Merchandising is a powerful and versatile tool that allows merchants to control search results and category listings ranking to maximize sales potential and sell important products to a business.

Every found product has its score that consists of relevance score and ranking score. In Merchandising, you can manipulate ranking scores to find your preferred products on top dynamically.

To promote or demote certain products, you must select an attribute and set a specific weight for it, adjusting the ranking score. You can manually write anything more than 100% as weight if you don't see your desired outcome. You can also filter products to control which products are included or excluded from search results and pin products in certain search results positions.

Merchandising rules can target all search queries (we also call them global search rules) or specific search queries (we also call them query rules). They can also target all category pages or specific category pages.

Global rules are the most powerful because they significantly impact discovery performance and apply to every query and/or every category page. Therefore we recommend starting with one merchandising rule that will apply to every search/category and a segment "Everyone", which means all users and all search queries will be affected by the rule.

Global rules enable you to target either all search queries or all categories with one rule.

For the main global rule, we recommend using performance metrics like Revenue, Conversion, Availability Ratio, SKU Availability, or others. This will boost currently relevant and well-performing products on top. You can also use attributes that indicate the importance of products that you want to sell like margin to promote more profitable products or the publish date to promote newly added products.

Rules that are set up either for specific queries or categories enable you to add more granular boosts. The basic mechanism is the same as for global rules and the boosts are merged with the already existing global rules. If you don't want the rules to be merged, use the exclusion mechanism directly in the create/edit menu.

Challenge: Your users search for “table” in your shop and the first results are showing a ping-pong table. You'd like to prioritize dining tables in your search results ranking.

Suggested rule: Set up a rule targeting the specific search query “table”, promote the attribute "Category" with the value "Dining Tables" and promote it by 80%.

Result: When your users now search for “table”, they first find products from the category Dining Tables.

Challenge: Your users search for “shoes” and find sneakers among the first results. For the segment "Dresswear", you want to promote more expensive shoes, mostly dress shoes like oxfords or tuxedos.

Suggested rule: Set up a rule targeting the search query “shoes”, select the attribute "Price" and promote higher price products by 70%.

Result: When your users now search for “shoes” and are in the segment of "Dresswear", they first find more expensive shoes.

Challenge: While your global rules promote highly converting new arrivals, you want to move inventory faster for the search queries “face cream”, “lipstick” and “moisturizer” and sell discounted products that have a high stock level. The rule should work until Black Friday.

Suggested rule: Set up a rule targeting the search queries “face cream” with an exact match, so it matches only this query, “lipstick” with a contains match, so any query where lipstick is a keyword matches and “moisturizer” with a contains match too. Select the attributes "On Discount" with the value "true" and "Inventory level" with the value "high" and promote it by 80%. Schedule the rule to work until the desired date.

You can chose either to add this rule to your global rule, promoting highly converting new arrivals to get a mixed products on top from both strategies or exclude these queries from your global rule to have only products boosted that match the specific rules attributes.

Result: If you have excluded the specific rule, your users will find discounted products with high inventory levels for the specified queries, while all other search queries will return the global rule strategy - highly converting new arrivals. The rule will work until Black Friday and will be auto-disabled.

When setting up merchandising rules, there is often a requirement to include or exclude certain segments from the rule (e.g. you want to apply a certain rule to all users but not for the segment first time visitors). You can easily do this during the configuration of your rule by selecting them from the related modal.

You can also exclude certain categories from your global rules, that are targeting all of your categories, if you want to deactivate your global rule on these specific categories. Simply use the exclude category functionality in the merchandising rules UI.

You can also exclude certain queries from your global rules, that are targeting the whole search (all queries), if you want to deactivate your global rule for these specific queries. Simply use the exclude query functionality in the merchandising rules UI.

Use case 2 in the "specific rules" paragraph describes search personalization based on segments. Another, more scalable option is to personalize search results for every visitor. 1:1 personalization based on visitor’s affinities and preferences that Nosto CXP learned.

To set it up, you can either use the generic Personalization attribute in the merchandising for your global rule. You can use it as a global merchandising rule or target only specific categories or search queries where personalized products ranking is more important.
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​Example:

Context: A new visitor browsed a few pages, and Nosto CXP learned that this visitor has an affinity to Women category.

Result: Products from category Women will be prioritized in search results. User searches for shirts, Nosto’s search finds women's shirts on top.

Another, more granular option to use Personalization in the merchandising rules, are affinity based Personalization weights. While the generic Personalization option mixes all affinities and preferences that Nosto has learned about the current user, the affinity based option allows you to set up your own weight-mix on your selected affinities.
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Example:

Context: You want to use the generic Personalization option but with an extra weighting on category affinities as you want to focus on pushing products from categories personalized for the current user. So you use both the generic Personalization attribute (with a 30% weight) and the more granular Personalized:Category attribute (with a 80% weight).

Result: All affinities and preferences available are pushed with a weight of 30% while the category affinity gets overwritten by the more granular setting - resulting in a 80% boost for this specific affinity.

You can mix generic and granular Personalization options as it best fits to your business strategy - either combine it, use just the generic option or go for as many specific affinity boosts as you like to create your most individual Personalization mix.

You can create merchandising rules with other actions, too - filter products to include or exclude products and pin products to specific positions.

Sometimes you don't want some search results to be found, or only some specific search results to be found. To accomplish this, you can exclude products by different attributes so they wouldn't be found or include products, so only they are found.

Challenge: when users search "sale" and "clearance", merchant doesn't want to find gift cards.

Filter action: first, target search queries "sale" and "clearance" as a contains match. Then create a filter rule by selecting Category attribute and the condition is not Gift Cards.

Result: when users search sale and clearance, they don't find products from the category Gift Cards

Challenge: when users search "apple", merchant doesn't want to find fruit air fryers that are found because they contain keywords apple, referring to fruit air frying. Merchant knows that the intent here is only Apple electronics.

Filter action: first, target search query "apple" as an exact match. Then create a filter rule by selecting Brand attribute and the condition is Apple.

Result: when users search for apple, they find products only with the brand Apple.

Sometimes some products should just be pinned to a specific position. Pinning action allows merchants to do so.

You can pin by manually typing product's name or ID as well as directly in the Preview box when in Merchandising. Once it's pinned, adjust in which position the product should appear.

In addition to this, pinned products can be re-order by using drag & drop in product preview as well as in the pinning view.

Note: products now could be pinned only to the first page of search results or category page. There is no hard limit for the number of products on the first page.

To make re-organising of the existing merchandising rule easier, it is possible to delete all rules related to relevant section with on click.

The adjustable preview view enables you to add more columns and display more products per page, making it easier to review results and merchandise products efficiently. You can modify the preview by selecting the "Layout" option in the preview section.

In the preview, product cards can be customized by adding or removing specific attributes to tailor the displayed information. Configurable options include Brand, Price, Stock Status, Inventory Level, and SKU-level inventory breakdown. To modify product cards, select the "Configure" option and check the attributes you want to display.

To pin multiple products in the preview, you can use actions like "Move to top" or "Pin to current position." To enable this functionality, ensure the "Editor" toggle in the top-right corner of the preview is activated. To select multiple products, check the boxes in the top-right corners of the desired product cards, then choose the appropriate action.

Finally, you can schedule the merchandising rule to work only for a specific period.