Merchandising is altering search results to promote or demote certain types of products. When a customer searches for the products on your website, the merchandising rules you set will be applied to display the products you want to promote or organize at certain positions.
Merchandising allows you to control the dynamic arrangement of the products in a search result. There are different types of rules that you can configure to achieve your merchandising goals.
Merchandising helps you achieve the following:
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- Promote certain types of products on your website.
- Demote certain types of products on your website.
- Show only certain types of products in the search results.
- Remove certain products in search results.
- Group certain products in search results.
- Pin down products at a specific position in the search results.
- Increase conversion rates by rocketing customer’s chances of placing orders.
Merchandising rules can be applied on three levels:
- Site Rules
- Category Rules
- Search Rules
Site Rules
Site Rules allow you to customize the search results page for all search queries on your website. They help promote or demote products across all the pages on your site.
Any rules you define here are applied to each search performed on your store. This is like global rules that will always work. Search rules will allow you to add, remove, promote, demote, pin, sort, or group products for all searches on the store.
Category Rules
Category Rules allow you to customize the search results for a particular category. They help to promote products or brands on specific pages only.
If you want to alter the products that are displayed when a customer visits any categories, then you can configure the rules for that here. For example, if you want to boost any specific brand of shoes when a customer visits the “Footwear” category, then you can add a boost rule under the Category rules.
Search Rules
Search Rules allow you to customize the search results for a specific search query.
This one is very useful, as you can configure what type of products should be promoted or which product should be shown or not shown in the search results when a customer searches for any specific keywords like “shoes”, “footwear”, etc.
Just type your search query and add the rules with the required conditions, and you will be able to see the exact search results that would appear to customers when they search on the store using the same query.
Inner rules:
The site, category, and search rule further provide the following inner rules:
- Boost - Promote products to appear at the top of search results, you can use the boosting algorithm.
- Bury - Demote products to appear at the bottom of search results, you can use the bury algorithm.
- Include - When you want to show only some kind of products in the search results, or nothing at all, then you can choose this rule.
- Exclude - When you want to remove some kind of product from the search results, then you can choose this rule.
- Sort - When you want to apply an ascending or descending sort order on some attribute, like price, for search results, then you can choose this rule.
- Pin - When you want to pin any products at a fixed place, then you can use this rule, and in the search results, it will always appear at that fixed position you defined.
- Slot - When you want to group products based on some condition to appear in the slot you define, then you can use this rule. For example, products with prices less than 50K should appear in the slot 1-5, and products with prices greater than 50K should appear in the slot 10-20.
Limitations:
- When you apply the sorting rule, then you won’t be able to use the pin rule, slot rule, boost rule, or bury rule, and vice versa.
- We display 50 products at a time, so the maximum position that you can use to pin a product is 50.
- Similarly, the slot range cannot exceed 50.
Priority Order:
This is the priority order in which rules will work when you configure multiple rules in the same duration and on the same conditions.
The below priority order is followed by the inner rules.
For example, when you set multiple inner rules like boost and bury, then the bury rule will take priority, and it will be applied to neglect the boost rule.