Merchandising Glossary

Merchandising Basics

Visual merchandising: Arranging products so that customers notice and buy them. Online, it is the order and presentation of the products on a store's home, category and campaign pages.
Digital shelf: A page of an online store that lists products, such as a category page. Its first rows work like the eye-level shelf of a physical store: most customers look there and few scroll far beyond.
Category page: A page that lists the products of one category. Together with brand pages and campaign lists, it is where the order of products matters most.
Collection: A list of products that is shown and sorted as one page: a category, a brand, a product list, a page or a widget. Merchandiser sorts each collection by itself, with its own sort type and schedule.
Product feed: The file or API through which a store's products reach Merchandiser, with their prices, stock, sizes, attributes and the collections they belong to.

Sort type: The method by which a collection is ordered: a sorting rule, Merchandiser AI, similar-product grouping or a manual order. It is chosen per collection.
Sorting rule: A formula over ranking signals that gives every product a score. The collection is ordered from the highest score to the lowest.
Ranking signal: A number about a product that a sorting rule can use: views, add-to-carts, sales, revenue, conversion rate, stock, size availability, price, discount rate or days on market.
Merchandiser AI: A sort type in which a machine-learning model, trained only on the store's own products and their performance, predicts the sales potential of each product and orders the collection by it.
Similar-product grouping: A sort type that keeps the products of one family side by side and in size order, and places the family by its strongest performer.
Manual order: An order arranged by hand. A manually sorted collection is never re-sorted automatically.
Sort frequency: How often a collection is re-sorted, from every hour to once a month. Each collection has its own frequency.
Smart collection: A collection whose products are chosen by a query instead of by the store's feed, for example the best sellers of a brand. Smart collections are set up by the Merchandiser team.

Pin: A fixed position for a product in a collection. A pinned product keeps its position on every automatic re-sort, and the other products are sorted around it.
Pin list: A spreadsheet with an SKU column and a Pin column that sets all pins of a collection in one upload.
Auto unpin: A collection setting that releases pins automatically once they are older than a chosen period.

Size availability: The share of a product's sizes that are in stock. A shirt with two of its six sizes left has a size availability of one third.
Size broken: A product that is still in stock and has lost most of its sizes. Merchandiser flags a product as Size Broken when 30% or fewer of its sizes are in stock.
Warehouse products: Products that have stock in the warehouse and are not on sale in the store. Merchandiser lists them when warehouse stock is connected.
Days on market: The number of days since a product was listed. Rules for new arrivals are built on it.

Views: How often a product was viewed, counted for the last day, week and month.
Add to cart: How often a product was added to a cart, counted for the last day, week and month.
Conversion rate: The share of a product's visitors who bought it. A product with many views and a low conversion rate attracts attention and does not convince.
Offline sales: Sales made in physical stores. They can be sent to Merchandiser through the product metrics API and used for ranking next to online sales.

Collection Health Score: A score from 0 to 100 for every active collection, combined from seven signals: top-of-page availability, stock health, traffic trend, sort freshness, product diversity, pin discipline and feed freshness.
Top-of-page availability: The health signal that counts how many of the first products of a collection are fully available: in stock and not short of sizes.
Pin discipline: The health signal for the share of a collection that is pinned. When a large share is pinned, manual positions block better-performing products.
Product diversity: The health signal that shows whether a single brand takes up too much of a collection.
Sort freshness: The health signal that compares the time since a collection was last sorted with its sort frequency.
Feed freshness: The health signal for the time since the last successful product feed of the account.
Actionable insight: A finding about one product or collection that needs a decision, with its evidence and a recommended action. An example is a best seller that is nearly out of stock.
Badge: A label on a product in the panel: Best Seller, Fast Seller, Most Popular, Size Broken, High Inventory, Low Inventory or New.

Version: A saved state of a collection: the order of its products, its pins and its rules. A version is saved whenever someone changes the collection in the panel.
Rollback: Restoring a collection to an earlier version. The product order, the pins and the rules return to what they were, and the rollback is saved as a version of its own.
Change log: The list of changes to a collection's sort type, sort frequency, pins and auto-unpin setting, with the user and the time of each.

Collections API: The API that returns a store's collections and the sorted products of each. Custom and headless storefronts read the product order from it.
Product metrics API: The API through which a store's own systems send online and offline sales of their products to Merchandiser.
Product-tag feed: An XML file in which every product carries tags that say where it ranks, such as the top 20 of the catalog. A feed management tool merges the tags into the product feed, typically as custom labels for advertising campaigns.