How-To: Boost New Products

This page describes how to set up a merchandising rule to boost newly added products search and recommendations on the basis of a datakey that describes the product's status as new.

The purpose of this is to help amplify the sales of products that have recently been added to your product catalog.

To set this up, you will need one of the following set up ahead of time:

• A datakey on your product that contains a boolean (true/false) value, for instance isNew

  or

• A Unix-formatted timestamp, for instance createdAt

To check whether this data is available on your products, confer with the products available on the Entities page.

Boolean or Timestamp

The preference between using a Boolean value and using a Timestamp comes down to how your integration handles the data.

In some cases, you control the 'newness' of a product in your content management system, and specify what products should be considered 'new' - this could be a new seasonal collection, a new brand, or any other type of collective 'new' that you want to promote. For these uses, a simple true/false datakey is fine, since you are handling all of the definitions of newness on the CMS side.

Alternatively, 'newness' may simply mean that it was added to your website within the last X amount of days. This is relevant if your products are not added in collections and batches, but rather on a case-by-case basis. In this case, it will be useful to have Relewise handle the transition from new to not-new product, which is best accomplished with a Unix timestamp and the "Is Before or After" condition in the merchandising rule.

Whichever is the better choice is dependent on how you integrate your data to Relewise, but the short of it is: If you want to manually control what products are new, use a boolean. If you want to passively boost all products that are added within a certain timeframe, use a timestamp.

Setting up the Boost Rule

To create this rule, navigate to the Merchandising -> Rules area of My Relewise. From here, click Create new rule and select Rule Type: Boost/Bury Rule.

Rule scope

From here, select the rule scope. If you wish to affect all requests sent to Relewise, simply leave the rule scope blank — no selection automatically includes all search and recommendation types.

Alternatively, check off the type(s) of search or recommendations that you wish to affect. If you are unsure about the type of search or recommendation requests you are using, you can refer to the Live View pages for Search and Recommendation, and cross-reference the incoming request types against the list of available options in the Merchandising interface.

Target entities

This is where you decide what products should be affected by the rule you are setting up. To better understand how to target various entity types, go here.

Since you want to target new products, you will need to add a filter of the type "Matches Product Data".

From here, enter the name of the datakey that you want to boost by. You must also specify the condition; this will depend on the type of datakey you are using.

If you are using a boolean...

... you must specify the Equals condition, of the type Yes or No / Boolean, and set the Data value to Yes / True.

If you are using a Unix timestamp

... you must specify the Is Before or After condition and the Comparison to Now as Before. The data format and current time offset is dependent on how far back you want the rule to look, but if you want to specify, for instance, seven days, specify the Data Format as Unix Seconds and the Current Time Offset as -604800.

To learn more about how to format the Is Before or After condition, and why it must be formatted in this way, refer to our explanation of the RelativeDateTimeCondition.

Defining the Boost

Once you have defined what entities to target, you can choose how much to boost the new products by. There is no single correct value; you should experiment to find a balance between promoting new products and preserving visibility of older ones. Adjust and experiment with the values until you find what works for you.

To boost, you can either select one of the premade values in the drop-down menu, or select the Custom value and enter your own percentage into the field. Positive values entered here will boost the products, while negative values will bury them.

Finishing Up

Once you have specified the boost value, you can save your merchandising rule, and it will take effect within a few seconds. We highly recommend always double-checking that your rules are performing as you intended. To test a rule, you can use the "Enabled" toggle at the top of the screen to turn it off and on, and compare results on the frontend of your website.