When enabling Category Merchandising for Shopify, Nosto directly modifies collections within Shopify by using the internal API's. This results in collections which are "sorted manually" behind the scenes and served to the front-end as any other Shopify collection.

Advanced targeting unlocks segment targeting and A/B-testing through Nosto. These advanced functionalities require parallel collections to be created within Shopify, and redirects to be applied to the store to match segments or customers assigned to a certain variant for testing to be matched with the appropriate content.

The sequence targeting all customers will still be modified directly within Shopify, and serve as a "default" collection, with additional sequences leveraging Advanced Targeting being managed as individual clone collections.

Clone collections can be seen and interacted with within the Shopify admin interface under Products -> Collections. Nosto clone collections are clearly separated from the general collections by the Nosto logo as the image field.

Nosto handles redirecting of users based on their current segment behind the scenes by using a Javascript redirect. This means if a user clicks on a link to the Clothing collection, they will be redirected to the most appropriate Sequence configured.

Clone collections are always denoted with an automatically generated suffix eg. "clothing-eb7a9a" or "clothing-44488d".

Generated clone collections will always refer to the original clothing collection by using a canonical URL, clearly signalling search engines such as Google or Bing to refer to the original page when crawling.

Learn more about this here: Shopify Sequencing and SEO

To ensure Advanced Targeting works as expected when creating clone collections within Shopify, you will need to review the following: