The Visual Merchandising panel allows you to define rules and facets for your category pages. Rules can be used to set promotion strategies for products, such as boosting specific products in search results.
Default Rules & Facets
The Default Rules & Facets tab allows you to specify the default merchandising rules.
To modify these rules and facets, click MANAGE RULES & FACETS. This opens the Category Selection modal.
Select the categories you want to update, then click PROCEED. This opens the rules page. The selected categories will be available in the Category dropdown menu.
Rules you define here save only when you click SAVE & PUBLISH. If you exit this page before clicking that button, all changes are lost.
The following rules options are available.
Default Boosting Rules
Boosting is a method to weight certain products more heavily in search results based on specific attributes. For example, if you want products of a specific brand to show up higher in search, you can specify a rule to boost that specific brand. Conversely, you can also de-boost certain products using similar rules. De-boosting causes matching products to appear further down in search results.
Click Add Rule to define a new rule for boosting. Rules are based on product attributes. Use the drop-down menus to select the desired attribute and value to trigger the rule.
You can use multiple rules to further refine your boosting strategy. Whether a boost triggers with multiple rules depends on whether you have set the rule to AND or OR. When the rules are set to AND, every attribute must match the specified value for boosting to trigger. When the rules are set to OR, at least one of the attributes must match.
You can also group rules together to further refine your strategy. For the purposes of conditional evaluation, the rules of a group evaluate together. In the above example, a group is defined to trigger boosting if the product material is either gold or silver.
Finally, the score defines the boost weight. Higher scores lead to a stronger boost weighting. A positive score boosts the product in results, while a negative number de-boosts the product in results.
Manage Pinning
Pinning a product forces it to the top of results. You can pin multiple products.
To select products to pin, hover over the product and click the pin button in the upper-right corner. To un-pin a product, click the same button again. Pinned products have a pin icon in the upper-left corner.
You can also group pin items by selecting the checkmark on the top left corner of each product and clicking the PIN SELECTED button.
If you have multiple pinned products and want to arrange them in a specific order, you can do that in the Set Product Orders tab.
Manage Exclusion
Exclusion allows you to prevent products from showing up in results.
To select products to exclude, hover over the product and click the exclude button in the upper-right corner. To re-include a product, click the same button again. Excluded products have an X icon in the upper-left corner.
You can also group exclude items by selecting the checkmark on the top left corner of each product and clicking the EXCLUDE SELECTED button.
Manage Facets
From this menu, you can define rules for how facets appear on the category page. This includes pinning or excluding certain facets.
By default, the facet order is defined by your sitewide facet order. You can use this or automatic AI sorting. If you select AI sorting, the order of the facets automatically changes over time, with AI determining the most appropriate facets to display first.
You can also pin or exclude certain facets here. Hover over a facet to display buttons to pin or exclude the facet. Pinned facets are moved to the top of the list, and excluded facets are moved to the bottom.
Scheduled Campaigns
You might want to schedule specific rules to override the default rules for a specific period of time. For example, pinning a specific product over the course of a sale. In these cases, you can use a campaign to set rules.
Campaign rules work exactly the same as default rules, except they have a specified duration. To set the duration, create the campaign, then click the Scheduling button on the rules page.
From here, you can define the start and end date of the campaign.
All other campaign rules are set up in the same way as default rules.