In the age of endless ads and online shopping, brick-and-mortar retail stores are holding strong. Whether it’s food, clothes, or shoes, shoppers still enjoy roaming the floor, interacting with the products, and being present in the experience.

That is why shelves, displays, and store layout matter so much. Retailers use them to make certain products easier to find, encourage discovery, and convince buyers to add a little extra to their carts.

In retailer terms, these are called merchandising tactics, and their main job is to influence shopper behavior. For today’s article, we’ll analyze some of the most commonly used tactics and the intent that goes behind them.

1. Vertical Tier Optimization

Where a product is placed on the shelf (vertically) determines whether shoppers will see it as soon as they’re within range or they need to look for it. That’s because most buyers make eye contact with products that are at eye level (54″–60″ off the ground).

Eye-level shelves are prime real estate in retail and are reserved for high-margin items, bestsellers, and impulse buys. A little lower, at waist Level, you can find staple, fast-moving items that customers actively seek out.

Finally, the bottom and top shelf areas are at opposite ends of the price range: the bottom shelf is for value brands, while the top is designated for specialty, niche, or local brands.

2. Visual Framing and Accent Illumination

When shoppers walk down a standard retail aisle, their brains tune out uniform rows of packaging. Basically, everything looks the same. This is why retailers use visual framing and special lighting tactics.

For instance, the overhead ambient fluorescent lights common in many supermarket stores tend to cast dark shadows on lower shelves, creating so-called dead zones. Luckily, this is easy to fix with a bit of LED under-shelf lighting.

It’s also a great way to create visual contrast through light. Human eyes naturally move toward the brightest point in their field of vision, and by maintaining a contrast ratio of roughly 3:1 or 5:1 between shelf lighting and ambient store lighting, retailers create instant focal points for high-margin items.

3. Signage Tactics

A sign that says “Hey, you! This product is cheaper today!” is a simple and effective way to attract buyers’ attention. However, if the store is littered with similar signs, it’s overwhelming. That is why retail stores use specific signage tactics tailored to their layout and marketing campaigns.

While signs do attract attention, their placement within buyers’ visual field is also important. For this, stores need a variety of retail sign holders that make it easy to spread different signs throughout the floor space. 

For instance, aisle violators (signs that stick out perpendicular to the shelf) intrude into the aisle walk path. They interrupt a shopper’s forward visual scanning momentum to highlight specific promos or brands.

Other signs use magnetic headers and can be attached to the top of metal fixture units. They establish strong visual anchors across long aisles, guiding destination shoppers directly to a product sub-category.

4. Cross-Merchandising

When someone reaches for a bag of pasta, they might spot oregano sitting right next to it and realize they’re running low. That’s cross-merchandising in action: placing complementary products from different categories together to encourage additional purchases.

Rather than organizing a store strictly by product category, say, all kitchenware in Aisle 4 and all pasta in Aisle 8, cross-merchandising groups products around how shoppers actually use them. Think cooking occasions, solutions, or even specific needs and mindsets.

It’s a way to exploit contextual association. A shopper might not walk down the kitchen gadget aisle for a cheese slicer, but seeing one clipped to the gourmet cheese display creates instant perceived utility (“I actually need one of those”).

5. Offline and Online Working Together

In today’s world, the online and offline faces of retail must work together, even for brick-and-mortar stores. Many big brands use digital technology directly on the shelf to bring online data, inventory, and experiences into the aisle.

Let’s take connected ESLs (Electronic Shelf Labels) as an example. Modern ESLs go beyond displaying prices; they sync in real time with the store’s e-commerce backend. Some can even display live online customer ratings directly next to the product price, on the shelf (now, isn’t this convenient?).

Some stores take it a step further and replace paper shelf strips with narrow, high-definition LCD video strips along the edge of the shelf. These can be used for ads or to implement dynamic pricing. This way, retailers can run dynamic in-store flash sales that automatically match active flash promotions on their e-commerce website.

The New Face of Merchandising

While product placement on the shelf, signage tactics, and special layouts are still effective merchandising tools, physical stores must also look for ways to connect shoppers with the online world. Customers want a unified experience that offers the flexibility of ecommerce and the interaction of brick-and-mortar stores.