As a retailer, you need to understand what customers need from your store when they first walk in, and whether your store provides it.
One thing they need and expect is order. According to ServiceChannel’s Brick and Mortar Retail Report, during a six-month period 70% of shoppers had a negative experience, like disorganized inventory and empty or broken shelves, and more than half of them left the store without buying anything. The reason? The physical condition of the store and an apparent lack of brand consistency.
Your store can miss the mark even when inventory management and shelf stocking are a priority. As people grab items off the shelf during the day, half-empty looking shelves can detract potential customers later. That’s where facing comes in.
This guide shares how to dress your store, with retail facing tips to aid product discovery through smarter visual merchandising.
What is facing in retail?
In retail, facing is the act of bringing products to the front of the shelf and making sure their labels are facing forward. It’s also sometimes called fronting, zoning, rumbling, blocking, straightening, leveling, or “dressing the shelves.”
Facing helps the store look great—well organized, stocked, clean, and tidy. You make it easy for customers to see your product lines, find items intuitively, and compare products. It can also encourage impulse buys—additional purchases the shopper didn’t plan on buying, but coincidentally discovered through complementary facing.
Here’s a great example from pet food retailer Tomlinson’s:
Facing as a verb (the action) vs. facing as a noun (the space)
You can use the term “facing” in the retail context in two ways: as a noun and as a verb.
- The noun facing describes the amount of shelf space given to each of the products you display and sell. For example, a spice store might have five facings of green pepper and eight facings of black pepper.
- The verb facing is what this guide focuses on: the practice of pulling your products to the front of the shelf. It’s the activity that makes your shelves look stocked and organized, and your products visible.
Why facing is critical for retail success
The retail environment experience depends on many factors and strategies you implement in the store, like product merchandising, the store layout, and product pricing. When these efforts work together to serve your brick-and-mortar customers, facing serves as the final touch that creates the illusion of a fully stocked store.
It improves the customer experience
Facing helps shoppers quickly locate the products they’re looking for. They don’t have to bend uncomfortably, reach deep into the shelf, or move other products around just to grab what they need.
This is key for both customer profiles:
- For new customers, facing is how you can make sure you’re showing them your entire product assortment. If only some of your products are visible, they may walk out with a product that isn’t quite the right fit—or without buying anything at all.
- For existing customers, facing is about effortless shopping, including ease and speed. These customers already know what you offer, they have their favorite or desired purchases, and they’re scanning your shelves to find them.
It strengthens your brand presentation
Retail branding is about giving your store a consistent look and feel—one that customers feel great about and remember easily.
Signage, colors, textures, scents, and lighting are key building blocks of your branding. Facing brings those elements and your product packaging together through shelves that look full and regularly attended to.
Easier inventory control
A visually appealing display that’s created by the insights you’ve retrieved from your point-of-sale (POS) data is a clever way to understand the needs of your customers. This can serve as an early warning to adjust your inventory in the short run.
For example, you might increase your next order of a particular product because you’re seeing an immediate peak in customer demand for it. In this case, it might also pay off to assign more shelf space to that product or its entire product category.
If that product keeps growing in popularity, it can also be a useful nudge to examine your long-term approach to demand planning, storage room organization, and your overall product offering.
Tip: Shopify unifies data across every sales channel, including multiple retail stores and an ecommerce website. You get one source of truth for exactly how much stock you hold, helping you make smarter restocking decisions and avoid tying up too much cash in inventory. This integrated inventory management helps Shopify merchants deliver a 1% improvement in annual GMV, on average.
How to face shelves: A 5-step process
Step 1: Start at one end of the aisle
Pick a starting point to work through your facing strategy. Best practice is to work from top to bottom, left to right across each shelf. You can then move onto other areas, such as end caps, to prevent skipping shelves or doubling back to recount faces.
Step 2: Remove misplaced items and dust the shelf
Check for products that are in the wrong place or facing the wrong way. Wipe the shelf to remove dust and keep the store clean.
Step 3: Pull all products to the front edge
Products should be at the front of the shelf to make them easy for customers to find and pick up. This positioning also makes your shelving look fully stocked, even if inventory behind the front edge is low.
Step 4: Turn all labels to face forward
When all your products are regularly pulled to the front with their labels facing forward, customers will always find what they need in a matter of seconds. A wall of familiar logos or brand names can also make new shoppers feel at ease when they enter your store for the first time.
Step 5: Align products neatly in rows
Arrange products so they are evenly spaced and level in a straight row. Here’s a great example of what this looks like in Starlight Knitting Society’s store:
Strategic considerations for facing
Determining the optimal number of facings
Walking into a retail store with an excessive amount of product on display can be overwhelming. On the other hand, having too few faces can mean you lose sales as items are removed quicker than they’re replaced.
Analyze POS data to look at sales velocity—how many units you sell of each SKU in a typical week. Fast-moving items might need more facings to make sure they don’t sell out and leave the shelves empty, while slow movers need fewer facings to avoid wasted space.
