Refine and order search results

There are several ways to influence the ordering of the search results your shoppers see in your store: specifying dynamic curation criteria, boosting and burying products, and using facets.

This section applies to Open Storefront Framework (OSF) and Storefront Classic.

Use dynamic curation

Dynamic curation allows you to influence the ordering of search results when the shopper navigates to a category (collection) or enters a search term. With this feature, you can create dynamic curation rules. Each rule has a destination (a collection or search terms), a set of criteria for ordering the search results, and an importance level for each criterion. Search uses your prioritization and blends the criteria to generate a sort order.

For example, in collections within Women’s, you can prioritize products that are newest, bestselling, and in stock; whereas within Men’s, you can prioritize bestselling, in stock, and most viewed. As another example, you can display in-stock and on-sale items near the top of the search results.

The dynamic curation feature does not replace the configuring Searchable Field Ranking feature, but rather supplements it. For text searches, it is best to configure Searchable Field Ranking to return the most relevant results first, and use dynamic curation rules sparingly. Otherwise, you might not display the most relevant results consistently.

You cannot test views and sales in Dynamic Curation in your staging or test environment.

Dynamic curation rules apply to all search-driven pages (where another dynamic curation rule does not apply), and not to collection pages driven by the repository. For example:

• If your storefront is customized such that the category pages accessed from the top-level collections are search-driven, the curated ordering applies on those pages.
• If the shopper uses guided navigation to navigate to a category page, the curated ordering applies on that page.
• If your storefront is not customized, the collection pages accessed from the top-level collections are repository-driven, and dynamic curation rules do not apply to them.

In addition, with the default search settings in Commerce, consider the following:

• When a curation rule has search terms as a destination, the rule serves only as a tiebreaker - that is, it takes effect only when two or more products that have the same relevance need to be ordered.
• When a curation rule has a collection as a destination, the criteria in the rule have a more direct effect, since relevance is not a consideration in the ordering. A rule defined for a collection applies to all sub-collections, except for any sub-collections that have their own rules.

Also be aware that because the underlying algorithm blends the criteria, predicting the search results order exactly may not always be possible.

Implement dynamic curation

This section describes how you can use the dynamic curation feature to influence the ordering of search results. Any changes you make will take effect in production after you publish them.

Create a curation rule

Follow these steps to create a new curation rule:

1. On the Search page, click Dynamic Curation.
2. Click New Curation Rule.
3. Select the site the rule applies to.
4. Select a collection or enter one or more search terms to define which search results will be ordered.
5. Click Add Criteria to select the criteria.

   Note: If you choose Newness as a criterion, it will only apply to products that are less than 100 days old. In addition, if Arrival Date is not populated for a product, Creation Date will be used instead.

   Note: The In Stock criterion only uses the default inventory; location-level inventories are not supported.

6. Use sliders to rate the importance of each criterion you have selected.
7. If you selected Product type, select and order the product types.
8. Click Create.

Update a curation rule

Follow these steps to edit an existing curation rule:

1. On the Search page, click Dynamic Curation.
2. Click on the curation rule you want to edit from the list of dynamic curation rules.
3. Update the collection or search terms to define which search results will be ordered.
4. Click Edit Criteria.
5. Use sliders to rate the importance of each criterion you have selected.
6. Click Save.
7. Optionally click Save and Preview to preview the search results you just curated. For site-specific rules, click the preview button on the header of the administration interface.

Delete a curation rule

Follow these instructions to delete a curation rule:

Note: The default rule cannot be deleted.

1. On the Search page, click Dynamic Curation.
2. Click on the curation rule you want to delete from the list of dynamic curation rules.
3. Click Delete.
4. When the confirmation appears, click Delete.

Boost and bury products

In addition to specifying the dynamic curation criteria, you can promote (boost) products to the top of the search results and move products to the bottom of the search results (bury).

Follow these instructions to boost or bury products:

1. On the Search page, click New Curation Rule.
2. Select the site the rule applies to.
3. Select a collection or enter one or more search terms to define which search results will be ordered.
4. Click Add Products under Select products to boost or Select products to bury to search for, select, and add products to be boosted or buried, respectively. In the grid of boosted or buried products, you can reorder products using drag and drop or the context menus. Alternatively, switch to the list view to edit the products' sequence numbers.
5. Click Create.
6. Optionally click Create and Preview to preview the search results you just curated. For site-specific rules, click the preview button on the header of the administration interface.

Note: You can boost a maximum of 200 products and bury a maximum of 200 products.

Order facets

You can select and order the facets that appear in the Guided Navigation widget when the shopper views search results or navigates to a search-driven collection.

• You can specify the default facets. These facets appear in the Guided Navigation widget on any search-driven page that does not have its own explicitly defined list of facets.
• You can create an ordered list of facets for a specific collection. These facets appear in the Guided Navigation widget when the shopper views the collection’s search-driven page.
• You can create an ordered list of facets for one or more search terms. These facets appear in the Guided Navigation widget when the shopper enters any of the search terms.

Follow these instructions to add facets:

1. On the Search page, click Facet Ordering and then New Facet Ordering Rule.
2. Select the site the rule applies to.
3. Select a collection or enter one or more search terms to define which search results whose facets you want to order.
4. Click the Add facet field to add facets.
5. Click Create and then Save.

Understand the behavior when a collection is created in two catalogs

If you create a collection in two catalogs on the same site, with the same path in each catalog, the collection will appear once in Dynamic Curation and Facet Ordering, under the site’s default catalog. A rule created for this collection will apply in both catalogs.

If you create a collection in two catalogs on different sites, or in two catalogs on the same site, but with a different path in each catalog, the two collections will both appear in the collection picker in Dynamic Curation and Facet Ordering. If you want the same rule to apply to both collections, you must create the rule twice, once for each collection.