Sorting Rules are the backbone of Category Merchandising, leveraging product attributes or performance metrics to sort an infinite list of items into a certain order. You can manage and create your Sorting rules under the Sorting tab in the navigation.

When you first start exploring Category Merchandising you will find that a number of pre-configured rules already exist within your account, with the opportunity to create new Rules tailored towards accomplishing your goals. 

Creating a Rule starts with defining one or multiple Product Attributes or Product Performance metrics that can either be used stand-alone (Sort by Price), or combined to create unique ones (Promote high-converting items with high margin). 

Product attributes are descriptive fields for products such as Brand, Category, Price, Supplier cost etc. These fields describe the product in one way or another and using them for merchandising rules allow you to group similar kinds of products together. 

Example: Promote products with a high price, or demote products with a low price, and adjust the weighting between different attributes to match your business needs.

Product performance metrics are calculated based on behavioral and transactional data, and consists of relative data points such as conversion rate, add to cart rate, inventory throughput etc. Using these fields will allow you to showcase products which are either performing poorly or well on certain measurement points. 

Example: Promote products with a high conversion rate, or demote products with a low conversion rate, and adjust the weighting between different attributes to match your business needs.

A full list of available Product Attributes and Performance Metrics are available in this article: Product Attributes and Performance Metrics

After adding one Product Attribute such as Price, we can add other things such as Brand and Conversion Rate to preview what kind of weighting makes most sense in terms of our business goal. 

When applying different weighting factors you will notice that products are assigned a percentual match score that illustrates how well products score against your configuration. 

You can read more about the science behind both weighting and match score in this article: Ranking Score and Weighting Factors.

After previewing the Sorting rule on the categories you intend to use it, you can save the rule and start applying it. If you haven't created a Sequence yet, you should start by reading this article: Get started with Category Merchandising 

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