Creating rules: boost and bury

Boost & Bury is a global, catalog-wide rules area in Commerce. It lives under Rules → Boost & Bury in the left navigation. A Boost & Bury rule promotes or demotes a set of products everywhere, across every strategy that uses your catalog, rather than inside a single strategy. Use it to give business priorities (a seasonal push, a brand deal, a product you want out of the way) a consistent, catalog-level nudge.

What changed: in earlier tooling, promoting and demoting products was done implicitly with in-strategy actions (Pin to force a product to the top, Sort/Exclude to push it down). Commerce keeps those in-strategy actions and adds a dedicated Boost & Bury Rules section with explicit Major / Moderate / Minor strength levels. See Pins vs. Boost & Bury below.

The Boost & Bury rules list

Across the top of the list you have:

Control	What it does
New Boost & Bury rule +	Opens the Create Boost & Bury rule modal.
Group By	Groups the list (for example by type).
Filters	Narrows the list by rule attributes.
Search	Finds a rule by name.

The table itself has these columns:

Column	Meaning
Rule Name	The name you gave the rule.
Type	Whether it is a boost or a bury rule.
Start Date	When the rule begins to apply.
End Date	When the rule stops applying.

Create a Boost & Bury rule

Click New Boost & Bury rule + to open the Create Boost & Bury rule modal.

The modal has three parts:

1. Rule name: a free-text input. Give the rule a name that explains its intent (for example "Summer collection boost").
2. Rule: a dropdown that sets the direction and strength of the effect (see below).
3. Apply rule on: a condition builder that selects which products the rule affects. Pick a property from the Select… dropdown, keep the operator Is, then add one or multiple values in the value field.

When you are done, click Save and apply. (Use Cancel to discard.)

💡 Boost changes will only be applied at the next catalog update. Boost & Bury rescores products as part of catalog synchronization, so a new or edited rule does not change rankings instantly, it takes effect when the catalog next refreshes. You can follow synchronization in the Health monitor.

The Rule dropdown

The Rule dropdown combines two ideas:

• Direction: Boost promotes the matching products toward the top of rankings; Bury demotes them toward the bottom.
• Strength: Major, Moderate, or Minor controls how strong the nudge is. Major has the largest effect on position; Minor is a gentle adjustment.

Option	Effect
Major Boost	Strongly promote matching products toward the top.
Moderate Boost	Moderately promote matching products.
Minor Boost	Lightly promote matching products.
Major Bury	Strongly demote matching products toward the bottom.
Moderate Bury	Moderately demote matching products.
Minor Bury	Lightly demote matching products.

A boost or bury is a re-ranking signal, not a filter: it changes where products appear in the order, it does not add or remove them from the catalog.

In-strategy customizations vs. Boost & Bury

Boost & Bury is global, it changes scores across the whole catalog, so every strategy that reads the catalog sees the effect. Inside a single strategy you have separate, local controls that only affect that strategy:

In-strategy control	Scope	Effect
Pin (Pins → Pin product(s))	One strategy	Force specific products to fixed top positions in that strategy only.
Filter / Exclude	One strategy	Restrict or remove products from that strategy's results.
Sort by…	One strategy	Reorder that strategy's results by a catalog field.
Boost & Bury rule	Whole catalog	Promote or demote products everywhere, by strength.

Rule of thumb: use a Pin when you want a product at the top of one placement; use a Boost & Bury rule when you want a product promoted or demoted consistently across all strategies. The two compose, a global boost can still be overridden by a strategy-level pin.

For the in-strategy controls, see Creating strategies and, for recommendations specifically, the Strategy Builder.