It is Monday morning and the main category looks wrong. The campaign products are gone from the top, and something from last season is in first place. Nobody knows what happened. Somebody starts dragging products back into place from memory.
This is the situation version history exists for. It is rarely a fault of the sorting logic. Almost always, a person changed something.
How a sort goes wrong
The usual causes are ordinary:
- A rule was switched. Someone tried a different sort type on a collection and saved it.
- Pins were cleared. "Unpin all" was meant for another collection.
- The wrong pin list was uploaded. A file for last week's campaign, or for a different category.
- A setting changed. The auto-unpin period was shortened and released a campaign's pins early.
- Many collections were updated at once, and one of them should not have been.
None of these is exotic, and each takes seconds to do. What takes long is the repair, when nobody knows what the state was before.
What a version has to contain
An undo that restores only the order is not enough. If the rule was changed, the next scheduled sort applies the new rule again and undoes the repair. A useful version holds the whole state of the collection:
- the order of its products,
- the pins, with their positions,
- the rules: the sort type, the sort frequency and the auto-unpin settings.
In Merchandiser a version with exactly these is saved whenever someone changes a collection in the panel: saving an order on the sort page, uploading a pin list, changing the settings, updating many collections at once, or rolling back.
Scheduled re-sorts are not stored one by one. They follow the rules, and the rules are what the versions keep.
Finding the change
With versions, Monday morning starts differently. The version list of the collection shows each change with its author, its time and a summary of what it altered: how many products moved, how many pins changed, which rule changed.
The version's own page has the detail: products added and removed, and for each changed rule the old and the new value side by side. Usually the cause is visible within a minute. "Sort type changed on Friday at 18:40" answers the question.
Rolling back
Choose the last version that was right and roll back to it. The order, the pins and the rules return to what they were in that version.
A few things are worth knowing:
- New products are kept. Products that joined the collection after that version are placed at the end, unpinned. Nothing is removed.
- The rollback is a version too. If it turns out to be the wrong call, it can be undone the same way.
- The store follows. The restored order is sent to the store like any other change.
- Automatic sorting continues. From then on the collection follows the restored rules. If they sort automatically, the next scheduled sort applies them to today's data, with the restored pins in place.
Rolling back is reserved for managers. Everyone on the team can open the version list and see what changed.
A second pair of eyes
Rollback fixes a mistake after it has been seen. A review helps it get seen.
In Merchandiser a manager can approve or reject a saved version and leave a comment. The change is already live at that point; the review does not hold it back. That is a deliberate trade: the team keeps working at full speed, and important categories still get a second look, with a rollback one click away when the reviewer disagrees.
Approved versions have one more use. Older versions are removed over time, but approved ones are kept, so a state that someone signed off can always be restored.
Habits that make it work
- Preview before saving. The sort page shows the order a different rule would give, and nothing changes until you save.
- Review the big categories. Have a manager look at changes to the collections that carry most of the traffic.
- Approve the states you would want back. The version before a campaign starts is a good one.
- Check the change log when something looks odd. Next to the versions, each collection lists the changes of its sort type, frequency, pins and auto-unpin setting, with the user and the time.
- Roll back first, investigate second. Restore the page, then find out what happened.
For how pins get out of hand in the first place, see Pinned Products: When to Pin and When to Let Go.