form.

The secret sauce in merchandising centers on your ability to add scarcity, urgency and social proof behavioral selling techniques to your merchandising to inn cent and motivate your prospective customers to buy.