Automatic sorting decides the order from data. A pin is where you overrule it: this product, in this position, whatever the numbers say. Both are needed. The trouble starts when pins are used for the wrong job, or when nobody removes them.
What a pin is for
A sorting rule knows what happened: views, sales, stock. It does not know what you have planned. That gap is what pins are for.
- Campaigns. The products of this week's campaign belong at the top of the campaign's category from the first hour, before they have any sales to show.
- Launches. A new collection piece has no history. Pinning it gives it the exposure it needs to earn a position of its own.
- Commitments. A placement agreed with a brand is a fact about your business that no signal carries.
- The look of the page. Sometimes the first row has to tell a story: the hero product of the season, next to what goes with it.
In each case the reason comes from outside the data. That is the test.
What a pin is not for
The tempting misuse is pinning to repair the sort. A product looks too low, so it gets pinned higher. Another looks too high, so something is pinned above it. After a few weeks the first two rows are all pins, and the category is sorted by hand again, only less visibly.
If the automatic order is wrong, the rule is wrong, and the rule is what should change. A product that is "obviously" too low usually points at a missing signal: new arrivals that need a boost, a season that should count for more, availability that is not part of the score. Fixing that corrects every collection that uses the rule. A pin corrects one position on one page.
For how rules are built, see Sorting Rules and Ranking Signals.
Pins and the automatic sort work together
A pinned product keeps its position on every re-sort. Everything else is ordered around it. So a collection with two pins is still almost entirely data-driven: positions one and three are yours, the rest follows the rule or the AI model.
This is what makes pins cheap to use for the right reasons. You do not have to choose between a curated page and an automatic one.
Every pin needs an end
Setting a pin takes a second. Remembering to remove it takes a process, and most teams do not have one. The campaign ends, the pin stays, and a product that stopped selling holds position one for a month.
The reliable answer is to give pins an end when they are set:
- Auto unpin after a set time. Choose the period per collection: a week for campaign categories, longer for others. Pins older than that are released.
- Unpin products that are missing a size. A pinned product that has lost a size gives its position back to the automatic sort. A pin should not keep a product on top that part of your visitors cannot buy.
- Unpin all. After a big campaign, clear a collection in one step and let the sort take over.
Pinning many products at once
For a campaign with dozens of products, pin from a list. In Merchandiser you export the collection's product list, fill in the Pin column with the position of each product and upload the file. The file is the complete pin list: products without a pin in it are unpinned.
This also makes pins reviewable. A spreadsheet can be checked by the campaign owner before it is applied, which is hard to do with positions set one by one.
How to tell that pins are getting out of hand
Three signs:
- The pinned share keeps growing. Merchandiser shows the number of pinned products for every collection, and the Collection Health Score includes Pin Discipline, which falls when a large share of a collection is pinned.
- Pinned products are out of stock or size broken. A pin that holds an unavailable product is costing you the best position on the page.
- Nobody knows why a pin is there. The version history shows who changed pins and when. If the answer is "last spring", unpin it.
A rule of thumb
Pin what you have decided. Sort what you have measured. And when you find yourself pinning to fix the order, stop and look at the rule instead.
All the pin features mentioned here are described in Product Pinning and Manual Control.