Sorting with Merchandising Rules

Discover can be influenced by manual recommendations set up in the Algonomy Omnichannel Personalization Dashboard.

Manual Merchandising rules enable you to specify which products will always appear at the top of the returned list of products.

Discover results are not affected by manual recommendations set for the Brand, Product, Attribute or Segment contexts. Any rules you set up in these contexts will be ignored by Discover.

With manual recommendations, you can determine which products always appear at the top of your returned list.

Manual recommendations apply to Discover results in these contexts:

• Sitewide

• Category

Recommendation Restrictions

Place recommendation restrictions on Browse rules to control which products can or cannot be shown in certain contexts. "Only recommend" and "do not recommend" rules apply to Discover results in these contexts:

• Sitewide

• Category

• Strategy

• Page

• Placement

Discover results are not restricted based on contexts set up in the Brand, Product, Attribute, Prices, or Segment tabs.

All filters can be used with Search/Browse results: Category, Brand, Product, Attribute, and Price.

For example, you cannot use price as a context, but you can use it as a filter. This means you could remove all products that cost less than $500 from your Search/Browse results, but you could not choose to apply a "do not recommend" rule based on the price of one of those items.

Boosting

You can now boost products on category pages.

You can boost products by creating rules that define what categories you want to apply the boost for and what to boost by specifying a category, brand or any product attribute loaded into Algonomy Omnichannel Personalization via the catalog feed. Once the boost rule is live, when a customer browses a category, the system will find all products that match that rule and move a subset of those products to the first page. This will enable merchandisers to bump products that are naturally found on the 15th page to the first page.

You can set a priority for each rule so that if two rules are applied to a category the rule with higher importance will be executed.

The boost amount determines how many products will be boosted from the matching list of products. For example, if a rule is boosting all Reebok shoes in the Shoes category, then boost amount determines how many Reebok products will show on the first page for Shoes category. There are 10 levels of boost. Think of this as a "volume knob" in a stereo system. At the highest setting all Reebok items will be on the first page.    We do not guarantee exact percentage of products being boosted for each of the 10 settings because of the interplay between personalization and merchandising. However, we do guarantee that a higher setting will boost more products than a lower setting.

Even if you set the boost to the highest amount, the boost only affects the results on the first page. For example, Assume your Shoes category has 2000 products of which there are 220 Reebok shoes, and the default category results page size is 60 products. When you apply the highest boost amount, the system will boost 60 of the best Rebook shoes on the first page. All subsequent pages will have the natural algorithmic ordering of products.

Personalization and boosting

The system will balance between personalization and boosting to ensure customer sees both personalized products and boosted products on the home page. However, if you set the boost amount to the highest setting for a rule that targets a large percentage of products in that category then the boosted products will supersede personalization.  Therefore it's highly recommended that you don't set the boost amount to the highest setting unless you have a very good business reason.