Iโm pumped to share with you our next app, ๐๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ด๐ผ๐ฟ๐ ๐ ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐, coming to the BigCommerce marketplace very, very soon.
๐ก Itโs so frustrating when you either donโt have fine enough control over the order of products in each category. But, then at the same time, you donโt want to waste time manually optimising every single product in every single category. What you want is the best of both worlds.
Now, with Category Merchandiser, for each category you can:
โ Choose the products you want shown at the top of the category
โ Move out of stock products to the bottom
โ Move on sale products to the top
โ And then an automatic sort order to use for everything in between.
๐
Is this something you would make use of? Is there more that youโd like it to be able to do?
Iโd be happy to give the app for free for 3 months for those that get in touch with feedback.
Transcript
It’s been a while, but I’ve been busy. It’s finally time that I can show you what I’ve been up to. So a little while back there was an API released by BigCommerce called the Product Sort Order API, which enabled you to customize the position of products on a category by category basis rather than just on a global store level.
Now, this got me very excited, very quickly and wanting to build a visual merchandiser style. Now I kind of beavered away doing that then recognised that actually there’s a lot more that I can do here. Let’s actually make it into a full-blown category merchandiser. And so this is the first version of Category Merchandiser, which will be submitted to the BigCommerce marketplace next week.
And I’ll give you a quick, a quick tour. So here we’ve loaded the app and we have our list of categories. So we pick our Swag Category. The first few settings you have is around what general automatic sort order do you want. So right now I’ve got it sorted by “New” and nothing else enabled. Then we can kind of hop over to the visual merchandiser tool.
Again, this is sort of the blank canvas, and I’ll walk you through how it works in a second. Now, this is our category right now, is it sorted by new we’ve got, you can see that we’ve got descending order of product IDs. I put them in the product name so you can kind of see them. So it’s nice and easy.
So going back, how might I want to configure and merchandise my category when the first thing I’m thinking about is, is the pin product. What do I want the first few products to be at the top of my category page. Now for this particular category, I kind of looking through the images that we have, I really want to merchandise these two, because they have great product images, product model shots. And I can kind of use this as a, as a way of kind of searching through all the different products that we have available. And if you’ve got a large category. Then once you’ve pinned the products, they will always be shown at the top of a category page and you can drag and drop and reorder as you see fit, as well as having slightly different views for them.
So that’s all well and good. I’ll save those and then moving back to the sort of the automatic sort options. I think I’m going to choose “Price (high to low)”. I also want to move out stock products to the bottom of the category. I hit save and that’ll immediately go and fetch all the products in the category, using the rules for the pins, the sort order and the additional merchandising rules that we have enabled here, it will process what order the product should be in and send that back to BigCommerce. Now once this gets sent back to BigCommerce, it does take a little while for it to be shown on the storefront. So I’m going to reload the page and skip through about it takes about a minute or so. And so I’ll fast forward this for you, and you’ll see it coming right next.
Okay, so fast-forwarding a minute or so. We have reloaded our page and straight away, we get to see our model shots, which are at the top of the page, exactly in the same order as we prescribed them. Then we have, we wanted it in “Price descending order”. So we can see that prices are going down, down. And then these last two products are actually out of stock.
So they’ve been automatically moved to the bottom of the page. Even though they’re in, they’re not necessarily the cheapest price products.
I’m really excited about where this app could go. You know, the first version already has quite a lot in there. Arguably not an MVP, so I can forgive myself for perhaps putting in a little bit too much in the way of feature set, for the first version of the app at least, but I’m looking forward to building out the ranking rules as well. So you could perhaps set up more merchandising rules based on brand and other sorts of fields that are specific to your store and prioritize each one of them.
So that’s kind of a direction that I certainly see it going in as well as setting up default ranking rules. So you don’t have to configure each category and you could set up a default sort order for all categories. So you can say move out of stock products to the bottom of every category, so, as one example.
I’d be really interested in your feedback. Is this, is this going to solve a need for you? Are there features that you think are like missing and you’d love to see in this app? Then let me know your feedback.
