In development: A New Approach to Sorting Products in Shopify Stores

A New Approach to Sorting Products in Shopify Stores

Why do we sort products, collections, or blog articles in Shopify stores? The primary goal is to improve the customer experience, making it easier for them to find what they're looking for and, ideally, leading them to make a purchase more quickly.

Recently, I've been exploring the idea of automatically managing how products and collections are displayed on a Shopify store. Currently, Shopify offers several options for sorting these items through the Shopify Admin page. For example, within a collection, you can choose to sort by options such as "A-Z," "Z-A," "Newest to Oldest," "Oldest to Newest," "Best Selling," or "Manual."

Most stores probably use either "Best Selling," "Date Added," or "Manual" for more precise control. Sorting by "Best Selling" makes a lot of sense: it surfaces popular products, which can encourage more sales. However, if you operate in a highly competitive market where other companies closely monitor your offerings, this approach may unintentionally reveal too much information to competitors.

Another downside to the "Best Selling" option is that it can take time for new products to appear at the top. Imagine you've been selling a product successfully for five years and introduce a new item. The new product might take a long time to gain enough traction to appear alongside the older, more established products.

"Date Added" is a reasonable compromise because it showcases the latest additions to your collection. However, if you frequently add new products, the most popular items can quickly be pushed down, forcing customers to use filters or sorting options—which, in my experience, many users don't bother with.

Then there's "Manual" sorting, which allows you, the store owner, to decide how products are arranged in a collection. This offers more control over your presentation; you know your customers best and have insights into their preferences. Naturally, you'll want to place your best-sellers at the top, and you might also make stylistic decisions about the order of other items.

However, while manual sorting provides control, it can be time-consuming to manage, especially if you're adding new products regularly. It also requires consistency across multiple collections, which can be difficult to maintain. In many cases, arranging products manually can feel like guesswork—you don't always have data to back up your decisions, and much of it is based on intuition.

A New Solution: Data-Driven Sorting

What if there were a way to automatically arrange your collection items based on certain metrics, like page views? As a product's page views increase, its position in the collection could rise, ensuring that popular products—likely your best-sellers or those that attract the most interest—are always displayed prominently. You could even set this arrangement over different time intervals, such as 7-day, 30-day, or 1-day ranges, to highlight trending products.

This method offers the benefits of the current sorting options without their drawbacks. Your best-sellers remain at the top, new products can quickly move up due to marketing efforts like email blasts or ads, and less popular items naturally fall to the bottom. This keeps your website content fresh and reduces the time and effort required to manage your collections.

Introducing Our Next App: Automatic Data-Driven Sorting for Shopify Stores

This brings me to our next app, designed to do exactly that. Our app will focus on arranging and displaying the most viewed products and collections at the top, automatically and with minimal setup. Once installed, the app runs in the background, with no impact on your website's performance—it only interacts with Shopify's servers, without making any changes to your theme or adding files.

Our app will collect and analyze analytics on your collections and products, allowing you to display them based on page views or the number of times a product is added to the cart.

We are in the early stages of development and are exploring this concept. If you're interested in a new way to manage or sort your products automatically and data-driven, we'd love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out at jonathan@ezapps.io, and we’ll be happy to walk you through an example.