📖 When you build a merchandising rule you pick conditions from a list of attributes and metrics. This article explains what each one means, how Boost works it out, and the order your products come back in.
⚠️ This article applies to Boost AI Search & Discovery V2 and above. To find out which version your theme uses, follow Boost AI Search & Discovery app versions.
To build a rule, follow Merchandising rules for Collection Page or Merchandising Rules for Commerce Search.
Attributes
Attributes describe the product itself. Most of them come straight from your Shopify product data, so if a value looks wrong, check the product in Shopify first.
Attribute | What it matches |
Product title | The product's name, taken from the Title field in Shopify. You type the text you want to match. |
Product type | The Product type field in Shopify. Choose from a dropdown of the types already used in your store. |
Product category | Shopify's standard product category. Choose from a dropdown of the categories used in your store. |
Vendor | The product's brand, taken from the Vendor field in Shopify. Choose from a dropdown of your vendors. |
Price | The selling price of the product or variant, in your store's currency. |
Margin | Your profit on a product, as a percentage of what you sell it for. Boost works this out from the Cost per item you set on the product in Shopify. |
Inventory | Stock, matched two ways. Either pick In stock or Out of stock, or match against a quantity. The quantity is the product's total stock across all its variants. |
Variants number | How many variants the product has in total, counting variants that are out of stock. |
Variants with stock | How many of the product's variants you can still sell. A variant counts if it has stock left, or if you do not track its inventory. |
Variants with stock ratio | The share of a product's variants that are still in stock. A shirt in five sizes with only XS and XL left has two of five in stock, so its ratio is 0.4. Useful for demoting products that are nearly sold out. [[confirm: does the merchant enter 0.4 or 40 here?]] |
Product tag | The product's tags in Shopify. Choose from a dropdown of the tags used in your store. |
Date added | The date the product was created in Shopify. |
Date published | The date the product went live in your store. This is not the same as the date it was created, so a product drafted in January and published in March counts as March. |
Collection | The collections a product belongs to. Choose from a dropdown of your collections. |
Variant options | A specific variant option value, such as a size or a color. Choose from a dropdown of the option values used in your store. |
⚠️ Margin only works if you have set a cost. Boost needs the Cost per item field filled in on your Shopify products. Products without a cost cannot be matched by a Margin condition, so a margin rule will quietly skip them.
Metrics
Metrics describe how a product is performing rather than what it is. Boost works them out from your store's own shopper activity.
⚠️ Metrics are available for Collection Merchandising only, which needs the Collection Merchandising add-on subscription. You cannot use them in Commerce Search rules.
Every metric except Discount products asks you to pick a time window of 7, 14 or 30 days. The metric is then worked out from activity inside that window only, so a 7 day window on a quiet week can match very few products.
Metric | What it matches |
Bestsellers | Products that sold the most, by units and orders, inside your time window. |
Newest arrivals | Products published inside your time window. This uses the published date, so a product you created months ago but only made live last week still counts as new. |
Most viewed | Products your shoppers looked at most inside your time window. |
High conversion rate | Products where a high share of views ended in a purchase. A product qualifies when more than 3 in every 100 views led to a sale. [[confirm: publish the 3% figure, or describe it without a number?]] |
High add-to-cart ratio | Products shoppers often add to their cart after viewing. A product qualifies when more than 5 in every 100 views led to an add to cart. [[confirm: as above]] |
High amount of clicks | Products shoppers click often when they appear in a list. A product qualifies when more than 2 in every 100 appearances led to a click. [[confirm: as above]] |
Discount products | Products with a discount running right now. Pick an operator and a discount percentage between 10 and 100 to set how deep the discount has to be. [[confirm: exact field wording and operators]] |
How your products are sorted
Merchandising sorts your results in two layers. The strategies set the broad order, then a relevance score orders products inside each condition group.
⚠️ On collection pages, most merchandising rules only take effect when your sort option is set to Relevance or Manual. If your collection is sorted by price or by date, your Pin, Boost and Demote rules will not change anything. To check your sort settings, follow How to use Sort by options.
Layer 1: strategy priority
When more than one strategy applies to the same product, they take effect in this order, highest first:
Hide > Banner > Pin > Filter > Demote > Boost
So a product caught by both a Hide rule and a Boost rule is hidden. For what each strategy does, follow Visual merchandising overview.
Layer 2: relevance score
Inside a condition group, your products are ordered by Boost's relevance score. They are not ordered by the value of the attribute or metric you picked, and they are not alphabetical.
⚠️ A Bestsellers group does not come back in sales order. This surprises most people. If you boost by Bestsellers, Boost promotes the products that qualify as bestsellers, but the order they appear in is decided by relevance, not by how many each one sold. The same is true of every other metric.
The reason is that one condition group can combine up to three attributes or metrics, so there is no single value to sort on. Relevance is used instead, and it is used even when your group contains just one metric.
Ranking between condition groups
Boost. Your groups are ranked in the order you put them in. Products caught by your first group sit above products caught by your second, and so on.
Demote. Every product caught by any demote group is pushed down together, then ordered by date added, newest first.
💪 If you need products in a precise order, use Pin rather than Boost. Pinning fixes products to positions you choose, so it is the only strategy that gives you exact control over the order.
Feel free to reach out to our dedicated support team via chat if you have any questions or require additional assistance.