The Same Problem on a Different Shelf
A travel website has the problem every online store has. A destination page lists hundreds of hotels, visitors look at the first few, and the order decides which hotels get a chance. Arranging those lists by hand does not keep up with prices, availability and demand.
Merchandiser treats a hotel list as it treats a product collection. It scores every hotel from your data, orders the list, and repeats that on a schedule.
A Panel That Speaks Travel
An account can be set up for the travel sector. The panel then uses the words of your business:
- Hotels
- in place of products.
- Lists
- in place of collections.
- Availability
- in place of stock: a hotel is available or not available.
- Type
- in place of brand.
What a Hotel List Is Sorted By
The ranking signals are the ones used for products, read for hotels:
- Demand
- Views, add-to-carts, purchases, revenue and conversion rate of each hotel, as your analytics records them.
- Price and discount
- The price of the hotel and its discount against the list price.
- Rating
- The rating of the hotel in your feed.
- Availability
- Whether the hotel is available. Hotels that are not available can be moved down the list.
- Attributes
- Attributes from your feed, such as the country and the type of the hotel, for rules that favor a group of hotels.
A list can follow a sorting rule or Merchandiser AI, which trains a model on your own hotels and their performance.
Contracts and Campaigns Stay in Your Hands
Not every position is decided by data. Travel websites have partner hotels, contracted placements and seasonal campaigns.
- Pins. Pin a hotel to an exact position in a list. The other hotels are sorted around it, and a pin can release itself after a period you choose.
- Boosts. A group of hotels, such as your own contracted hotels, can carry a boost that lifts it in every list. Boosts are set up with our team.
- History. Changes your team makes to a list are kept in the version history and can be rolled back.
Data In, Order Out
Hotels come in through a feed, for example a JSON file with one record per hotel: its ID, name, address on your website, image, price, list price, rating and the lists it belongs to. Performance data comes from Google Analytics 4.
The order goes out in one of two ways. Merchandiser can send each list to an endpoint of yours as hotel IDs with their positions, or your website can read the ordered list from the collections API. Either way the ranking is calculated on Merchandiser's servers, and your pages load as they always do.
What Merchandiser Does Not Do
Merchandiser works with one record per hotel. It does not know travel dates, room types or the price of a particular night, and it does not sort search results for a date range. Those stay with your booking system. Merchandiser orders the lists that visitors browse before they search: destinations, themes and campaigns.