Tip: Shopify unifies sales data across every sales channel. You can also break down reports by store to find fastest selling items for each location, allowing you to personalize your retail facing strategy for every store.
Vertical vs. horizontal product blocking
If you have multiple products from the same brand or category, position them in blocks to make it easier for customers to locate what they’re searching for.
There are two ways to do this:
- Vertical blocking, which places the same product or brand in a vertical column down organized shelves. This option is great for top-selling brands or bestselling products since customers can find what they’re looking for, no matter the shelf they initially scan.
- Horizontal blocking, where products from the same category or brand are displayed horizontally across the shelf. It’s ideal to encourage comparison since products are at the same eye level. It can also showcase variety within a specific product collection.
Ensuring planogram compliance
Planograms are visual diagrams that show where each product sits on your shelves. They include how many facings each product gets, how they’re blocked, and the exact position—for example, are they at eye level or on a lower shelf?
Planogram compliance makes sure that your diagrams are implemented in-store. They’re especially important if you operate multiple locations. When everyone works from the same planogram, the shopping experience becomes seamless for every customer, no matter which store they visit.
Integrating facing into daily store operations
Face the store during slow periods
If you track your store’s foot traffic, whether manually with a counter or by using retail tracking software, you’ll already have an idea of when these quiet times typically occur. Plan ahead to dedicate some time to face the store during those periods.
Even if you can’t quite predict when those slow periods will happen, start by paying attention to it over the next week and taking notes, so you can build facing into your daily routines and brief store employees on it.
The amount of time facing will take depends on the size of your store and on how busy each particular day gets, but the more you practice it, the better idea you’ll have of the effort it takes.
Dedicate staff to facing on each shift
Once you establish a daily facing routine, make it a part of your staff schedule, meaning there’s a person (or people, if you have a bigger team and lots of foot traffic) in charge of facing throughout the day.
Every staff member should know who’s in charge of facing during each of their shifts, as well as when it’s their turn. This can be as simple as adding an asterisk to a printed schedule that’s visible in your back room.
Encourage your team members to have each other’s backs. The goal is to embed the importance of tidy, clean shelves into your team’s everyday goals and focus. This way, if the person who’s in charge of facing for the shift is overwhelmed with work, someone else can jump in and take over the facing task for them.
Tip: Shopify POS integrates with staff-scheduling tools, and offers both role-based access and performance tracking that’s directly tied to sales data. In other words: you get one platform to manage every aspect of retail operations.
Prioritize facing at the end of the day
If you can only dedicate time to facing your products for a portion of the business day, prioritize it around the end of each day. This will help you prepare the store for next morning’s opening.
As the morning shift completes the store opening checklist, the product merchandising step will go more smoothly thanks to the facing effort from the day before.
Use a product facing checklist
To make facing easier to complete every day, create a list of tasks for your staff to follow. Here are some examples of items for that list:
- Pull products to the front to create the appearance of a fully stocked shelf.
- Make sure products are turned right side up and with labels facing front.
- Check for products that were moved from their dedicated place and put them back.
- Check for any empty spots and restock them. If the product is out of stock, replace it with a nearby product and add an “out of stock” label next to the price tag on the shelf.
- Dust empty spaces before facing or restocking them.
Improve facing in your retail store
You’re already doing everything right: planning your assortment, marketing your store to bring customers in, and using visual merchandising to make your products appealing.
Facing helps you maximize that effort. It ensures that your store looks put together, organized, and functional—and shows your customers you prioritize them and how they feel while they shop with you.
Shopify has everything you need to manage retail operations from a single platform. It offers ultimate inventory control—not just for seeing how many quantities of a particular SKU you have in stock, but also how fast they sell with automated replenishment to ensure continuity using apps like Stocky.
Plus, when the worst does happen and you sell out more quickly than anticipated, you can divert the customer to purchase online through email carts. All of this happens from a single backend that makes the customer experience seamless, without a complex mismatch of middleware and patchy integrations typically required to sell omnichannel.
Facing in retail FAQ
What is the difference between facing and a planogram?
Facing describes the number of product units displayed in-store, while a planogram is a visual diagram that outlines where each product and its facings should be placed in the store.
How many facings should a best-selling product have?
A bestselling product should have multiple facings—typically more space than average—to keep shelves stocked and maintain product visibility. The exact number depends on sales volume and shelf space.
How do you face merchandise quickly?
To face merchandise quickly, start by working from top to bottom and left to right, pulling products to the front edge of the shelf and turning labels outward. Group similar items together, remove gaps or misplaced products, and tidy as you go. A routine or checklist helps you work efficiently and keep shelves looking full and organized.
How do you count facings?
To count facings, stand directly in front of the shelf and count the number of product units visible from the front, not those behind. Each product facing forward on the shelf counts as one facing, regardless of how many are stocked behind it.
