5 Merchandising Strategies to Boost Summer Sales and Profits

Are you set up with the newest merchandising optimization technology to drive summer conversions? 

Pairing the right strategy with the right tech can help you capitalize on summer shopping trends to not only boost conversions but drive profitability through an enhanced customer experience, competitive advantages, and inventory efficiency. 

So, how do you leverage increased consumer activity and spending during the summer while quickly adapting to shifting summer trends and preferences with responsive merchandising?

These five strategies are the best place to start! 

Let’s dig deeper into each. 

1. Leveraging Weather-Responsive Merchandising

Thanks to evolving AI, a dynamic merchandising strategy that adjusts product displays based on local weather conditions is possible. 

This could enable you to promote products — with seasonal promotions, product sorting, and dynamic marketing campaigns — such as sunscreens, hats, and beachwear on hotter days, and switch to light jackets and raincoats when the forecast calls for rain. 

To initiate this strategy, you must consider integration with a weather API. This enables you to automate your product displays based on real-time local weather data.

Let’s say you’re a US-based online retailer selling primarily in Miami. When the forecast predicts a weekend heatwave, your online store can then automatically highlight a collection of beach essentials like sunscreen, swimsuits, and coolers, boosting sales as customers prepare for the beach.

Alternatively, a more straightforward route is to use geo-targeting to display appropriate weather-related products to customers based on their current location — or, invest in a Shopify app such as Meteonomiqs.

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2. Opting for Advanced Product Sorting That Uses Multiple Parameters

Next on your summer-merchandising ideas to-do list should be getting a sophisticated algorithm to sort products, not just by popularity or newness, but by combining multiple parameters — such as margins, conversion rates, customer reviews, and past purchasing patterns during similar seasons. 

This ensures that high-margin products and inventory you need to move in the summer with a higher likelihood of conversion are prioritized on your pages.

Let’s say you’re a tech gadgets e-retailer. You can use an advanced sorting algorithm to prioritize high-margin, high-conversion laptops and accessories at the start of back-to-school season, significantly increasing their conversion rates as students prepare for the new academic year.

For giant mega brands like Amazon, this means developing your own in-house algorithms with machine learning that factor in multiple data points like profit margins, conversion rates, customer reviews, and historical sales data to sort your products. 

For anyone else who does not want to do this manually, or for those without Amazon’s budget, there is Kimonix. 

Click here to find out what ROIs our customers are getting! 

3. Considering Localized Assortment Planning

Another summer merchandising strategy worth testing is localized assortment planning, which involves customizing product assortments by region to cater to local preferences and trends. 

To do this, you can use sales data to identify regional buying patterns, and stock products that resonate more strongly with local audiences. For an apparel brand, this can mean prioritizing swimwear in coastal areas, while promoting hiking gear in mountainous regions.  

To do a proper regional sales analysis before the summer, you should: 

1. Collect and segment sales data by geographical regions where your products are sold
2. Analyze purchasing patterns, product preferences, and seasonality specific to each region
3. Compare sales performance across regions to pinpoint high-performing areas and those that are lagging
4. Employ advanced analytics tools to explore deeper into factors such as demographic trends and regional economic conditions
5. Implement targeted marketing and merchandising strategies based on these insights to enhance sales in specific regions

You also want to ensure you integrate this strategy with supply chain logistics to manage inventory more effectively across regions.

4. Using Inventory Levels to Trigger Automatic Flash Sales 

To take advantage of summer demand trends, you want to consider flash sales triggered by inventory levels. This means setting up automated promotions for products that have higher levels but slower turnover — products identified using advanced analytics.

You also need to ensure you are using real-time inventory management systems to closely monitor your stock levels and set rules to automatically apply discounts to products with surplus inventory. Here are a few examples of strategies you can use: 

• Apply a 20% discount, automatically, on beach towels when inventory surpasses a three-month supply threshold 
• Set up a 30%-off promotion for summer dresses that fall short of reaching 50% of their projected mid-season sales 
• Launch a buy-one-get-one-free offer on surplus sunblock stocks if they exceed anticipated demand by 40% toward summer’s end 

Consider this approach: If you're managing a thriving swimwear brand, you can set up your inventory system to activate a 25% discount on all surplus snorkeling gear 30 days before the summer's peak. This tactic ensures you maximize the remaining high-demand period while effectively reducing excess stock. Not only does this strategy help clear out stagnant inventory, but it also drives significant sales during critical seasonal peaks.

5. Investing in Predictive Analytics for Up and Cross-Selling 

Lastly, let’s talk advanced up and cross-selling strategies. By employing predictive analytics to offer personalized upsells and cross-sells based on the customer’s current cart contents and browsing history, you can tailor summer shopping experiences and boost conversion. 

Ideally, you want to suggest complementary products that are likely to be purchased together based on data from previous summer sales. But you also want to factor in a customer’s browsing and purchasing history to predict potential interests. In other words, 1:1 personalization-based product recommendations. 

You also want to ensure that you regularly conduct A/B testing to refine the effectiveness of recommendation algorithms and use customer feedback to further enhance predictive analytics models.

Imagine you're a beauty brand: When a customer pops a sunscreen into their cart, if you’re using a predictive analytics system, it immediately recommends a complementary after-sun care lotion and a high-SPF lip balm. This smart suggestion is based on insights from previous purchases and browsing behaviors, designed to boost the likelihood of additional sales. 

This strategy not only personalizes the shopping journey but also ramps up the average order value.

Wrap Up 

As summer approaches, updating your merchandising tactics with the newest tech is more than just staying current — it’s about staying ahead of your closest competitors. These five strategies do just that, exploiting data to refine every customer touchpoint. 

When you consider that nearly 70% of online shoppers say product content can make or break a sale, and that advanced product sorting algorithms have been shown to boost product discovery by over 30%, the right merchandising tech is worth the investment. 

Hanging out on LinkedIn? Reach out to us there with your merchandising questions!