Merchandising rulesets
Control how products are ordered inside your collections, and keep that order up to date automatically.
A ruleset defines how a collection is sorted. Instead of dragging products around by hand — and watching that order go stale the moment stock changes — you describe the ordering you want once and apply it to as many collections as you like.
📸 Screenshot needed — the Merchandise Rulesets page listing saved rulesets with their sort rule, schedule and assigned collections.
What a ruleset contains
Sort rule
The base ordering applied to every product in the collection.
No sort rule
Keeps the collection's existing order as the starting point
Publish date
Newest first / Oldest first
Inventory
Highest first / Lowest first
Price
High to low / Low to high
Promote and demote rules
On top of the base sort, you can pull specific products up or push them down:
Promote / demote by tag — anything carrying a given tag
Promote / demote by vendor — everything from a given brand
Promote / demote by metafield — matching a namespace, key and value
Promotions move products to the front of the collection; demotions push them to the back. Everything else keeps its position from the base sort.
This is how you run "new season first", "clearance last", or "house brand above third-party" without maintaining the order by hand.
Housekeeping rules
Two switches that solve the most common merchandising problems:
Push out of stock to bottom — sold-out products stop occupying prime positions.
Push products without images to bottom — products that would render as a grey box don't lead the page.
Collections
Choose which collections the ruleset applies to. One ruleset can cover many collections.
You can also mark a ruleset as the default for new collections, so anything you create later is merchandised consistently without you remembering to assign it. Only one ruleset can be the default at a time.
Schedule
A ruleset can re-apply itself automatically:
Not scheduled
Only applies when you apply it manually
Every 6 hours
Re-sorts four times a day
Every 12 hours
Re-sorts twice a day
Every 24 hours
Re-sorts daily
Previewing before you apply
Open a collection from the merchandising view and you get a visual grid of its products in the order the ruleset would produce — thumbnails, position numbers, and badges showing which products were promoted (green), demoted (amber), moved manually, or are out of stock.
📸 Screenshot needed — the merchandising preview grid with position numbers, a promoted product outlined in green and an out-of-stock product greyed out.
You can also nudge individual products up and down with the arrows. Manually positioned products are badged Manual so you can see which positions came from your hand rather than the rule.
Nothing changes on your storefront until you confirm. Save Ruleset & Apply writes the new order to Shopify.
Applying a ruleset overwrites the collection's manual sort order. If someone has hand-arranged a collection in Shopify, that arrangement is replaced. Preview first.
Plan limits
The Free plan allows one ruleset. Paid plans are unlimited. See Plans & billing.
Related pages
Collection audit — fix the collection pages themselves.
Product stitching — link related products to each other.
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