Smart Merchandiser Blog

Louis C.K. has a bit in his comedy special, "Hilarious," where he discusses the average American's unreasonable expectations regarding customer service during the average flight.

Upon hearing of a person's frustration at waiting 40 minutes on a runway before taking off, he says, "What happened then, did you fly through the air like a bird, incredibly? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? . . .You're sitting in a chair in the sky."

When Kermit the Frog sang about the difficulties of being "green," he wasn't in any position to change his color situation. Frogs are after all—green. And eventually Kermit found solace and satisfaction in both his color and himself.

But if Kermit were an online retailer today, changing colors and other attributes for products in his online store could easily send him into another existential color crisis.

Maybe no one knows better than eCommerce retailers that too much of a good thing can be disastrous. When a buyer’s forecast overshoots the mark, inventory can pile up in warehouses and mean big losses when products don’t move off the shelves as quickly as anticipated.

There are few images more illustrative of urban decay than the lone, overturned abandoned shopping cart, tossed aside against broken concrete with no one around to push it, fill it or even set it aright.

Overseeing the creation, implementation and maintenance of an online product catalog doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. With the right resources and tools in place, designing and optimizing the best layout for your digital retail front can be a rewarding and seamless experience.

Ever since the word was coined somewhere between the 1920s and the 1940s, "teenagers" have occupied the wild space between childhood and adulthood with both confidence and anxiety.

Looking to stand out from the crowd, the average teen is also surprisingly desperate to fit in, cultivating a sensitivity to peers' opinions. The period of time between ages 13 and 19 is complex, making marketing to teens an exercise that requires a trained hand, loads of data, and a set of tools to gain insight into it all.

Predicting the future was once the domain of palm readers, tea leaf enthusiasts, and crystal ball aficionados.

However, those days have, for the most part, disappeared, relics of an age with much less access to science and reliable data. And while the 21st century's version of the crystal ball is neither an exact science nor completely free of mystery, for merchandisers and designers itching to know the back-to-school season's hottest colors, that crystal ball is Pantone®.

In 1989's sci-fi family comedy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the Szalinski children get shrunk to a quarter of an inch thanks to an accident with a ray gun.

Stuck in the backyard beneath towering blades of grass, the kids must traverse a terrifying new landscape filled with perils like giant insects and larger-than-life pollen to get back to the house in hopes that, once they're there, things can be made right again.

For online retailers that are still adapting to the mobile commerce (mCommerce) revolution, the terrifying new landscape of the super-small screen is just as full of mythical perils as those faced by the Szalinski kids.