Why should you do it?

Browsing category pages is a common way for users to discover new products, categories, collections or brands. By optimizing the relevance of the products displayed on category pages, retail companies are able to improve the conversion rate, increase average order volume and help users discover new products and categories.

Category Merchandising with Rules

Relevance Rules allow you to optimize your merchandising strategy on category pages in multiple business scenarios:

• Boost best selling categories

When you know that a particular collection, e.g. yoga attire with floral print, performs better than other similar collections, it will be beneficial to boost the entire collection on the category page. In this case, when a user lands on the yoga attire category page, the floral print collection will be boosted in order to increase the likelihood of a purchase.

• Boost high inventory collections

In the situation where the inventory of a particular product or SKU is too high, we can apply relevance rules to specifically target high inventory items. For instance, on the Spring Sale category page, we can boost the collection of winter jackets, if we wish to lower the stock of winter clothes.

• Boost new collections, subcategory

There are several scenarios in which you will want to boost specific subcategories or collections: 

• For instance, when a new collection of dresses is launched, you might want to use relevance rules to boost the “summer dresses” collection and perhaps, bury previous season’s dresses. 
• Additionally, there are scenarios when you want to boost a subcategory within a collection. For instance, your company might launch a specific t-shirt collection designed in collaboration with a celebrity or an influencer or feature a t-shirt line by a selected brand. You can boost the “influencer t-shirt” or “X brand” sub-category within the category “t-shirt collection”.
• Add a banner on category/collection page 

To improve product/collection discovery and bring user attention to a specific category or a collection page, banners are a useful tool in a digital merchandiser’s arsenal. For example, when running a “Buy 2, get 1 free” event on a perfume collection of a cosmetics and beauty website, we can trigger a banner every time a user visits the perfume category page on the site. This strategy helps remind the user about the ongoing promotion at the most relevant time of the user journey and increase the conversion rate. Additionally, banners can be placed on the main landing page, product description page and many other strategic placements on the site. 

• Redirect to a dedicated landing page

To optimize the discovery and direct users to the desired category page, relevance rules can be used to redirect the users to a dedicated landing page. For instance, clicking on a “Back to school” banner will redirect the user to a promotional category page containing multiple collections of school supplies: backpacks, books, pens and pencils, calculators, lunch bags and water bottles and more. 

Redirecting users browsing on the site to a promoted category page can be combined with redirecting users searching for relevant queries. For more details, refer to the Redirect users guide.

• Hide or bury out of stock products / shipment delay

Your relevance rules can incorporate business data in order to optimize user experience on the site and reduce frustration and dissatisfaction with the purchasing process. For instance, you can leverage stock and shipment data to manage the order in which products are displayed on the category page. If a certain product or collection of products are out of stock or affected by a shipment delay, you can hide or bury them. This way, products in stock and without shipping delays get more visibility on the page.

• Facet merchandising: order facets, order facet values, sort facets values

For some categories, different facet order or values are needed in order to ensure the best user experience. For example, adult clothes sizing, youth sizing, and baby sizing will differ. Therefore, it makes sense to apply different facet values for different category pages (men, women, youth and baby clothes). 

Additionally, if a single category page includes both men and women products, but our internal business data shows that women are the primary audience for this specific category, we might want to reorder the facets and feature women filtering facets on the top.

Category Merchandising with AI Tools

The power of AI tools can be leveraged for category page merchandising to optimize the conversion rates, average order value and optimal customer journey on the site.

• AI Re-Ranking

Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to automate product ordering on the category page. Most popular products will be promoted to the top, while laggers will be buried on the bottom.

• Personalization

Adjusting the product ordering on the category page according to each unique user profile and shopping preferences.

• Recommend

Product recommendations increase the average order volume, optimize conversions and promote new products and categories to the users. Product recommendations can be added on multiple pages on the site: main landing pages, category pages, product description pages, checkout pages and more.

For more information refer to Category Page Merchandising.