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Visual merchandising in ecommerce is the work of deciding which products shoppers see first on category pages, search results and recommendation slots, and keeping that order aligned with stock, margin and demand. In Adobe Commerce you have three main tools: the Visual Merchandiser for drag-and-drop and rule-based categories, Live Search rules for boosting, burying, pinning and hiding products in search and categories, and Product Recommendations for automated cross-sell slots. Magento Open Source has simpler controls: manual positions, default sort order and catalog rules. The tools matter less than a steady weekly routine.
What visual merchandising means online
In a physical store, merchandising is shelf placement and window displays. Online, the equivalent real estate is the first two rows of a category page, the top results for your most common search terms, and the recommendation slots on product and cart pages. Shoppers rarely scroll deep, so the order of products on those surfaces does a lot of selling.
Good online merchandising balances four signals: what is in stock, what sells, what earns margin, and what the business wants to push (new ranges, seasonal lines, clearance). The tooling decides how much of that you do by hand and how much is automated.
Merchandising levers by edition
Availability depends on edition and licence. Adobe lists Live Search and Product Recommendations as Adobe Commerce-only SaaS services included at no additional cost (they are not offered for Magento Open Source), and Adobe also offers merchandising in Adobe Commerce Optimizer. Check what your licence includes before planning around a feature.
| Lever | Magento Open Source | Adobe Commerce | Best used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual product positions in a category | Yes (position numbers in Products in Category) | Yes, plus drag-and-drop tiles in Visual Merchandiser | Hero products and new launches at the top |
| Default category sort (position, name, price) | Yes | Yes | Baseline order for categories you do not curate |
| Rule-based categories | No (extension) | Yes: Match products by rule, using smart attributes | "New arrivals," "Under $50," brand or season collections that maintain themselves |
| Automatic sorting in categories | No (extension) | Yes, Visual Merchandiser options such as newest products first, low stock or special price to top or bottom, and sorting by name, SKU, color or price | Keeping out-of-stock or stale items from leading a page |
| Search merchandising rules | Search synonyms and search-term redirects (Marketing > SEO & Search) only | Live Search rules: boost, bury, pin, hide, with conditions on the query | Fixing poor results for high-volume queries |
| Category merchandising with behavioral ranking | No | Live Search Category Merchandising (Live Search 3.0.0 or later): intelligent ranking plus manual pin, boost, bury, hide | Large categories where demand changes faster than you can curate |
| Recommendation slots | Related, up-sell and cross-sell links set by hand or rule extension | Product Recommendations with types such as Most viewed, Bought this, bought that, and Viewed this, bought that | Product page, cart and order confirmation cross-sells |
Visual Merchandiser (Adobe Commerce)
Visual Merchandiser lives in each category's Products in Category section. You can switch to tile view and drag products into position or type a position number, and set Match products by rule to Yes to build a category from conditions such as attribute values. Two details trip people up. Each attribute used in a rule must be configured as a smart attribute, and matching runs when the category is saved, so new products only join a rule-based category after it is saved again. Products that stop meeting the condition are removed from the category.
Live Search rules
Live Search replaces standard search in Adobe Commerce with a SaaS service. Its merchandising rules let you change results for specific queries: boost moves a product up, bury moves it down, pin fixes it at a position and hide removes it. Category Merchandising applies the same idea to category pages and adds intelligent ranking based on shopper behavior. Note one limit: if a shopper changes the sort order from the default, pinned, buried and hidden products are no longer sorted that way. Our guide to AI site search covers search relevance beyond merchandising rules.
Product Recommendations
Product Recommendations fills slots with machine-learned or popularity-based products. Different types use different data windows. Adobe documents Most viewed as counting sessions with a product view over the last seven days, while Bought this, bought that needs substantial cross-product purchase data, so it takes time to become useful. More like this and Visual similarity lean on product content (attributes, descriptions, images) rather than shopper behavior, which makes them a sensible starting point on a new store. The ecommerce product recommendations guide explains how to choose types by page.
A weekly merchandising routine
Tools only pay off when someone uses them every week. This routine fits into a couple of hours for most catalogs:
| When | Task | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Review the top 20 search terms and any with zero or poor results; add synonyms, redirects or Live Search rules | Reports > Search Terms, Live Search dashboard |
| Monday | Check the top 10 categories by traffic: are the first two rows in stock, in all key sizes, and priced right? | Analytics landing pages, Visual Merchandiser tile view |
| Wednesday | Push new arrivals and campaign products into position; set end dates for temporary pins in your notes | Visual Merchandiser, Live Search rules |
| Wednesday | Bury or hide products that are low stock, discontinued or have high return rates | Low stock report, returns data |
| Friday | Remove expired pins and boosts; stale rules are the most common merchandising problem | Live Search rules list, category positions |
| Friday | Compare category conversion and revenue per visit with last week; note which changes moved the numbers | Analytics, sales reports |
Keep a simple log of each change and its date. Without it, you cannot tell which merchandising decision helped and which hurt.
Merchandising and SEO
Merchandising changes what search engines see on category pages, so coordinate it with your SEO work:
- Rule-based categories change content. If a rule empties a category or swaps most of its products, the page can lose relevance for the terms it ranks for. Keep the category's intro copy and core range stable. Our category page SEO guide covers what a strong category page needs.
- Sort parameters create URLs. Sort and direction parameters (for example
product_list_order) create duplicate versions of the same category. Keep canonicals pointing at the clean category URL. - Hidden products still have pages. Hiding a product in search results does not remove its product page from the index. Decide separately whether discontinued products redirect, stay live or return a 410.
- Client-side rendering needs checking. If a SaaS search service renders category grids in the browser, confirm that product links are still crawlable as normal links.
An SEO review of your category templates and parameters is part of Mistri's Magento SEO work.
Where AI fits
Behavioral ranking and recommendations are already a form of AI merchandising. The practical next steps are generating collection pages and descriptions for rule-based categories, and using sales and stock data to suggest which products to pin each week, with a merchandiser approving the changes. Keep a human in the loop for brand decisions; ranking models optimize for clicks and sales, not for which range you want to build.
If you want help connecting merchandising data, search and recommendations into a workflow your team will actually run, see Mistri's AI for ecommerce services.
Sources
Visual Merchandiser (Adobe Experience League); Category product rules (Adobe Experience League); Live Search Category Merchandising (Adobe Experience League); Product Recommendations types (Adobe Experience League); Extensions from Adobe (Adobe Experience League); Manage search terms (Adobe Experience League).
