Create a merchandising strategy

A Merchandising strategy controls product ordering within categories and collections to enforce business priorities, best sellers first, promotions surfaced, slow movers pushed down, without manual back-office sorting. Commerce computes a score per product per strategy and syncs those scores to your CMS or search engine, which reorders the catalog accordingly.

What changed: Merchandising comes from the former Recommendations & Merchandising product. The builder now shares the same shell as Recommendations (New Rule, Pins, Global customization, Save / Save and deploy) and adds Pins for category for per-category pinning. Under the hood each strategy still carries a MERCH_ID used for deployment to the CMS or search engine.

How merchandising works

Merchandising does not reorder products live on every request. Instead:

1. Score generation: Commerce computes a merchandising score per product, per strategy, from the strategy's rules (best sellers, new arrivals, margin, and so on).
2. API sync: those scores are transmitted to your CMS or search engine.
3. Catalog update: the CMS reorders products using the scores.
4. Front-end display: the reordered list is shown to visitors.

Filters only hide products, they don't change AB Tasty's ranking. A filter on your website removes products from view, but the underlying score-based ordering is unchanged. If products reorder unexpectedly, check your filter logic first. Because scores are computed and synced (not recalculated on every request), rankings stay stable between syncs.

Creating a merchandising strategy

1

Click Create merchandising +

The New merchandising strategy → Pick a strategy to start from… modal opens with a starting point such as Basics → Empty strategy.

2

Build the strategy

The right-hand Your strategy results panel previews the ordered products for a selected category context. Until you pick a category, or if your configuration returns nothing for it, the panel shows an empty state such as "0 results returned for [Category: None]" / "Your current configuration doesn't return any products for the context you are trying to preview…".

Choose a category to see how that category would be ordered.

3

Save and Deploy

Merchandising uses the two-step Save / Save and deploy model shared by all strategies. Save stores a draft; Save and deploy computes the product scores and syncs them to your CMS or search engine so the catalog reorders.

Selecting a starting point opens the builder at /merchandising/new/builder.

The Merchandising builder

The header follows the shared pattern, editable strategy name, a Draft badge, Save, and Save and deploy. The configuration panel contains:

Default rule

A new merchandising strategy opens with a Default rule already in place:

Products sorted by revenues_last_30_days, Unlimited

This sorts the category by 30-day revenue with no result cap. Add more rules with New Rule + to layer additional sources or refinements on top.

Pins for category

Pins for category lets you pin products per category. Choose a category in the Select… category selector, then "Pin product(s) for a specific category", the pinned products are forced to the top of that category only. This is what makes merchandising category-aware: different categories can have different pinned products under the same strategy.

Pins

Pins → Pin product(s) pins products across the strategy, independent of category.

A Pin forces products to the top within this strategy. To promote or demote products globally across all strategies, use the dedicated Boost & Bury rules instead.

Global customization

Global customization → New global customization (filter, exclude, sort…) adds rules that apply across the strategy, Filter, Exclude, Diversification, Shuffle, Sort by…, or Filter if…. (Remember the warning above: filters hide products, they do not change the score-based ranking.)

The Merchandising list

The toolbar offers Create merchandising +, Group By, Filters, Display settings, and a search box. The table columns:

Column	Meaning
Merchandising name	The strategy's name.
Status	Deployed, or Deployed (Draft Waiting…) when a live version has saved edits pending.
Categories	The categories the strategy covers (for example "11 categories", "sport").
% of revenue	Share of revenue attributed to the strategy.
CTR	Click-through rate.
Conv. Rate	Conversion rate.
Tag(s)	Labels applied to the strategy.
Creator	Who created it.
Creation	Creation date and time.