What is merchandising in Layers?
Merchandising rules let you take direct control of how products appear on your collection pages. You can manually pin products to specific positions, create expressions that automatically group and prioritize products based on attributes, or combine both approaches for a hybrid strategy. Merchandising rules extend your sort orders rather than replace them — products that aren’t pinned or matched by expressions continue to follow the base sort order.How merchandising fits into the platform
The platform uses a priority hierarchy to determine the final order of products on collection pages. Dynamic linking takes the highest priority, followed by merchandising rules, and finally the base sort order: Priority hierarchy:- Dynamic linking (first page only) — Products from ad campaigns or promotional URLs appear first
- Merchandising rules — Manually pinned products and expression-based groups
- Base sort order — The underlying sort order for all remaining products
Types of merchandising
Manual merchandising lets you pin specific products to exact positions at the top of a collection page, giving you precise control over which items receive the most visibility. Automated merchandising uses expressions to automatically group and prioritize products based on attributes like product type, vendor, tags, or other criteria. Hybrid approach combines manual pinning with expressions for a comprehensive merchandising strategy that balances precision with automation.Key capabilities
- Contextual conditions — Target different audiences with different merchandising strategies based on shopper context (location, channel, customer data)
- Rule scheduling — Automatically enable and disable rules based on time windows for campaigns and promotions
- Soft boost expressions — Gently adjust product positions within the sort order without creating hard clusters
- Draft and filtering — Control how draft products and filters interact with your rules
- Multiple rules per collection — Layer multiple rules on a single collection with priority ordering
- Live preview — Preview merchandising on your live storefront before saving or publishing
Next steps
- Merchandising rules — Full guide to creating and managing rules
- Pins & media overrides — Manual product pinning
- Expressions & automation — Attribute-based product grouping
- Soft boost expressions — Gentle ranking adjustments
- Contextual conditions — Audience targeting
- Rule scheduling — Time-based activation
- Create a merchandising rule — Step-by-step guide