They might not always be in the spotlight, but digital merchandisers are the behind-the-scenes heroes of ecommerce, crafting the seamless, engaging online experiences customers expect. They do more than arrange eye-catching product displays or run promotions — they’re strategic thinkers working at the crossroads of data, technology, and customer experience. Today’s merchandisers tackle everything from on-site search and personalization to AI-driven product recommendations that drive both loyalty and revenue. With the rise of AI, the scope of what’s possible has expanded, bringing both new opportunities and new challenges to the role.
Ecommerce Merchandising Challenges
Digital merchandisers face persistent roadblocks that hinder their ability to work efficiently. Launching promotions often feels like a time-consuming balancing act, compounded by reliance on IT for minor updates to ecommerce storefronts. These delays make it harder to respond quickly to customer needs. Meanwhile, outdated customer segmentation struggles to deliver the one-to-one personalized experiences shoppers now expect.
The challenges don’t stop there. Managing complex catalogs, addressing diverse location-specific demands, and working with limited analytics tools leave merchandisers without the insights needed for data-driven decisions. Combined with the relentless pace of retail planning cycles, these issues keep them stuck in reactive mode—leaving little room for the strategic, creative initiatives that drive long-term success.
Many of these challenges can be seen in a single day of a digital merchandiser’s work. In this post, we’ll explore these challenges through the lens of Ava, a digital merchandiser at a large global online retailer, and see how Coveo’s AI merchandising capabilities are transforming her work — from automating repetitive tasks to delivering real-time analytics and personalized recommendations. With these tools, merchandisers like Ava can shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive, innovative merchandising, focusing on strategies that truly enhance the customer experience.
Morning: Promotions, Promotions, Promotions
Ava starts her day early, her coffee barely cooled as she dives into setting up a new promotion for the weekend to meet trading targets. The promotion needs to go live within hours, but launching campaigns like these often involves multiple steps: writing rules, selecting products, coordinating with IT, and double-checking every configuration. In the past, this process would have taken hours, possibly the entire morning. Waiting days, sometimes even weeks, just for a simple change left Ava feeling disconnected from her merchandising goals, stifling her ability to respond quickly.
With an AI-powered merchandising platform, Ava simplifies the entire setup. Automation lets her save rules for recurring promotions, which she can launch with just a few clicks. By 10 a.m., she’s finished, with plenty of time to prepare for her first meeting.
Mid-Morning: Seasonal Campaign Strategy Meeting
Ava joins her team for a strategy meeting dedicated to their upcoming seasonal campaign. This time of year is critical for driving sales, and the team is eager to make the most of it by crafting an engaging, high-impact campaign. Ava loves these sessions — they’re a chance to think creatively about how to capture the seasonal excitement and bring fresh ideas to the table. Armed with accurate data about customer behavior and past promotion performance, Ava is prepared with actionable insights that show which products and promotions resonated most with shoppers in previous years.
The team dives into brainstorming ways to feature seasonal products on the homepage, spotlight new arrivals, and craft personalized recommendations that match each customer’s holiday preferences. Ava suggests running flash sales for top seasonal items and creating bundles that pair popular products together to boost average order value. She also proposes using location-specific promotions based on regional trends, with AI analytics highlighting which items are most popular in each area.
With the support of analytics, Ava can confidently identify the customer segments most likely to engage with specific promotions, ensuring every campaign is tailored for maximum impact. She leaves the meeting with a game plan, from customized email campaigns to eye-catching homepage banners, ready to bring the campaign to life. Energized by the strategy session, Ava is prepared to make this seasonal promotion their most successful one yet, delivering a memorable shopping experience that keeps customers coming back year after year.
Late Morning: Solving an Overstock Conundrum
Just as she wraps up her meeting, Ava’s team lead drops by with an urgent issue: they need to clear overstocked inventory by the end of the quarter. It’s a scenario Ava understands all too well; unexpected surges in stock can tie up valuable warehouse space and cut into profits if left too long. In the past, situations like this would send her scrambling, setting up last-minute sales in hopes of driving enough traffic to clear inventory. She’d spend hours selecting products, adjusting pricing, and trying to target the right audience.
In just a few clicks, Ava can easily pin or boost overstocked items on the site ensuring they appear prominently across high-traffic pages, such as the homepage and relevant product listing pages. With just a few adjustments, she can quickly tailor the site experience to strategically prioritize products so that customers who are most likely to respond to discounts will see these overstocked items first. This proactive approach not only helps Ava’s team move excess inventory and meet their sales goals but also frees her from constantly reacting to stock issues. With overstock items now front and center for the right audience, Ava feels confident that she has the situation under control.
Afternoon: Turning Insights into Wins
After lunch, Ava reviews her sales dashboard and notices an unusual spike in views and orders for a product that hasn’t been in the spotlight recently. Curious, she digs into the data and discovers that a popular influencer recently shared an impromptu video featuring the product sparking viral interest. In the past, Ava might have had to scramble to launch a campaign manually, but today, her merchandising platform is already on it.
Thanks to the merchandising platform’s insights, Ava doesn’t need to wait for a monthly report to catch this trend. The platform had already surfaced the product as the top search term, alerting her to a surge in demand. Acting quickly, Ava updated the homepage with a prominent promotion and adjusted product recommendations to highlight the product for incoming visitors, ensuring it was easy to find for those inspired by the influencer’s post.
Ava didn’t stop there. She alerted the marketing team who set up a targeted social media campaign, zeroing in on audiences likely to have seen the influencer’s content. In this case the platform took care of the heavy lifting by automatically adjusting content and recommendations based on customer intent, allowing Ava to turn a viral moment into a strategic win.
Having this level of visibility means Ava isn’t just reacting to trends — she’s proactively capturing new opportunities. She can see the pulse of her site and spot patterns early, enabling her to align her campaigns with exactly what her customers want, when they want it. This level of agility transforms her approach, positioning her brand not just as a responsive retailer but as one that intuitively meets customers’ needs.
Late Afternoon: Mastering Recommendations Management
Ava’s day wraps up with optimizing recommendations, a task essential for driving engagement and revenue by surfacing tailored products. Ava reviews all recommendation slots (dedicated spaces on the website for showcasing tailored product suggestions) across tracking IDs and locales. She focuses on key metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and revenue, comparing performance over time. A quick sort by CTR highlights top-performing slots and areas needing improvement.
For a homepage slot featuring “Most Bought” products, Ava switches the strategy to “Most Viewed” to align with recent customer activity. She applies rules to fine-tune results, boosting high-margin items or excluding products below a certain price. For seeded slots, which use specific products as a starting point to generate related recommendations, Ava applies rules to ensure complementary items are featured — like pairing a kayak with a durable paddle or matching hiking boots with moisture-wicking socks — to enhance the shopping experience.
With the preview feature, Ava sees how changes will look for different locales and checks the top-performing products, tweaking strategies to keep the momentum going or shift focus if needed. By the end of the day, she’s fine-tuned her recommendations and planned for upcoming campaigns, to create a shopping experience that feels personal and keeps customers coming back.
Transforming Digital Merchandising with AI
Amid the daily demands and challenges of ecommerce, AI and automation empower digital merchandisers like Ava to shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive, strategic merchandising. AI’s transparency builds trust, allowing merchandisers to understand and verify every recommendation, insight, and adjustment.
With these tools, Ava is able to go beyond managing her day-to-day tasks; she’s innovating and enhancing the customer journey. AI stands as a reliable partner, empowering merchandisers to bring thei vision to life and tackle each challenge with confidence.
Time to make AI-driven merchandising your next big move.