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The moment merchandising stopped being physical
💡 Merchandising shifted from physical placement to managing product pages — the same item, presented across many retailers you don't fully control.
For a century, merchandising was a physical craft: negotiate the best shelf position, design packaging that pops, run an end-cap display. Brands hired field reps to walk stores and fix messy shelves. The product itself — sitting there, tangible — did a lot of the selling.
E-commerce broke that model. Today a huge share of shopping journeys start online even when the purchase happens in-store: people research on their phone first. And when the sale is online, the product becomes a page — a bundle of text, images, and data. The "shelf work" is now digital work: writing the right title, uploading the right images, keeping the price and stock accurate, answering questions in reviews.
The catch is scale and control. A brand might sell the same item across Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, and its own site, each demanding different content formats and each free to display your product however they like. Physical merchandising was hard but local. Digital merchandising is everywhere at once — which is exactly why brands need systems, not just field reps.