Merchandising

Spotler Activate Search includes functionality regarding merchandising for listing pages. With merchandising, you can arrange the items in your listings so that visitors find the right product in the right place. In general, it will empower you to curate perfectly balanced and relevant product listings in your webshop's category/listing pages.

In order to have merchandising enabled and working in your Spotler Activate Search account, you need to implement it manually through the API reference documentation for the Merchandising endpoint. That way, it can return the most relevant products for each category or list page, based on the filters set in the API call. Find the API documentation here.

After this implementation, Merchandising will be visible in your Spotler Activate Search account as its own module. Below, we explain step-by-step how to set things up within the software, to optimize the order in which your products are shown on your pages. First, click on the newly appeared module within Spotler Activate Search:

Merch-module.png

Step 1 - Add new page

You start by adding the pages that you would like to merchandise. Click on the yellow button with Add new page give the new page a clear name for within the software, followed by entering the set Page Identifier. The identifier is the value that is sent to receive this merchandised page. It can be any string, and could reflect the breadcrumb of the listing page. After doing so, click the Save icon and the new page will now be visible. Click on the arrow icon in the top right of the created page to continue. 
Merch-addnewpage.png

Step 2 - Add merchandising states

Create a merchandising state. This is a set of rules and manual product placements that will be applied to the page. You can set a fixed date by clicking the slider at Set a date on. Doing so will give you the option to set a Start Date and an End Date. Keeping this slider off, will have the merchandising state active continuously. For this example, we will use "Default state" to create some rules that will be active permanently:  
Merch-state.png

The use of start and end dates

Choosing a start and end date is great for preparing date specific states, such as Black Friday in November or other promotional-attractive periods. You can always keep these states around when created, and just reactivate when needed.

After clicking on Save, this state is now added to the merchandised page. To further edit the added Default state, click on the arrow icon. Manual Merchandising and Ranking Rules now appear.
Merch-state2.png

Step 3 - Manual merchandising and ranking rules

To use Manual Merchandising, click the edit/pencil icon next to it. A pop-up window opens where you can search for products to manually place them on the specifically chosen page (in this case, the Training page). Select the wished product and drag it onto the placement on the right.

To use Ranking Rules, click the edit/pencil icon next to it. A pop-up window opens where you can add new ranking rules. Clicking on the yellow button will open a new window to create a filter. Here, you select a data field on which you want to boost your products:

Merch-rankingdata.png

  • You can match documents on text values or numeric values by clicking on Type. Depending on the type, you give a description for text values or ranges and a maximum for numeric values.
  • You also have the option to add another boost condition by clicking + ADD BOOST CONDITION
  • Next, you set a Boost level for the rule, using the slider. This option promotes or demotes the specific boost.
  • If you want to activate your ranking rule only in a specific period, you can specify a start date and an end date.
  • Click Save to add this ranking rule to the Merchandising state of this page. It is also possible to add multiple ranking rules to merchandising states. For example, adding one on top using the start date and end date option. 

Step 4 - Generic ranking rules

You can also add generic ranking rules that - by default - apply to all the merchandising states you add. This way you can make rules once and these will be enabled on all pages you've added in the above steps. Setting up generic ranking rules works the same as for the individual ranking rules. Newly added generic ranking rules will automatically be applied to all already existing merchandising states.

You can also disable generic ranking rules for a specific page by clicking on the ranking rule settings of that page. There you find sliders for each generic ranking rules to turn them off or on.