Smart Collections: Merchandising Rules

Merchandising Rules is a rule-based configuration feature within Smart Collections that controls which products rise to the top of your collection pages and which ones get pushed down or excluded entirely. You can boost, demote, or hide products based on product tags, metafields, vendor, inventory status, price, and more, combine several of those attributes into a single rule, and decide which rule wins when more than one could apply to the same product.

You configure Merchandising Rules from Search & Collections > Smart Collections > Template & Settings, and they apply globally across every collection on your store.

Merchandising Rules lets you influence product ranking across your collections using flexible, condition-based logic. Here is what you can accomplish:

To access Merchandising Rules in Smart Collections, follow these steps:

You create a Merchandising Rule from the Merchandising Rules slideout, and a single rule can combine more than one product attribute.

You can combine multiple conditions in a single Merchandising Rule so that a product has to meet more than one requirement before the rule acts on it. A single rule holds up to 10 conditions. Once your first condition is complete, an And button and an Or button appear below it, and clicking either one adds another condition row.

A counter to the right of the And and Or buttons tracks your total. To remove a condition, click the trash icon at the end of its row. Adding conditions doesn't change how the rule is prioritized, since strength still comes from the rule's position in the Boost & Demote list.

You can edit, delete, reorder, or toggle any existing rule from the Merchandising Rules table.

Every row carries an icon showing what the rule does. In the Boost & Demote section, a green up arrow marks a Boost rule and a red down arrow marks a Demote rule, sitting next to the position number on active rows. Disabled rows keep the arrow but lose the drag handle and the position number.

When more than one rule could apply to the same product, the order you arrange your rules in determines which one actually applies. Understanding this order helps you build rules that behave as you expect.

Rules are applied in this order: Hide, then Featured, then Boost or Demote in your list order. Featured Products are configured per collection in the collection editor and per campaign in Smart Collection Campaigns, not on the global Template & Settings page. An info banner above your rules in the Merchandising Rules slideout states this same order.

Every Merchandising Rule is built from the parts covered in the sections below. The rule type sets what happens to a product the rule matches, the condition type sets which product attribute Smart Collections checks, and the operator sets how that attribute is compared to the value you enter. You choose all three in the rule builder when you create or edit a rule, and the available operators depend on the condition type you pick.

When you create a new rule, you select a rule type. Each rule type controls how matching products are treated in your collections. For Boost and Demote, the rule's position in the list sets its strength, not its type.

The following table names each rule type and describes what it does to matching products.

The Type field in the rule builder defines which product attribute is evaluated. The following table names each available condition type and describes what it targets.

The Operator field defines how the condition is evaluated. Available operators may vary depending on which condition Type you select.

The following table names each operator and describes how it evaluates the condition.

Merchandising Rules has the following limits, which apply globally across every collection on your store. The Rules Enabled bar at the top of the Merchandising Rules slideout tracks your enabled count against each of these maximums. The following table lists each rule type with how many of that type you can have enabled at once and the shared total across all types.

Additional restrictions to be aware of:

Merchandising Rules apply globally across every collection page on your store. Collection-specific rule overrides aren't supported on this settings page. If you need different merchandising logic for a particular collection or a limited time period, use Smart Collection Campaigns instead.

A Boost or Demote rule that appears not to work usually comes down to sort order or rule order.

First, check your sort order. Boost and Demote rules only take effect when Relevance is selected as the Default Sort. If your collections are sorted by a different method, such as price or alphabetically, Boost and Demote rules won't affect the product order.

Second, check your rule order. Rules never stack, so the first rule in your Boost & Demote list that a product matches is the one that applies. If a rule higher in the list already matched that product, your rule further down never gets a chance to act on it. Drag the rule you want to win closer to the top of the Boost & Demote list.

The Hide rule always wins. Hide rules are absolute and unaffected by list position, so if a product matches a Hide rule, it's excluded from your collection pages entirely, regardless of any Boost or Demote rule that also applies to it.

You can have up to 10 Boost rules, 5 Demote rules, and 5 Hide rules enabled at the same time. You can create up to 30 total rules across all types, but only the active limits above apply at any given time. Each individual rule can combine up to 10 conditions with And or Or. The Rules Enabled bar at the top of the Merchandising Rules slideout shows your current enabled count against each limit.

Featured Products always appear before Boosted products. Featured Products are configured per collection in the collection editor and per campaign in Smart Collection Campaigns, and Boosted products appear below them and above standard, non-boosted results.

An entire product is hidden from your collection when a merchandising rule matches only one of its variants because Merchandising Rules evaluate their condition at the product level, not the variant level. When you build a Boost, Demote, or Hide rule on a variant-level value, such as a variant Metafield or a Product Option, the rule applies to the whole product as soon as any single variant meets the condition. A variant Metafield set on just one variant still hides, boosts, or demotes the entire product across your collection pages. Merchandising Rules cannot act on one variant while leaving the product's other variants unaffected.

Merchandising Rules are one part of a broader set of tools available in Smart Collections. The articles below cover everything from initial setup to advanced features and customization.

Getting Started

Features & Advanced Settings