You can have an array of attractive, practical products on one shelf and still have the customer have to do too much work to understand them. This isn’t necessarily a problem with the amount of product, though, but the shelf itself may lack any resting point for the eye. The boxes, bottles, flattened items, props, price tags, colors, they all butt up against one another until the eye no longer perceives the shelf as containing different items. It is a well-stocked shelf, yes, but from the customer’s side this is visual cacophony.
Do a quick pre-change test. Stand back at customer distance and try to describe the shelf in a sentence. If your answer sounds like “a bunch of stuff,” then the display probably needs more grouping, more organization. It is possible to have a fully-stocked shelf that is still readable, but each section on that shelf still has to have its own purpose. Products might be grouped by function, category, fragrance, size, color, occasion, or any other logical reason. Without it, the customer is forced to decode one item at a time, a process that is exhausting in a small store.
This crowding also causes some practical information to go unseen. Price tags are obscured by the product. Shelf labels end up behind the product. Signage becomes less visible and the customer has difficulty reading it. A customer likes the product, but hesitates before choosing it because the size, use, price, and differences are not immediately understood. This is why good signage is an integral part of the visual merchandising process, not just the decoration at the very end. A clear shelf allows the product room for display, it allows a place to set the label clearly, and it puts buying cues close enough to make sense.
Novices sometimes worry that if they take out some items the whole shelf will look empty. But the question is not whether the display is full, but rather whether or not it has the right “rhythm” to make the product stand out. Sometimes negative space between two groups is necessary for them to stand out on their own. A little space around a featured product can look like a frame. A lower height on a second stack of product makes the next taller product more apparent. When a customer is getting something clear, space isn’t wasted.
A good starting point to clear up any confusion is to take one shelf section and reduce the pressure over several iterations. In the first phase, simply eliminate any products that do not fit the central grouping. Next, push up those products that remain and align them so that their labels can be seen from the consumer’s path of travel. Then, use a riser or another short stack to make the display height higher so there is one center focal point. Finally, make sure that the shelf labels or sign cards are visible. They should not have to be viewed head on to be legible before anything else is put back.
Crowded shelves are harder to maintain as well. Once a customer removes an item, a tight display often becomes a series of gaps or product tilted over with labels blocked. The same goes for a table display or a wall-mounted shelf unit: there should be a clear system for resetting each display daily in one day so that the full display isn’t recreated. Whether or not it is possible to fix a display to have the proper product facing, gaps, and labels should be a task that takes only a few minutes. If a display only really looks good when nothing has been removed from it, then it is too fragile to withstand regular use in a shop.
Before considering a shelf display a success, you should walk past it at normal customer distance and see what your eye is able to immediately understand. Take a picture of the display on your cell phone from customer height and look for clumps of color, labels that aren’t visible, gaps that aren’t aligned, and products that are too close together. It is not necessary for a shelf to appear minimal, but it should make the product story easier to read than it was before.