FAQs: Automated Site Merchandising

No, Merchandise Optimization is part of our Core plan and available to all brands.

Our auto-sorting is based on the performance of your products, using historical click and purchase data. To get meaningful results, you should have at least 500 orders. Additionally, for significant impact on collection traffic, your collections should contain at least 15 products.

Our collection pages are optimized based on product performance, ensuring that your best-performing products get the most visibility. This helps convert users who are browsing your collection pages into customers. Unlike sorting decisions based on opinion or gut feeling, RetentionX's optimization is completely data-driven.

Setup is easy, fast, and requires no development resources! Our setup guide walks you through every step and can be completed by anyone with admin rights to Google Analytics and Shopify.

To enhance your Google Analytics tracking, you’ll need to add a custom pixel to your Shopify store. This pixel feeds your GA account with additional data, such as product impressions and clicks.

The pixel is added in a sandbox environment, ensuring it doesn’t impact your storefront, shop performance, or any other tracking.

RetentionX calculates a performance score for each product, factoring in the following four metrics:

• Click Rates to identify your most enticing products
• Basket Rates to identify best performing product detail pages
• Purchase Rates to identify high-converting products
• Product LTV to account for gross margin, product return rates, and repeat purchases

To benchmark click rates, RetentionX compares them to the expected click rates for your products' positions. This indicates whether a product is outperforming or underperforming in its current position, as products always listed at the top of your collection pages will naturally receive more visibility and therefore more clicks.

Our automated collection sorting is updated daily, with changes pushed after your data is refreshed overnight. Additionally, if you set up or adjust custom sorting rules, you can trigger an immediate re-sync at any time.

After the initial data collection phase, RetentionX starts to improve positions for products that outperformed their previous positions to determine their ideal placement. Over time, changes will stabilize while continuing to reflect shifts in customer behavior, seasonality, and product assortment.

Both performance tracking and auto-sorting work at the product level, which aligns with Shopify's available sorting settings.

Yes! You can easily set up custom sorting rules to:

• Promote new arrivals
• Pin specific products
• Group products by tags
• Demote products running out of stock

Absolutely! RetentionX provides transparent tracking of your collection KPIs over time. This allows you to monitor trends and evaluate the impact of auto-sorting. A key metric to watch is Revenue per Mille (RPM)—the revenue generated per 1,000 views—which should improve over time.

Once the setup is complete, the first collection data will be accessible within 48 hours. For the best results, we recommend collecting 7 days of data before enabling auto-sorting. This will give our algorithm the insights it needs to optimize your collections effectively. Our automation will then test better positions for high performing products to continually optimize the collection sorting.

While you’ll see initial changes quickly, we recommend running auto-sorting for at least 3 weeks to thoroughly evaluate the impact– the larger your collections, the more time may be needed to test different positions. Collection performance is transparently tracked over time to reflect ongoing improvements.

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