Merchandising rules
The four types of rule, the conditions that make them fire, the campaign dates and the tie-break order.
The engine decides relevance; the rules decide the business. A search for "dresses" can be perfectly ordered by relevance and still not show the collection that arrived yesterday, because relevance doesn't know what's new in your shop nor what you have too much of in the warehouse.
Rules live in Search → Merchandising, and they apply per engine.
The four types
- Pinned products: forces products to the top, in the order you choose.
- Boost: lifts a brand, a category or a set of products, without forcing positions.
- Banner: content in a slot of the search panel. Shipping notices, buying guides, campaigns.
- Redirect: takes the visitor straight to a URL, without going through results.
Each one has its own guide, with what goes well and what goes wrong. The rest of this page is what the four have in common.
When a rule fires
The condition is the heart of the rule, and there are five:
| Condition | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Exact search | the term typed is exactly that one |
| Search contains | the term typed includes that word |
| Category or brand in the results | the results of that search are mostly from that category or brand |
| No results | the search returned nothing |
| Always | on every search |
"Search contains" is the most used and the one that most easily gets out of hand: a rule on "bed" fires on "bedding" and "bedside". It's always worth checking in the playground before leaving it active.
"Always" is the one for what doesn't depend on the term: a free shipping banner, a product you want everywhere. It's also the one most quickly forgotten switched on.
Dates
Each rule has an optional start and end. That's what makes it useful for campaigns: the Christmas rule is written in November, comes into force on its own and goes away on its own. Without dates, it applies from the moment it's activated until somebody deactivates it.
A rule outside its window stays in the list, visible and greyed out, instead of disappearing. That's on purpose: a campaign that repeats every year is edited, not rewritten.
When more than one applies
Each rule has a position, and when several apply to the same search the lowest position wins. That's the tie-break, and it's the reason to leave room between positions (10, 20, 30): later on there's always a rule to slot in the middle.
Switching on, switching off and rehearsing
The switch for each rule is in the list itself, without going in to edit. And the playground shows, for a term you type, which rules fired, which didn't and why.
That second list is the one that settles most doubts: a rule "that doesn't work" nearly always has a condition that isn't met, a date that has passed, or a rule with a lower position beating it.
What rules don't do
- They don't hide products. There's no rule to take a product out of the results; that's decided in the catalogue or in the indexing.
- They don't change the sorting chosen by the visitor. If they sort by price, that's what rules.
- They don't apply only to search. "Always" rules also apply to the recommendations (the grid of the box opened with no term and the carousel on product pages), which is good to know before pinning five products for everybody.