For me the most interesting part of merchandizing (or merchandising) has always been the advertising, design, point-of-purchase displays, and in-store promotional aspects of selling a product or service. Unfortunately a lot of this is sadly missing when it comes to promoting products and services online. Classified ads listings, especially real estate and auto listings, are an excellent example of this.

A lot of sellers are satisfied with simply leaving it up to the marketplace to help their property, product or service get noticed - but this isn’t always a great strategy. To illustrate my point, I took screenshots of two popular marketplaces that are representative of most listings of this type:

It is obvious from the listing format that the first thing people look at are the photos, in fact I wrote on the importance of good photos in a previous post. In the post, I pointed out that viewers consistently found photos - a powerful visual element - to be the most important feature for those searching for homes online.
Unfortunately there is only so much you can with a photo! Maybe you have the world’s best looking property, maybe you don’t, but what next? Here is where a little merchandizing can help!

When we started vFlyer, one of the things we wanted to do was to provide a service that allowed people to create attractive visual presentations that helped them differentiate and draw attention to their listings, products and services - vFlyers allow you to do just that! Pouring through real estate and auto magazines looking for potential beta customers, however, we came across another complementary idea - merchandizing online photos!

I am sure the last time you picked up your local real estate or auto magazine you noticed the stars, banners and other attention grabbing graphics that agents and dealers used to draw attention to their listings. Headlines like “Just Listed”,”Price Reduced”, and “No Money Down” immediately providing additional information about the listing. Obviously it works - so we decided it would be a good idea to provide the same kind of merchandizing help online!

Earlier this year, after meeting with a friend of the company (Munjal Shah, co-founder of Like.com/Riya and previously Andale - one of the first successful image hosting services for eBay sellers - later acquired by Vendio) we decided it was time to empower online sellers to merchandize photos as well!

Tomorrow we are launching the public beta of Watermark Plus, our photo enhancing and “merchandizing” value-added service. It’s still in beta, so please be patient as we continue to add more advanced features and functionality to the service. The service is FREE - you don’t even have to register to use the service (unless you want vFlyer to host the images for your) - So try it today!