Skip to main content

​
What context influences

Contextual information affects multiple aspects of the search experience: Relevance Scoring: Products related to cart items or purchase history receive adjusted relevance scores, surfacing complementary or similar items more prominently. Facet Selection: The platform intelligently selects which facets to display based on the customer’s browsing context and previous interactions. Sort Order Optimization: Default sorting can be influenced by customer behavior patterns, showing more relevant products first. Geographic Personalization: Location-aware merchandising rules and product availability can be applied based on the customer’s region. Intent Understanding: Prior searches and click behavior inform how new queries are interpreted, improving semantic understanding over time. Customer Segmentation: Customer profile data (order history, spending patterns, loyalty status) enables personalized experiences for different customer segments. Marketing Attribution: UTM parameters and campaign information help track the effectiveness of marketing efforts and can influence product recommendations. Channel-Specific Behavior: Shopping channel information enables different merchandising rules, sort orders, and analytics segmentation for web vs mobile app visitors.

​
Implementation notes

  • Contextual information is processed in real-time and only persists for the duration of the session
  • No personally identifiable information (PII) is required; all data is behavioral and anonymous
  • Sort Orders and Merchandising Rules always take precedence over contextual adjustments
  • Missing or incomplete contextual data won’t break functionality; the platform gracefully degrades to non-personalized results
  • For headless implementations, validate your contextual data structure matches the expected format to ensure proper personalization

​
Privacy considerations

The Layers platform is designed with privacy in mind:
  • Device IDs are anonymous browser identifiers, not tied to personal information
  • Contextual data is used only for search personalization and is not shared with third parties
  • Customer IDs are encrypted and handled according to Shopify’s privacy standards
  • Geographic data is limited to city-level granularity, never precise coordinates

​
See also