Up to 70% of online sales originate from category pages. That’s the number our data scientists came up with when analyzing hundreds of Nosto customers in 2019. Yet most Category Pages still rely on simple sorting methods, don’t cater to different audiences and testing is a pain. And that was exactly the problems that we set out to solve.
Category Merchandising enables online retailers, and merchandisers to:
Reduce manual workload by using product attributes and performance metrics to apply different combinations of sorting on category pages.
Increase relevance by leveraging Real-time Segmentation to cater to different audiences with different kinds of sorting methods to influence the customer lifecycle.
Deploy in-house expertise and know-how and make adjustments using the intuitive Visual Editor with interactive controls to ensure a branded experience.
Validate hypotheses and deploy A/B-tests without time-consuming configurations, or needing to employ costly experts to interpret the results.
In this article we'll explore how to Get Started with Category Merchandising by creating a new sorting rule, and a sequence that utilises that rule, and targets a specific segment.
The overview page is the mission control of Category Merchandising, allowing you to see a full list of categories, create individual sequences, mass apply merchandising rules and see an overview of category performance.
When navigating to a single category with no sequences applied, we can use pre-existing merchandising rules to tailor the content based on different factors. This article walks through the journey of creating a new sequence targeting all customer on the clothing category.
Creating a new Sequence
Clicking the "Create new sequence" - button at the top right corner of the overview page will open up a wizard that allows us to create new sequences for any category page.
You can use any of the pre-existing sorting rules available to get started quickly, or choose "Create new rule" to create your own sorting based on any combination of Product Attributes and Performance Metrics that drive your unique business goals.
You can create sorting rules inline when creating a new sequence, or you can create them centrally and mass apply them to multiple categories in one go. You can learn more about sorting rules in this article: Introduction to Sorting Rules, and how to create them.
The sorting gives you a good baseline of how products should be ordered, however in some cases you might want to manually control the listing after the initial sorting has been applied. This can be done by dragging and dropping items in the grid, which essentially "pins" them in place, regardless of how the other products in the flow change over time.
Great success! You have now created your first Sequence. If the account has access to Segmentation you can create as many sequences as you have available segments, essentially showing a completely different experience to different audience groups.
You can read more about Segmentation in this article: Segmentation & Insights - General Article
