Merchandising

Merchandising is a way for you to affect the results of searches and recommendations by boosting, burying, filtering or pinning products, product categories, content pages and content categories. It is a powerful tool that lets you improve the visibility of important products and pages, or filter out products you do not want to show in your search results. Learning how to use Merchandising rules enables you to get the most out of your Relewise experience, and lets you fine-tune your search and recommendation algorithms to perfectly fit your needs.

To learn how to set up your own merchandising rules, please refer to the MyRelewise merchandising page.

Merchandising Rules

Merchandising operates with three different types of Rules, as described below:

Boost/Bury

A Boost/Bury rule adds weight to a product, a product category or a product brand, by enabling a multiplier score that is added to the chosen product(s) during search. This can serve to either bring a product above its peers in a search or recommendation, or push it below similar search results.

Typical use case

When a certain product or brand has a high profit margin, and you want to promote it in searches and recommendations.

When a product is getting returned a lot, and you want to lower its ranking compared to other, more stable sellers.

Filter

A Filter rule prevents entities from being shown in searches and recommendations.

Typical use case

When you want to filter out products not currently in stock from a search or recommendation.

Pin

A Pin rule is used to lock a particular product, product category or content page to a specific position.

Typical use case

When you want to display your best selling item on the power step to boost visibility.

Relevance Modifiers

Similar to Merchandising, Relevance Modifiers allow you to influence the order of entities shown in search and recommendation sliders, on the basis of a number of different qualifiers. Using Relevance Modifiers is a great way to further customize your search and recommendation results on the basis of user type or display location, among other things.

For more information regarding the various Relevance Modifiers, we urge you to look in the SDK for the language you are using, which can be found here.

ProductRecentlyViewedByUserRelevanceModifier

Alters the relevance of a product depending on whether the user has viewed this product within a certain, recent time span. This relevance modifier allows you to set a modifier for when the user has viewed this product before (as well as defining the time period since it must have been viewed for this modifier to trigger), as well as a modifier for the product if the user has not viewed the product before.

Typical Use Case

Useful for keeping products in view that the user has shown interest in previously.

ProductRecentlyPurchasedByUserRelevanceModifier

Alters the relevance a product depending on whether the user has purhased this product within a certain, recent time span. This relevance modifier allows you to set a modifier for when the user has purchased this product before (as well as defining the time period since it must have been viewed for this modifier to trigger), as well as a modifier for the product if the user has not purchased the product before.

Typical Use Case

Useful for B2B users who are prone to purchasing same things again and again.

ProductCategoryIdRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of products on the basis of their parent category ID(s). This can also be negated, to allow the modifier to target all entities outside of the target category ID.

Typical Use Case

Useful for boosting or burying certain product categories to relevant user groups.

ProductAssortmentRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of products on the basis of their associated assortments. The modifier looks for the corresponding assortment value on the products, and activates if it finds a matching value.

TIP

Useful for boosting or burying products on the basis of markets, customer types etc.

ProductDataRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of a product on the basis of one or more matching conditions of a data key. Can be configured to require that all associated conditions parse on the data key, or if simply meeting one condition is sufficient.

ProductListPriceRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of a product if the list price of the product falls within a certain range, which is specified by the relevance modifier. Requires the specification of what currency is used to distinguish the price. Also allows for the value to be negated, thus modifying the relevance of all products where the list price falls outside of the specified range.

ProductSalesPriceRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of a product if the sales price of the product falls within a certain range, which is specified by the relevance modifier. Requires the specification of what currency is used to distinguish the price. Also allows for the value to be negated, thus modifying the relevance of all products where the sales price falls outside of the specified range.

ProductIdRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of product if it belongs to a certain list of product IDs specified in the relevance modifier. Can also be inverted to target all products not on the list.

BrandIdRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of a product if it belongs to a certain list of BrandIds specified in the Relevance Modifier. This can also be used to specify the weighting of products that do not belong on the list of BrandIds; by specifying the list of BrandIds, the relevance modifier takes two components: IfProductIsBrandMultiplyWeightBy and IfProductIsNotBrandMultiplyWeightBy, each of which allow for a specified multiplication value.

VariantSpecificationsInCommonRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of variant products if they have specifications in common with the variant product being viewed. Specifically, it allows you to define what specifications should be evaluated, and provide each specification with a multiplier value.

Use Case Scenario

Useful if you want to ensure that your users find styles similar to the ones they are already browsing; e.g. a user looking at black shirts should be presented with recommendations favoring black shirts.

VariantSpecificationValueRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of variant products on the basis of whether certain specification keys (such as color, size, etc.) match the variant data. This modifier allows for multiple keys and multipliers, meaning that the same modifier can be used to boost color=black variant products by 1.1, and size=small variant products by 1.3.

VariantAssortmentRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of variant products on the basis of their associated assortments. The modifier looks for the corresponding assortment value on the variant products, and activates if it finds a matching value.

TIP

Useful for boosting or burying variant products on the basis of markets, customer types etc.

VariantDataRelevanceModifier

Similar to ProductDataRelevanceModifier, this affects the relevance of a variant based on the matching conditions of a given data key. Can be configured to require that all associated conditions parse on the data key, or if simply meeting one condition is sufficient. This can also be negated, so that all variant products that do not match the data key are affected.

VariantListPriceRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of a variant product if the list price falls within a certain range, which is specified by the relevance modifier. Requires the specification of what currency is used to distinguish the price. Also allows for the value to be negated, thus modifying the relevance of all variant products where the list price falls outside of the specified range.

VariantSalesPriceRelevanceModifier

Affects the relevance of a variant product if the sales price falls within a certain range, which is specified by the relevance modifier. Requires the specification of what currency is used to distinguish the price. Also allows for the value to be negated, thus modifying the relevance of all variant products where the sales price falls outside of the specified range.

UserFavoriteProductRelevanceModifier

Similar to ProductRecentlyPurchasedByUserRelevanceModifier, it affects the relevance of a product based on whether it has been purchased within a set interval from when the request is made. Weighting of the modifier can be influenced by two separate parameters: The time since the product was last purchased by the user, and the amount of times the product has been purchased by the user in the total time defined by the relevance modifier.

Common Use Case

Useful for B2B commerce, where a user's purchases are likely to be of a similar nature across time, and where the ease of re-acquiring items for the basket are of high importance. By balancing the weight between time since last purchase and amount purchased overall, it is possible to help predict what a user is likely to want to purchase again.