Using Manual Change Sort Order to Optimise Product List Pages

When customers browse your website, the products that appear at the top of listing pages receive the most attention. For this reason, it’s important to carefully manage the order in which products are displayed—especially on the first few pages. Prioritizing key items such as bestsellers, new arrivals, or high-margin products can improve visibility, drive engagement, and boost conversions across your site.

Generally, this is best managed by leaving the sitewide dynamic settings in place such as Popularity (most viewed in past 90 days), Best Sellers (most orders in past 90 days), or What's New, and in some instances changing the default sort order for a specific category.

Note: This article specifically covers details around using the manual Change Sort Order functionality. For full details of sort order in AB Commerce:

➡️ Product List Page Sort Order

Quick recap of sort order in AB Commerce

• You can set a sitewide default sort order - the different options are Popularity, Best Seller, What's New, Price, and (if active) Our Recommendations - for B2B websites, there are additional options to sort by Product Code or Title
• You can override this for any category - and all its sub-categories will then receive this new default sort order
• You can manually move specific products to the top of the page and change their sort order using drag and drop
• The user has options to change the sort order of products to their preference

Manually Changing the Sort Order of the Products

There are times when you may wish to promote or highlights specific products by making sure they are at the top of the product list page when your customer visits, regardless of whether they meet your default sorting criteria.

Some examples of when you might do this:

• Hero products you know your customers rely on you for/buy very regularly - though these should naturally be top of of Popularity and/or Best Sellers
• If your default is Popularity (views) you might want to promote a trending product just added to your catalogue which won't have enough views yet to ensure it is high on the list for Popularity
• If your default is Best Sellers (orders) you may want to promote seasonal product which will sell well but hasn't in the past 90 days for seasonal reasons
• If your default is What's New (date added) you may want to promote a product which has been in the catalogue for a long time, but is only recently back in stock

Guidelines & Key Points

• You should only use Move to Top on about 4-8 products in a given category, and a maximum of around 18 in a very large category
• Remember to Remove from Top when the item no longer needs to be artificially promoted or this can cause your list pages to become stale and also more difficult to manage
• These promoted products are only visible when customer first views the page - if they change the sort order themselves via the dropdown, these promoted products slot back into the list where they would naturally exist
• Even if the customer reselects the default option e.g. Popularity, these promoted products are not present at the top of the list - they would need to leave the page and revisit it to see the promoted items at the top again
• If you have manually changed sort order on a large number of products across your site and would like us to help you clear this so you can take full advantage of the new analytics based sort order options, please contact helpdesk@magico.com 

How to use manual Change Sort Order to Move to Top

You can manually change which products display first by logging in as WEB ADMIN and taking the following steps:

• Go into the category on the front-end and click CHANGE SORT ORDER
  
  
• If this is the first time entering this screen, you will see no products displayed as you need to first click the link for Click here to do this to select which products are to be MOVED TO THE TOP 
  
• On the following screen you will see a list of all the products in the category - click Move to Top under the products that you would like to be moved to the top of the list
  
• Once you've made your selections, return to the prevous screen by clicking Click here to resort the products that have already been MOVED TO THE TOP
  
• On the following screen you will see the products you have MOVED TO TOP and then you simply drag and drop the products into the places that you want them to be displayed in
  
• Lastly, to keep your updates, click Save Changes
  
  
• You can return to this screen anytime and resort the products, or go into the next screen to select new/additional products to MOVE TO TOP
  
  

Removing Products MOVED TO TOP

• While logged in as a WEB ADMIN, go into the category on the front-end and click CHANGE SORT ORDER
  
• You will see the products you have MOVED TO TOP listed, and to remove them simply click the Remove from Top link on the product you wish to remove
  
• Lastly, to keep your updates, click Save Changes
  

Further Questions & Assistance

If you have any questions or need assistance with this functionality, please reach out to us at helpdesk@magico.com and we'd be happy to help!