You decide what shows first
Put your best products at the top
Search ranks products by how well they match what the shopper typed. That is the right starting point, but relevance knows nothing about your new collection, your best margins or the stock you need to clear. These guides show how to add your own priorities to the results, and how to keep products and categories you don't want shoppers to see out of the way.
Why the top of the results matters
Shoppers give most of their attention to the first products a search shows them. If those products are the ones you most want to sell, in stock and worth recommending, search turns into sales more often. If they are a discontinued item or a sample, the shopper has to dig, and many won't.
You know things the search can't guess: that the new abaya collection launched this week, that the perfume gift sets are what you want to push before Eid, or that a phone case model is about to be replaced. Ranking controls let you put that knowledge into the results without breaking the match between what shoppers type and what they get.
Three tools, three different jobs
The tools in this topic work together, but each one answers a different question. Knowing which to use saves you from hiding a product you only wanted to push down, or boosting one you should have hidden.
- Merchandising rules move products up. Use them for products, categories, tags, discounted items or best sellers you want shoppers to see first.
- Hidden products take items out of search completely. Use them for samples, discontinued lines and products that are not for sale yet.
- Hidden categories keep products searchable but remove the category from the filters. Use them for internal or leftover categories that only clutter the filter list.
A sensible order to set them up
Start by cleaning up. Hide the products that should never appear and the categories that make your filters messy, so you are boosting within a tidy catalog.
Then add one or two rules that apply to every search, such as on-sale or most purchased products. After that, look at the searches your shoppers make most often and add rules for those terms only. Review your rules when a season or campaign ends, and switch off the ones you no longer need.