Merchandising

Merchandising allows you to make advanced rules to govern the way your search and recommendations behave. It allows you to highlight or bury entities, to help drive views and conversion rates for the products you deem important.

Creating a Merchandising Rule

From the My Relewise control panel, you can easily create and manage your Merchandising rules.

Creating a rule requires two things to function: The Affected Context of where the rule should apply, and the Target entity that the rule should apply to. A rule can have multiple Contexts and multiple Targets.

Affected Context

The Context denotes where the API call is coming from, and thus where on the site the rule should be applied.

At the broadest level is Currency and Language. Relewise is capable of sorting between revenue streams on the basis of language and currency via the Revenue section of My Relewise, so setting up these types of contexts is only recommended if you have special need to target large swathes of your site at once.

Specific Location lets you target a particular page or page type on the site. This lets you set up rules for recommendations being made on the Product Details Page or the Power Step, or it can let you affect the search weighting of products via the search overlay. Important to note is that Location will affect every request made from the particular page, which means that if there are multiple recommendation bars on a PDP, they will all be affected by the Merchandising rule.

Search and Recommendation Types denote the types of requests being sent. my.relewise.com will generate a list of the request types that the system has registered from your site, which makes it easy to set up rules for the specific request types you are using. This also allows you to debug the requests by checking if a particular request type is actually being reflected in the generated list.

The generated lists of requests are not exhaustive, and it is possible to view all types of requests by clicking the "Show all types" button below each list. Staging a Merchandising rule on a request type not currently in use can be useful for pre-loading a series of rules to features not yet implemented on the site, and lets you anticipate the needs of your solution ahead of time.

Targeting

Targeting refers to the entities that you want to target with your rule. This can be a particular product, a product category, a content page, a brand ID, a particular product tag, etc. The most commonly used Targeting types are found front and center when setting up a Merchandising rule:

Common Merchandising Targets in Relewise

• Match a Product: This filter matches with one or more product IDs. You can search by product name or ID, and a list of suggested products will be presented to you. Each product needs to be added separately, so it is recommended to only use this for rules applying to a few products, or as a Negated target to filter out a handful of products from an otherwise active filter.
• Match Product Data: This filter matches with one or more data keys present on a product, eg. ProductType, InStock, or Vendor. The data key is then given a condition for the rule to apply: To either equal, contain, be distinct from, be less than or be greater than a given value.
• Match a Product Category: This filter matches with one or more product category IDs.
• Match a Brand: This filter matches with one or more Brand IDs.

Advanced Settings

The Merchandising UI allows for the setup of advanced Merchandising rules through the 'Show Advanced' button. Relewise is set up to handle multiple filters for a single rule, in which case all filter conditions must be true for an entity to be returned. This makes it possible to filter out entities from a broader category by nesting filters inside each other.

Negated targets

Negated targets allow you to sort exceptions out of the filters you are setting up. For example, you might want to create a Merchandising Rule that targets all but two products from a particular Product Category. In this instance, you would create a Rule that targets the Product Category ID, and then a second target that Negated the two products you do not want to boost.

Example of a Negated rule including a Product Category but excluding two particular Product IDs