How to bury products for your browsing experience
Burying products in the browsing experience lets you downplay specific items within category or collection pages, even when shoppers explore without entering a search query.
By burying selected products, they are pushed lower in the product listing. This reduces the visibility of low-priority, outdated, or less aligned items without removing them from your catalog, while still respecting the natural relevance order.
In Empathy Platform, product burying in the browsing experience is managed from the Playboard using the Results Ranking management tool, so you can adjust product positions and immediately see the impact on the category or collection results page.
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Willing to know more about all that you can do by using Results Ranking? Check the Results Ranking management tool page to discover it.
Burying products for your browsing experience
You've lately discovered that your commerce store shows shoes dominating the top positions in the raincoat category, even though shoppers expect to see clothing first when browsing this section. To solve this, you can configure bury rules to push shoes further down the product listing so raincoats appear in the leading positions. Burying shoes keeps them available in the results without removal, ensuring category relevance while guiding browsers toward the intended products.
To bury these products in your browsing experience, perform the following steps:
Open your Playboard and go to Play > Results Ranking.
Click the + New button in the top left corner to create a new Results Ranking configuration. The Configuration panel displays.
In the Details section, make sure the toggle button is switched on so that the configuration is active once it's saved.
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If you turn off the configuration, you can turn it on later using the action tools in the results ranking list screen.
Enter a name for your configuration. For example, "No shoes in raincoat category".
Select the endpoint your configuration relates to. In this case, select the Browse endpoint.
In the Endpoint section, indicate the attribute and the attribute value that the bury configuration should apply to. For example, "category" and "raincoat" respectively.
Select the desired options for the filters to customize the scenario for your configuration. Remember that the available filters depend on your implementation. For this example, select "English" for the Language filter.
In the Settings section, go to Product Ranking to configure a hard ranking. Hard ranking strongly impacts product positioning by pushing selected products to the bottom of the product category page (PCP). Refer to the Considerations for burying multiple products section below to understand product positioning.
- Click the + (plus) icon. The Product ranking pop-up window appears.
- Choose whether the configuration should be always active or scheduled for a determined period. For this example, set the configuration to be active from today until the end of the current month.
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Review the steps in Scheduling a configuration to learn how to schedule product ranking configurations.
- Enter one or more product IDs and press Enter. To add multiple product IDs at a time, use a semicolon (
;) or a comma (,) to separate them. For this example, enter "35907;35909" to bury products with IDs 35907 and 35909. - Click the Bury button to add the configuration to the list. Remember that you can also bury products directly from the Preview section by hovering over a product thumbnail in the results list and clicking Bury. In this example, product ID 159584 is also buried. The product is added to the Product Ranking settings list and placed in its corresponding position on the category page preview.
In the Preview section, review the product ranking as it will appear to your shoppers. Optionally, enter a keyword in the search box to narrow down the results. You can also select a date to preview the results for a specific time and check product positions in real time based on your configuration. Results update automatically as you make changes to the configuration.
Once finished, click Save to apply the configuration. The saved configuration is displayed in the configuration list on the main Results Ranking screen.
Considerations to boost or bury more than one product
- Make sure you enter valid product IDs. Product IDs aren't checked against the product catalog. If you enter an invalid product ID, it will be ignored. All other valid product IDs are added to the product list.
- When several products are boosted or buried at the same time, the order they follow on the category page is the order they have in the configuration list.
- Products with conflicts are highlighted in red. A conflict may occur due to an existing boost or bury configuration for the same product.. For example:
- A product may have been boosted with an always-active schedule, and you try to create a new boost or bury for the same product ID, duplicating the product boost or bury.
- A product may have been buried with a schedule, and you try to create a new buried product with an always-active schedule. You can't boost or bury products with conflicts. In these cases, you should remove the product from the Product ID field to save the configuration for the remaining products, and revise the existing configuration for the product ID in the product list.
- If you want to change the schedule applied to the products or remove the boost or bury after you create it, you must edit or delete each product individually in the product list.