4 Practical Use Cases for Growing Profits with Merchandising

Please note: Clerk Merchandising is a native feature that complements Clerk's other products, so it doesn't cost extra money as long as you are using Clerk's Search, Recommendations, or/and Email products.

Now, lets dive into 4 practical use cases for growing sales and profits with merchandising:

• Boost on sale items
• Promote specific brands
• Prioritize high-margin products
• Utilize cross-merchandising.

Continue reading to see how to run merchandising campaigns that don’t fight your relevance model—and that you can actually operationalize week to week.

Boost on sale items

Sales are easy to launch and surprisingly easy to waste. If discounted items don’t show up where customers are already searching and browsing, you end up paying for price cuts without getting the volume. This is why many DTC brands use merchandising to increase exposure for products that are on sale—without turning the entire experience into a clearance page.

One good example is from the Danish brand, Pilgrim. As the figure below displays, when customers search for "necklace," Pilgrim gives a boost to sale items by highlighting them in the search results. The operational detail that matters: you’re not replacing relevance—you’re biasing it toward a commercial goal for a defined period.

Clerk’s merchandising allows you to boost products that are currently on sale anywhere across your site, both in search results and in recommendation banners. In practice, teams running Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce stores use this to align onsite discovery with the promo calendar—then roll it back cleanly when the sale ends.

Promote specific brands

Brand promotion is usually a commercial agreement problem disguised as a UX problem. If you sell multiple brands, you’ll often need to deliver guaranteed visibility (or at least “share of shelf”) without breaking customer trust. Merchandising is the lever that lets you do that while keeping results credible.

As the following example exhibits, you can promote a particular brand, namely Ganni here, by giving Ganni dresses a boost in the search results of "dress." The trade-off: over-boosting can tank conversion if the brand isn’t relevant to the query intent, so keep boosts scoped (category, query groups, or segments) and review search exits and add-to-cart behavior.

Key takeaway: Treat brand boosts like a controlled experiment: define where the boost applies, set an end date, and validate impact on conversion and revenue per visitor—not just impressions.

Prioritize high-margin products

Prioritizing high-margin products is one of the fastest ways to improve contribution margin without touching traffic. But it’s also where most teams get it wrong: they push margin so hard that relevance drops, conversion falls, and net profit goes backwards. The right approach is to nudge visibility while still respecting intent.

Many e-commerce shops have massive catalogs, and margin often varies wildly within the same category. Clerk's merchandising makes it possible to ensure that high-margin products receive more exposure across search and recommendations. The example below is from Executive Shaving and shows how Clerk's backend can be configured to give high-margin products more visibility in site search results.

In doing so, Executive Shaving can provide the right mix of relevant products as well as those that can increase profits. Operationally, this works best when your catalog data is clean (cost, margin, stock, and brand fields) and your rules don’t surface items that are likely to be returned or that routinely fail on reviews. If you want a deeper baseline on how this fits into onsite discovery, start with onsite search merchandising and work outward to recommendations and email.

Utilize cross-merchandising

Cross-merchandising is the practice of displaying products that complement each other together, increasing basket size by offering a complete solution. It’s also a retention play: when customers buy a “set” that works, they come back. This is the same logic you’d run in Klaviyo flows or post-purchase email—just applied earlier in the journey.

For instance, when your customer is viewing shirts, you can recommend pants (instead of more shirts) to complete the look and reduce decision fatigue. The operational decision is which relationships you want to enforce (outfit, accessories, refills, compatible parts) and where: PDP, cart, search results, or email.

Besides the four examples discussed above, you can also use merchandising to boost low-stock items in search and recommendations to clear out older styles and improve inventory turnover. Just be careful with “low stock” logic: if you’re also running paid traffic, you don’t want to over-expose items that will sell out mid-campaign and create a bad experience. For more ideas on aligning discovery with commercial goals, see merchandising controls across search, recommendations, and email.

To get more real-life examples of how your online shop can use merchandising, check out our webinar co-hosted by Stefan, Head of Customer Success at Clerk.io, and Robert, Ecommerce Manager at Executive Shaving.

Talk to one of our specialists today to learn more about how Clerk's merchandising can help your business achieve higher sales and better profits.

TL;DR

• Use merchandising to resolve real constraints (promo calendar, margin, inventory), not to “make the site look better.”
• Boost sale items where intent is highest: onsite search and high-traffic recommendation placements.
• Promote brands with scoped rules and time limits; validate with conversion and revenue per visitor, not impressions.
• Prioritize high-margin products with a light touch so you don’t trade relevance for margin and lose profit overall.
• Cross-merchandise complements (not substitutes) to increase AOV and improve the shopping experience.
• Keep catalog attributes clean (stock, brand, margin) so merchandising rules stay predictable across channels.