Merchandising Rules

When you set up merchandising rules for a site, you can manually recommend products, choose preferred strategies, apply only-recommend/do-not-recommend rules ("filters"), and boost products. When you use these different rules at the same time, how do you know which products you should expect to see?

If you use Advanced Merchandising, those recommendations always appear before and separately from other recommendations.

So, when multiple types of merchandising rules are in play on a page, which rules take priority?

The variety of tools available to the retailer can offer powerfully personalized recommendations when the retailers understand how they work together and where the potential conflicts might arise.

Because of the interplay of various rules, strategies and filters, there is a complexity that must be respected and carefully examined to avoid mistakes that could result in the retailer sabotaging their site. Work with your Algonomy team if you need help instrumenting your site.

How It Works

Here's how the rules fit together:

Rule Priority Order

Advanced Merchandising

Advanced Merchandising rules take priority over all other types of rules, including merchandising rules (restrictions, strategy preference), manual merchandising and regular recommendations from the Algonomy engine. Merchandising rules do not apply to products the Advanced Merchandising rule identifies to recommend, but will apply to any backfill products when the Advanced Merchandising rule does not produce the maximum number of products required for a placement, and "use backfill" is selected in the Advanced Merchandising rule in question.

Manual Merchandising

All manually merchandised products take priority over regular recommendations from the Algonomy engine if you directly assign the manually merchandised products to a particular placement.

To select the placements you want, on the Omnichannel Personalization dashboard, go to Recommendations > Manual Recommendations and select the Select placement(s) radio button.

Recommendation Restrictions ('Filters')

Only-recommend and do-not-recommend rules apply to all recommendations, other than those driven by an Advanced Merchandising rule. These rules apply to backfill recommendations for Advanced Merchandising rules if the rule does not satisfy the required number of products, and “use backfill” is selected.

Contradictory rules (setting "only recommend toys" and "do not recommend toys" at the same time) result in no recommendations. Only-recommend rules indicate "do not recommend anything except," so combining “only-recommend” and “do-not-recommend” for the same product results in no recommendation.

Boosting

Boosting will influence recommendations, including any from preferred strategies, but will not affect manually merchandised products or Advanced Merchandise strategies.

Items that are boosted by the most rules are picked first. For example, if there are three boosting rules running, a product matched by all three rules will be put in front of products that are only matched by two rules.

Boosting does not override “only-recommend” and “do-not-recommend” rules.

Compound Strategies

When a component strategy of a compound strategy has a rule targeting it, the rule should still apply to that component strategy within the compound strategy results.