Commercial Sorting Best practices

Do's

Boolean Parameter

A boolean parameter can be modelled by creating a Term parameter with two partitions. e.g true and false. If you only wish to apply weights when the boolean is either true or false, then one partition is sufficient.

As an example consider an "On Campaign" boolean, in this case it will only be relevant to assign a weight when "On Campaign" = true. We therefore only need to create one "true" partition.

Don'ts

Commercial sorting is only for tiebreaking

Use only commercial sorting to do tiebreaking. Relevance score is usually the most important. (stock may be more important than phrase relevance)

Pinning Products In PIM

At first glance it might seem like a good idea to create a pinning parameter in commercial sort, such that some specific products can be boosted, and then use your PIM to define if a product should be pinning.

However this approach should be used with care, as the pinning works across all contexts. You could therefore end up with an unintended search result.

As an example. Lets say you have the following products

If we then do a search for 'Bike' and give a very high boost to 'Is Pinned' we could end up with 'Duct tape' as the best match for 'Bike' which is obviously not a good match for a bike.