When a category underperforms, the first suspects are the products and the prices. Often the cause is simpler and easier to fix: the page itself is in poor condition. The first row is half sold out, the order is two weeks old, or one brand fills the screen.
Here are seven signals that describe the condition of a category page. They are the signals behind Merchandiser's Collection Health Score, and they are worth checking whatever tool you use.
1. Availability at the top of the page
Most visitors see the first rows and little else. So the first question is: can they buy what they see?
Count how many of the first products are fully available, meaning in stock and not missing most of their sizes. A first row with two sold-out products and a third that only comes in XS is a wasted first row, however well those products sold last month.
This signal carries the most weight, together with the next one. See Size-Broken Products for how to keep such products out of the top positions.
2. Stock health
Next, the whole collection: what share of its products is in stock?
A category where a third of the products are unavailable feels picked over, even if the first row is fine. And an empty collection that is still live is the worst case. It is a dead end that visitors and search engines both reach.
3. Traffic trend
Compare this week's visits to the collection with last week's. A sharp drop is not a verdict, but it is a question. Did the page lose its place in the menu? Did a campaign end? Did a change of the sort move the products people were coming for?
The trend needs history to mean anything. A page with a handful of visits a week has no trend, only noise, and should not be judged on this signal.
4. Sort freshness
An order is a snapshot of the data at the moment of sorting. Every hour after that, it drifts from the truth: products sell out, new ones arrive, demand moves.
Compare the time since the last sort with how often the page is supposed to be sorted. A collection that should be sorted daily and was last sorted four days ago has a problem, either with the schedule or with whatever runs it. How a schedule is set per collection is described in Sorting Rules and Ranking Signals.
5. Feed freshness
Sorting is only as good as the data behind it. If the product feed stopped arriving on Monday, every sort since then has used Monday's stock and Monday's prices, and the page has been confidently wrong ever since.
Check when the last successful product feed came in. This is an account-wide signal. When it fails, every collection is affected at once, which makes it the first thing to rule out.
6. Product diversity
Open the page and count the brands in the first rows. When one brand makes up most of a mixed category, the page stops being a category and becomes that brand's page, and visitors who wanted to compare leave.
This signal only makes sense for mixed collections of a reasonable size. A brand page is one brand by design, and a collection of eight products cannot be judged for variety.
7. Pin discipline
Finally, how much of the page is pinned? A few pins are a sign of a team that curates. A page where half the products are pinned is manually sorted, with all the cost that comes with it: positions that no longer react to stock or demand.
The share of pinned products is the signal. When it is large, review the pins. Pinned Products: When to Pin and When to Let Go covers how to keep them in check.
From seven signals to one list
Checking seven things on one page is easy. Checking them on three hundred pages every week is not, which is why the signals are worth combining into a score.
Merchandiser scores each signal from 0 to 100 and combines them into one score per collection, with availability at the top of the page and stock health weighing the most. Signals that cannot be judged fairly, such as a traffic trend without history or brand variety on a brand page, are left out for that collection.
The result is a list of your collections with the weakest first, each with the evidence behind its score and a recommended action. The work changes from inspecting pages to working down a list.
What the signals do not tell you
None of these measure sales. A page can be in perfect condition and sell little, because the products or the prices are wrong for the audience. Health tells you that the shelf is in order. It removes the avoidable reasons for poor performance, so that what remains is a real question about the assortment.